questions as i'm reading
HyceI tried my hand at mastering it as well but didn't care for the results so I sent it off to get mastered by Carl Saff out of Chicago - he did a great job.
-what makes mastering so difficult that you (and lots of others) outsource it to some expensive studiodude? According to Crypto's definition you take your audio files and then put some analyzers, audio meters and whatnot on it and tweak a compressor/eq until all the tracks look like you want it.
hyceI learned a fair amount here particularly in terms of guitars - precisely where you mic up an amp changes the sound character drastically.
-So if you play electric guitar, you put it through a "standard" guitar amp, then put a mic in front of the amp? Why not ditch the mic and plug the amp signal directly to your recording device?
hyceHowever, I've since learned that you can take it to the next level by actually mixing and not just adjusting levels. I'd say the cornerstones of what mixing really is about boil down to:
1. Volume levels - setting the physical volume of one track. "playing with faders," as it were.
2. Equalization - Adjusting the frequency spectrum of a track - boosting or cutting both for tonality and clarity.
3. Compression - Controlling the changes in the volume envelope of a track - "squishing" it so that it has less variance.
4. Panning left to right - controlling which speaker the track comes out of.
- how is this different to mastering? What Crypto said is that mastering deals with volume, eq, compression, for all the tracks to have some consistency. Therefore if you're able to mix your own tracks individually, why bother with outsourced mastering? How is it more difficult/complex/whatever?
for some reason spotify doesnt work on this computer so i can't hear the examples but i appreciate the pedagogic way you explain :)
- did you record each instrument playing on its own? or do you have everyone play at once and have their own mics?
hyce I gated and compressed the attacks of the snare drum and bass drum so that you get a loud attack and then the volume falls of quickly so you aren't missing out what the rest of the band is doing
- I thought compression was about putting a max threshold on a signal's amplitude. I should probably read more about this because I seem to understand it backwards (ie compression = reduced amplitude -> less pronounced attack)
hyceBackground vocals were also hard panned to leave room in the "center channel" of both speakers, and also "pushed into the background" by using a little bit of reverb.
- so your backgrounds vocals are stereo? Or do you have two background singers?
- What you call center channel, is in fact a mono signal panned evenly on both sides, or something else?
I can see now why it can be time consuming, but just like adjusting colors of a movie, there is no "perfect" result, so you could tweak it for years and still want to make changes.
Thanks for the detailed answer btw, i really appreciate it!