[LAU] Tips for mastering?

[Gabbe Nord]

Hello!

Thank you all very much for your tips, I'll be sure to use 'em all!

Regardning the music: It's all produced/mixed by myself, so the workload
should indeed be minimal if all goes as planned. I'll however probably need
to do some adjusting anyways but I think mostly it'll all be about
adjusting my multiband compressor + gain enough for each song. Awesome tip
with the referencemusic, if I sort of "line up" all the tracks to the
refereencetrack it'll probably save me alot of time, kind of matching my
tracks a bit to a musical frame dynamicswise.

Regards,

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 6:01 PM, S. Massy <lists at wolfdream.ca> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First, all of what Al said is good common sense stuff.
>
> When you say "mastering" are you implying that someone else is mixing
> and you intend to do the post-processing? Why not go the whole way and
> do it all yourself?
>
> IMHO, it's worthwhile to pause and think about how you want things to
> sound *before* even touching anything. Once you have an answer to that
> question, it's a very good exercise to listen to a cross-section of the
> genre and pick a few reference mixes you feel comfortable with (they
> don't have to be perfect, so long as you know what the strong and weak
> points are): it fulfils the double role of providing some kind of marker
> to ce-centre you when your ears have had all they can take, and forcing
> you to think about what you like and don't like in a mix.
>
> For a whole album, you probably want to do it in two passes, the first
> focusing on the songs, the second on harmonising the sound. If the mixes
> were well done in the first place, the amount of work should be minimal:
> in fact, you probably should worry if you find yourself tinkering too
> much with certain aspects of the sound...
>
> That's all I can think of for now. Good luck!
>
> Cheers,
> S.M.
>
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 02:42:04PM +0100, Gabbe Nord wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > In a month or so I'll for the first time in my life attempt to master two
> > smaller EPs (my own music should be added). I've worked up a fairly good
> > skillset with some parts of the mastering (multiband compressing etc)
> but I
> > need some major help with tips for what I'm trying to accomplish, which
> is:
> >
> > * I want a similar soundlevel throughout the whole of the EP, eg. I want
> > the songs to be similar in strength even if they are dissimilar in
> > dynamics/type of song. Some songs are naturally more "aggressive" and
> thus
> > will be a bit stronger, but I want the climaxes in the more easy going
> > songs to be as strong.
> >
> > I realise that most of this will be done through the traditional "just
> > listen and compare", but I'm wondering if there are any other
> > analyzingtools that might ease my work a bit? Like analysing RME for the
> > whole song, will that give a fair indication that can be compared amongst
> > songs? Fatigued ears and the need for alot of small breaks is calculated
> > with, but those difficulties will be pretty testing for me I think with
> my
> > low patience lol, so anything that makes the process easier is good
> stuff!
> > Mastering on my own like this probably isn't that good, I know, but I'm
> > looking at it as an opportunity to learn some tricks of the trade.
> >
> > I will be using plugins from linuxDSP together with a few Calf ones and
> the
> > Foo Limiter, so no Jamin etc.
> >
> > Do you have any general tips for me etc? All tips I can get are greatly
> > appreciated!
> >
> > Thanks in advance, regards,
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Linux-audio-user mailing list
> > Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> > http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>
>
> --
>
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