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Welcome to the Audacity Mastering Overview @Gator-Studios.com! Or... "Just Enough Mastering to not be dangerous” Or... “How not to blow up your RiffWorks Mix!”
Introduction
In our first article the RiffWorks Mixing Overview, we spent the first 2 pages just talking about the process, listening, and tracking. Why? Because this is 80-90% of the battle to a great end result.
Yes, you can "fix" some things in mastering, but that is not it's purpose. Yes, you can make things loud in mastering, but that's not it's purpose. It's purpose is to take a performance that makes you say "damn!" and a mix that makes you say "hot damn!" and achieve a level of "holy sh*t!" out of it.
This article is not about how to achieve that result. Huh? Well, let's face some facts about mastering. The toolset doesn't sound too complex...eq, compression, limiters, etc. All used in proper fashion will enhance the mix. Used incorrectly, well they will turn a good mix into a load of wasted bits.
This article is designed to help get a bit more of what you are looking for out of your RiffWorks mix, without blowing the thing out of the water. I'm going to use Audacity as the application, as it is free and accessible, does ogg files, mp3, wav etc. (all sample clips in this overview were done with Audacity and are 192k MP3’s). There are other programs you can use and if you have it, use it. The concepts here will apply elsewhere. Grab your favorite RiffWorks or other mixed track and play along!
FYI, “Mastering” is not technically the real term for what we're doing here, but it's become such a de-facto term for post-mix or pre-mastering processing I'll just cave in and use it. Mastering is much more than just processing a song, it's more of getting a whole CD together in a manner that it flows properly as a unit. But enough of that, let's get on with it!
Pre-work
First, make sure you've done everything you can to get a good mix. If a guitar part is harsh, eq it in RiffWorks. If something is too uneven, compress it or use the 'info' line to smooth it out. If your bass is too loud or too quiet, correct it in the mix. Once we get beyond the mix, tweaking changes everything, so for example getting more bass out of the master is going to bring more kick along with it. Smoothing out a rogue guitar is going to muddy the vocals. You get the idea.
When it's time to export the mix, play the song all the way through and make sure the red light on the master meters never lights. We want some headroom in our mix, and don't want to be stuck with any pumping from the master limiter. Depending on your mixing levels this could be around -6db or so. Export using "mix-to-wav" so we keep all the quality we can going into mastering.
On to Page 2...Let’s Get on With It!
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RiffworksTM is a trademark of Sonoma Wire Works and used with permission! |
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© Copyright 2006-2008 by J.J. Falkanger |
