E
Equality 7-2521
Guest
ok i know almost nothing about mastering. i came across this article by Mass MC (owner of Double Beef Records) on www.ozhiphop.com (popular australian hiphop website)
do you guys thing this is a good article?
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It's not how loud you make it, it's how you make it loud...
below is the paper written for my site using wavelab and some plugins..
I am also writing up a paper on hardware mastering as we speak and i shall be posting soon..
hope this helps.....
Mass MC gets down to the basics and shows the mastering enthusiast just how easy it is to master tracks at home with a little understanding of sound, afew plugins & time.
Mastering is about creating the finest possible showcase for an artist's tracks. Usually this means trying to maintain state-of-the-art quality and transparency. But with some tracks, the "finest possible showcase" may have different priorities.
Take Hip Hop mixes for example. As DJs cut Wax after Wax, a consistent level is important -- you don't want to segue into a radical level drop, particularly if you're halfway through a set. As a result, we must agree to a de facto standard reference level: Put as much average level as is technologically possible on a recording.
Mastering for Hip Hop walks a fine line between maintaining enough dynamics to be musically interesting, while keeping the tune loud enough to hold its own when bookended between two cuts that were engineered for flat-out maximum level. Fortunately, today's plug-in tools go a long way toward letting you optimize a mix with as few compromises as possible.
THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE RIGHT JOB
Traditionally, the mainstays for mastering have been high-quality dynamics control and flexible equalization. However, the evolution of the art has brought us the multiband compressor, which combines filtering and compression. The way this tool works is, you specify a range of frequencies to be affected by an associated compressor. Meanwhile, a separate range of frequencies can be affected by a different compressor. This allows for tricks such as tightly controlling the bass response through limiting, while adding midrange compression in, for example, the 1kHz region to improve "snap" and allow samples to "speak" a little better.
When it comes to plug-ins, you can choose from a variety of multiband compressors. My current favorite is the Spectral Design plug-in that's part of the Steinberg Mastering Edition software package. However, some software packages (such as Sonic Foundry Sound Forge) include multiband compression as a standard feature, and there are other multiband compression plug-ins. These all work fairly similarly, so what's described here should be easy to translate to whatever you're using.
THE MASTERING PLUG-IN SETUP
Multiband compressors typically include three to five stages. Often, three stages (for low, mid, and high) are enough; any more can just complicate matters. Many times what you really need instead of more stages is simply a stage of traditional parametric EQ. However, for some "problem cases" where it's crucial to apply a specific amount of dynamics processing to a specific frequency range, four or five bands can come in handy.
Fig. 1. The mastering setup I used for Mystik Journeymen (Living Legends) Tracks Recorded By ESP (Dominion). Note the multiband compressor toward the lower left, the EQs in the upper right, and the spectrum analyzer in the upper left. The Loudness Maximizer (along the bottom) is "folded in" to take up less screen space.
Let's look at a real-world example of setting up some mastering plug-ins, then zero in on the multiband compression. Figure 1 (above) shows Steinberg WaveLab 3.0 with four different mastering plug-ins, which are arranged in this order:
Pre-multiband compressor EQ
Multiband compressor
Post-multiband compressor EQ
Loudness maximizer
For one song, the bass range was almost overwhelming, as you'd expect from a Hip Hop mix. The high end was weak in comparison to the bass, and the midrange was in the low end's shadow. Another problem that needed to be addressed was a midrange prominence that gave a sort of "honking" quality.
The first EQ in the chain was the simplest fix, as it simply backed off a bit on the prominent midrange component at around 1.2kHz. With that out of the way, the compressor could work more naturally. The second EQ was for some final trimming: about -1dB of bass shelving starting at 200Hz, a bit of added "air" (1.5dB of shelving starting at 9kHz), and a tiny midrange cut to smooth out the response a bit. The loudness maximizer at the end merely added a 1.5dB boost to the whole piece to bring up the average level a tad. The main action happened with the multiband compression.
FINDING THOSE FREQUENCIES
Using a multiband compressor involves isolating the specific frequencies that need work, then processing them with the compressor. Again referring to Figure 1, you can adjust each band's width and amplitude in the left pane, and the input/output transfer function (which determines the shape of the compression, expansion, or limiting) in the right pane. When you solo a band, the line representing its transfer function becomes brighter than the others. Clicking on this line provides "break points" that you can drag to alter the transfer function curve.
First, I soloed the lowest bass band and adjusted it to include the desired bass range. This meant going as high as I could without picking up the midrange; an upper limit of about 100Hz sounded right.
Next came the treble frequencies. Because of the weak high end, I initially set the low end of the high range to around 4kHz. This picked up the brightest frequencies, while again leaving the midrange mostly alone. However, when I then soloed the midrange, the sound was a bit too bright. Moving the treble crossover point down to 2kHz produced the desired results: The tune's bottom and power was in the bass band, the brightness and sheen in the treble band, and the definition in the midrange band.
Now it was time to address each problem through dynamics processing. Fixing the high end simply involved adding a small amount of compression, but starting at a low threshold. This acted like a treble boost, with the compression bringing up some of the lower-level high frequencies. This compression was so effective at lifting the brightness that it was necessary to bring down the treble band's amplitude a bit in the left pane.
The midrange needed the same kind of treatment to increase intelligibility. In fact, the reason you don't see three separate curves in the right pane is that the high and midrange response curves are so close as to cover each other. Adding midrange compression brought up some background vocals and instruments that had been almost buried.
Bass was the most interesting challenge. The kick/bass combination had an extremely long sustain, so the low end was not well-defined. In some ways this sounded really cool when you cranked the level, but it also obscured the rest of the track.
The fix for this band was to add expansion rather than compression. Signals below about -10dB were expanded downward to make them softer than normal. Signals above -10dB were treated more or less normally. This created more peaks and variations in the bass dynamics, but the loudest peaks were just as loud as before. Doing this opened up the whole tune; the bass no longer overwhelmed the rest of the track, but because the peaks were still plenty loud, it didn't sacrifice that all-important club bass sound. However, it was necessary to increase the overall level of this band a bit, because the expansion lowered the average bass level.
On some other tracks I've used expansion in the treble range to tame an overly bright high end. Doing high-end expansion typically allows transients, like a closed hi-hat strike, to come through just fine, which preserves a tracks percussive nature. However, lower-level bright sounds fall in level more quickly, so they "get out of the way" of the rest of the track.
Of course, finding these frequencies and calling up just the right amount of compression is time-consuming. But when you finally nail the sound, hit bypass, and confirm that the mastered version slams the original, any time spent seems very worthwhile.
SEVEN SUGGESTIONS WHILE MASTERING
Before you jump into a marathon mastering session, here are seven things that are good to remind yourself of periodically.
1) Have someone else master your mixes for you. OK, in most project studios we realize that the same person is often the performer, producer, mixer, and mastering engineer. At least get someone else to listen with you. Or find someone who will master your mixes if you master theirs. You’re too close to your own music. You’ll hear things other listeners won’t hear, and you’ll miss things that everyone else does hear.
2) Take breaks and listen to other CDs in between. Refresh your ears in terms of what other stuff sounds like. OK, the pros just instinctively know what sound they’re working towards, but for the rest of us being reminded from time to time during the process isn’t such a bad idea.
3) Move your listening position. Studio reference monitors are very focused and directional. The sound can change significantly depending on your listening position. Shift around a bit. Stand across the room for a moment.
4) Listen on other speakers and systems. Burn a CD with a few different variations and play it on your home stereo system, or drive around and listen to it in your car. Don’t obsess over the specific differences, but just remind yourself what other systems sound like.
5) Check how it sounds in mono. Check how it sounds with the polarity inverted on one speaker. People will listen to it this way (although maybe not intentionally) and while your master probably won’t sound great this way hopefully it won’t completely fall apart either.
6) Monitor at normal volumes, but periodically check it at a higher volume. When you listen at low to medium volumes, you tend to hear more midrange (where the ear is most sensitive) and less of the lows and highs. This is related to something called the Fletcher-Munson effect, which involves how different frequencies are heard differently depending on the playback volume. So check from time to time how it sounds at different volume levels.
7) When you think you’re done, go to bed, and listen again the next morning.
Mass MC
do you guys thing this is a good article?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not how loud you make it, it's how you make it loud...
below is the paper written for my site using wavelab and some plugins..
I am also writing up a paper on hardware mastering as we speak and i shall be posting soon..
hope this helps.....
Mass MC gets down to the basics and shows the mastering enthusiast just how easy it is to master tracks at home with a little understanding of sound, afew plugins & time.
Mastering is about creating the finest possible showcase for an artist's tracks. Usually this means trying to maintain state-of-the-art quality and transparency. But with some tracks, the "finest possible showcase" may have different priorities.
Take Hip Hop mixes for example. As DJs cut Wax after Wax, a consistent level is important -- you don't want to segue into a radical level drop, particularly if you're halfway through a set. As a result, we must agree to a de facto standard reference level: Put as much average level as is technologically possible on a recording.
Mastering for Hip Hop walks a fine line between maintaining enough dynamics to be musically interesting, while keeping the tune loud enough to hold its own when bookended between two cuts that were engineered for flat-out maximum level. Fortunately, today's plug-in tools go a long way toward letting you optimize a mix with as few compromises as possible.
THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE RIGHT JOB
Traditionally, the mainstays for mastering have been high-quality dynamics control and flexible equalization. However, the evolution of the art has brought us the multiband compressor, which combines filtering and compression. The way this tool works is, you specify a range of frequencies to be affected by an associated compressor. Meanwhile, a separate range of frequencies can be affected by a different compressor. This allows for tricks such as tightly controlling the bass response through limiting, while adding midrange compression in, for example, the 1kHz region to improve "snap" and allow samples to "speak" a little better.
When it comes to plug-ins, you can choose from a variety of multiband compressors. My current favorite is the Spectral Design plug-in that's part of the Steinberg Mastering Edition software package. However, some software packages (such as Sonic Foundry Sound Forge) include multiband compression as a standard feature, and there are other multiband compression plug-ins. These all work fairly similarly, so what's described here should be easy to translate to whatever you're using.
THE MASTERING PLUG-IN SETUP
Multiband compressors typically include three to five stages. Often, three stages (for low, mid, and high) are enough; any more can just complicate matters. Many times what you really need instead of more stages is simply a stage of traditional parametric EQ. However, for some "problem cases" where it's crucial to apply a specific amount of dynamics processing to a specific frequency range, four or five bands can come in handy.
Fig. 1. The mastering setup I used for Mystik Journeymen (Living Legends) Tracks Recorded By ESP (Dominion). Note the multiband compressor toward the lower left, the EQs in the upper right, and the spectrum analyzer in the upper left. The Loudness Maximizer (along the bottom) is "folded in" to take up less screen space.
Let's look at a real-world example of setting up some mastering plug-ins, then zero in on the multiband compression. Figure 1 (above) shows Steinberg WaveLab 3.0 with four different mastering plug-ins, which are arranged in this order:
Pre-multiband compressor EQ
Multiband compressor
Post-multiband compressor EQ
Loudness maximizer
For one song, the bass range was almost overwhelming, as you'd expect from a Hip Hop mix. The high end was weak in comparison to the bass, and the midrange was in the low end's shadow. Another problem that needed to be addressed was a midrange prominence that gave a sort of "honking" quality.
The first EQ in the chain was the simplest fix, as it simply backed off a bit on the prominent midrange component at around 1.2kHz. With that out of the way, the compressor could work more naturally. The second EQ was for some final trimming: about -1dB of bass shelving starting at 200Hz, a bit of added "air" (1.5dB of shelving starting at 9kHz), and a tiny midrange cut to smooth out the response a bit. The loudness maximizer at the end merely added a 1.5dB boost to the whole piece to bring up the average level a tad. The main action happened with the multiband compression.
FINDING THOSE FREQUENCIES
Using a multiband compressor involves isolating the specific frequencies that need work, then processing them with the compressor. Again referring to Figure 1, you can adjust each band's width and amplitude in the left pane, and the input/output transfer function (which determines the shape of the compression, expansion, or limiting) in the right pane. When you solo a band, the line representing its transfer function becomes brighter than the others. Clicking on this line provides "break points" that you can drag to alter the transfer function curve.
First, I soloed the lowest bass band and adjusted it to include the desired bass range. This meant going as high as I could without picking up the midrange; an upper limit of about 100Hz sounded right.
Next came the treble frequencies. Because of the weak high end, I initially set the low end of the high range to around 4kHz. This picked up the brightest frequencies, while again leaving the midrange mostly alone. However, when I then soloed the midrange, the sound was a bit too bright. Moving the treble crossover point down to 2kHz produced the desired results: The tune's bottom and power was in the bass band, the brightness and sheen in the treble band, and the definition in the midrange band.
Now it was time to address each problem through dynamics processing. Fixing the high end simply involved adding a small amount of compression, but starting at a low threshold. This acted like a treble boost, with the compression bringing up some of the lower-level high frequencies. This compression was so effective at lifting the brightness that it was necessary to bring down the treble band's amplitude a bit in the left pane.
The midrange needed the same kind of treatment to increase intelligibility. In fact, the reason you don't see three separate curves in the right pane is that the high and midrange response curves are so close as to cover each other. Adding midrange compression brought up some background vocals and instruments that had been almost buried.
Bass was the most interesting challenge. The kick/bass combination had an extremely long sustain, so the low end was not well-defined. In some ways this sounded really cool when you cranked the level, but it also obscured the rest of the track.
The fix for this band was to add expansion rather than compression. Signals below about -10dB were expanded downward to make them softer than normal. Signals above -10dB were treated more or less normally. This created more peaks and variations in the bass dynamics, but the loudest peaks were just as loud as before. Doing this opened up the whole tune; the bass no longer overwhelmed the rest of the track, but because the peaks were still plenty loud, it didn't sacrifice that all-important club bass sound. However, it was necessary to increase the overall level of this band a bit, because the expansion lowered the average bass level.
On some other tracks I've used expansion in the treble range to tame an overly bright high end. Doing high-end expansion typically allows transients, like a closed hi-hat strike, to come through just fine, which preserves a tracks percussive nature. However, lower-level bright sounds fall in level more quickly, so they "get out of the way" of the rest of the track.
Of course, finding these frequencies and calling up just the right amount of compression is time-consuming. But when you finally nail the sound, hit bypass, and confirm that the mastered version slams the original, any time spent seems very worthwhile.
SEVEN SUGGESTIONS WHILE MASTERING
Before you jump into a marathon mastering session, here are seven things that are good to remind yourself of periodically.
1) Have someone else master your mixes for you. OK, in most project studios we realize that the same person is often the performer, producer, mixer, and mastering engineer. At least get someone else to listen with you. Or find someone who will master your mixes if you master theirs. You’re too close to your own music. You’ll hear things other listeners won’t hear, and you’ll miss things that everyone else does hear.
2) Take breaks and listen to other CDs in between. Refresh your ears in terms of what other stuff sounds like. OK, the pros just instinctively know what sound they’re working towards, but for the rest of us being reminded from time to time during the process isn’t such a bad idea.
3) Move your listening position. Studio reference monitors are very focused and directional. The sound can change significantly depending on your listening position. Shift around a bit. Stand across the room for a moment.
4) Listen on other speakers and systems. Burn a CD with a few different variations and play it on your home stereo system, or drive around and listen to it in your car. Don’t obsess over the specific differences, but just remind yourself what other systems sound like.
5) Check how it sounds in mono. Check how it sounds with the polarity inverted on one speaker. People will listen to it this way (although maybe not intentionally) and while your master probably won’t sound great this way hopefully it won’t completely fall apart either.
6) Monitor at normal volumes, but periodically check it at a higher volume. When you listen at low to medium volumes, you tend to hear more midrange (where the ear is most sensitive) and less of the lows and highs. This is related to something called the Fletcher-Munson effect, which involves how different frequencies are heard differently depending on the playback volume. So check from time to time how it sounds at different volume levels.
7) When you think you’re done, go to bed, and listen again the next morning.
Mass MC
