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Audacity Mastering page 2
Let's get down to it
The focus here is on how to get your song loud and balanced without blowing it up. I will explain the concepts and give some starting points that hopefully will keep things out of trouble. We're going to use two tools primarly...compression and limiting/amplifying, and we’ll talk a little bit about eq. We'll use them sparingly as starting points, and we'll overuse them to make some points.
I've chosen one of the finished Backing Track files from our BT store as the sample file, as it was all done in RiffWorks (left picture).
As you can see, it doesn't look anything like the Green Day track (on the right), which has been tracked, mixed and mastered in the finest studios. While I won't claim we can get that level and quality with Audacity, we can certainly get some great results that will let us stand shoulder to shoulder on a mix CD with them.
Compression
Everybody loves the compressor. I'm not sure why, but we do...we're told we need to compress to make things louder. Did you know the compressor actually makes things quieter? The compressor's function is simple, take quiet sounds and loud sounds and reduce the difference between them, by squishing from the top. The quiet sounds stay the same, the louder sounds get quieter. Huh?
How loud a song 'sounds' is due to it's average volume. By squeezing the quiet and loud parts closer together, we can then bring the whole thing back up in volume to the same peak, and it sounds louder. It's less dynamic so it's average is higher, and sounds louder. This is a good thing, right? If it sounds better than what you started with, it's a good thing. If it sounds like louder crap, perhaps it's not. So we need to start easy and work our way up using the magic mastering monitoring tool...those two things on the side of your head!
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© Copyright 2006-2008 by J.J. Falkanger |
