Mastering Promotion Winners
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- Published on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 20:31
Congratulations to the masters of the Universe!
The time has come for me to announce the lucky winners of my little mastering promotion and show how the winning tracks sound.
First I'd like to thank everyone who sent in their sounds. The qualiity of the tracks I recieved was really high, and it was really difficult to pick out three. Luckily, I don't have to stick to my own rules, so I ended up working on a couple more than I intended to.
So here are the winners and their before/after results:
Mastering Audio: Get a Free Master!
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- Published on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 17:11
Get a pedicure, get ur track did
I've been interested in mastering for a while. It feels a bit like the final frontier in music production. It also seems like it's an area where great monitoring equipment and expensive analog compressors, EQ's and other black magic machines are a necessity.
If you've been following this blog, you know I recently got the IK Multimedia T-Racks3 mixing and mastering suite, and I'm testing the software and my own skills.
The question is: In a world of digital music media, how necessary is professional mastering and which results can you get with a software and project studio setup?
You can check the results I've gotten until now with my own tracks on my Bandcamp page. Compared to the original unmastered tracks, there's quite a difference.
Now I'm giving away a free master to three lucky winners. Just because I want to test my skills on material I didn't write and mix myself.
Mastering Audio: Two Demonstrations
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- Published on Thursday, 22 March 2012 15:55
Master Blaster!
Tuesday I gave praise to the T-Racks3 Deluxe mixing and mastering suite. The way I see it, software like this gives producers working at home or in project studios the ability to come a good deal closer to sounding like their professional counterparts in very expensive mixing and mastering studios.
Now you can hear for yourself what the software can do.
Keep in mind that I'm mastering my own tracks. I have great speakers (Dynaudio BM6a), but my studio and monitoring facilities are nowhere near what professional mastering studios have (most would say sub woofers are a must). And of course I'm not a trained mastering engineer.
So this is not a comparison of how my mastering stands up to a high end studio, but a demonstration of what T-Racks3 can do for your tracks if you're in a similar position to me.
Nattevandring
I made this track a bit over a year ago, and it was my first track that got a bit of recognition. It was featured on Danish national radio and got a lot of play and positive feedback from some of my favorite Danish DJs.
The sound is dark and deep, and I just wanted to give it a bit of a transparent boost, letting everything shine through nice and clear.
For this, I chose a somewhat boring mastering chain:
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Linear Phase EQ (the most transparent equaliser)
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Opto Compressor (the most transparent compressor)
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Brickwall limiter (set to “clean”)
On the EQ, I went with a mid/side EQ. As mentioned, I'm no mastering whizkidd, but I've had some good experience mid/side Eqing on the master. Done right, it makes the mix a bit clearer I think. What I do is this:
On the middle, I boost the lows in a narrow band around either the kick or bass and also sweep around the snare to find a nice frequency to boost.
On the sides, I'll cut the bass a bit farther up than on the middle. I might attenuate just a bit in the midrange, but then I'll boost a good deal from 5kHz and up.
What this does is give a bit more punch to the foundation of the track (kick, snare, bass) while giving a bit of sparkle in the sides – which almost always compliments my tracks.
Compression for mastering purposes isn't my strongest side, so what I did here was to muck around with different presets and get an impression of what I wanted. I've been told you should be in the area of 45-50ms on the attack and 80-130ms on the release and no more than a ratio to 2 or 3:1, so I used those figures as guide lines and let my ears do the rest. Check my settings here:
At the end of my chain, of course the brickwall limiter set to clean. Attack and release all the way down and the ceiling set to -0.1.
Mastering Audio: T-Racks3 Deluxe
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- Published on Tuesday, 20 March 2012 11:10
Master Mastering
I'm equally fascinated and mystified by audio mastering.
So I was quite delighted when recently IK Multimedia sent me their T-Racks3 mixing and mastering suite to test and review. I'm going to try shed a bit of light on the art of mastering for the project studio.
In this post, I'm reviewing the T-Racks3 Deluxe product, tomorrow I'll be giving some more practical insights and examples of how I mastered two of my own tracks.
And also, I'm starting a little promotion: Send one or two tracks (in the form of downloadable Soundcloud links) to jacobbogh at gmail dog com and you might be one of three lucky winners of a free mastering!
What's this all about?
I've read a number of books and trawled through tutorials on the subject of mastering, but until recently, it felt a bit like black art to me. Where people with golder ears and mythical old machines tweak buttons that make your music sound better in some incomprehensible way.
And it's not all wrong. On the one hand, mastering IS all about golden ears, great monitoring and expensive equipment. But it's also just about getting the most out of your mix.
With T-Racks3, that task has become a bit more accessible to the common musician.
The Effects
IK Multimedia have always been about bringing the life and character of classic studio gear into the digital realm. I've used their SampleMoog, SampleTron and Miroslaw synths quite a lot (despite terrible stability issues). They just sound great. And as mentioned in this recommendation, I'm a big fan of their Vintage compressor and EQ
The T-Racks3 deluxe suite includes nine plugins and a metering section. All can be used in the standalone suite, as a plugin or individually in your DAW.
Besides the vintage EQ and compressor, T-Racks3 includes: The "classic" series (compressor, multiband limiter, clipper and EQ) plus a brickwall limiter, an opto compressor and a linear phase EQ.
I've tried out all nine effects and I'm pretty confident my weapons of choice will be the vintage effects, opto compressor, linear phase EQ, brickwall limiter and classic clipper. Not that the other classic effects aren't also great. They just get outshined by the amazing sound in the others!
The Electric Toothbrush
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- Published on Thursday, 15 March 2012 11:50
Brush them beats fool!
I'm mad busy moving and working in the studio these days, so no time for a lot of words.
Ableton posted this video today. An amazing showcase of what you can do with Live. Quite inspirational and educational in terms of sound design.
It's a track made with nothing but a sample of an electric toothbrush and Ableton's own effects.
This is a reminder to forget the new-gear-syndrome and get on creating music with what you have!
That's all for today.
Come back tomorrow though. Denmark's coolest DJ is in the house pon di Secret Selections!
