Home recording / mastering tips

[conky]

I finally got my band's upcoming album recorded and mixed but I'm having issues with mastering it. I need to get it louder without distorting everything. I know the best thing is to pay someone else to master it but I'm broke and on a short timeline. Anyone got tips on the mastering side of DIY recording. This would be a good place for discussing all aspects of DIY home recording so post your recording do's and dont's.

[Kacey Y]

First part to making mastering easier is appropriate mixing. Filter out inaudible extreme high and low frequencies on individual tracks. Mild compression on sub-mix groups to control dynamic spikes. Fast attack and release, low ratio (1.5bB usually), trying to reduce just about 2bB. Applying that technique to individual tracks with very widely varying dynamics and spikes helps as well (before doing any more tonally focused compression). All of this is essentially just helping with gain staging and eliminating dynamics spikes , to allow a limiter to work most efficiently without over compressing.

The other big key is psychoacoustics. The human ear/brain perceive certain frequencies as being louder than others. Particularly mid frequencies. So doing a mild broadband boost of mids helps with perceived loudness at the mastering stage. Using a multiband compressor helps with this as well, to compress different frequencies in different amounts/ways.

Signal flow is important with the mastering chain. There's a lot of bells and whistles that can be thrown in, like reverb or automating compression, eq, frequency dependent stereo imaging. Playing around with the order of different effects and the gain staging helps. I generally do hpf/lpf, eq, multiband compression, limiter, but there's no set rule. Parallel compression and effects can be useful as well. The most important thing, as with all mixing, is understanding the core concepts/goals and checking with your ears above all else.

[archlilim]

*takes notes*

[D.o.S.]

*comes into the thread ready to learn*
*reads Cory's post*
*starts "mastering fund" instead*

[Kacey Y]

Yeah, I would follow all that up by saying those are REALLY broad strokes and leaves a lot of detail out. I consider myself a good mixing engineer and a kind of fairly ok mastering engineer for my own private demos, I don't think I would ever dare charge anyone to master their mixes myself. The biggest thing I would impress upon anybody who wants to improve at mixing or try to effectively master their own music, is that there's no real quick fixes. It's a skill that you have to practice regularly for a long time, primarily because you really have to train your ears. It's not enough to make something sound good, you have to know WHY it sounds good so you can do it again in the future. Especially because there's not mix/mastering settings you can just save that will sound good with every piece of music. You can't just necessarily memorize certain EQ points or compression settings, you have to know what those are doing with a particular song, why it works (or doesn't) and how to apply those principles to a completely new piece of music that might require different actual settings to get the same result. There's a hundred or more different ways to get the same result or simply a good result, but you have to have a clear idea of what your goal is and how to achieve it. You need a good grasp of the basic principles.

There are a lot of good video series out that discuss basic techniques, the importance of a lot of the fundamentals and all that. Pensado's Place is a great resource, though there's a ton of material to sort through and only some of it will be educational and relevant. Most really good teachers for recording/mixing/mastering will often disclaim a lot of things by saying "this is what works for me" or "this is what I do" and encourage you to experiment and figure out new/different ways to get good results and use your ears to find out what sounds good to you.

I spend a lot of time convincing bands to budget for good mastering engineers. There's nothing wrong with doing it yourself, even if only for the satisfaction of learning things, I just say that to highlight the fact that it is a practiced skill.

[maggot]

Check in with Old Colony Mastering: http://www.oldcolonymastering.com/about.html $35 a track (maybe slightly more for long tracks), and he's for real. A lot of the "real" recording people at Tape Op swear by him for more modest projects. The stuff he did came out great. He even sent me quieter and louder masters of the same material when I asked, so I could decide between volume & dynamics.

Gear wise, what an ME has that you probably don't have is ridiculously accurate monitoring. Otherwise, see if you can bump the volume up a couple DBs while shaving off only the most extreme peaks with a limiter. Listen for problem frequencies, but don't adjust them more than a couple DBs, and hope for the best.

My guess is that if you can come up with a few hundred bucks, and call Old Colony or another low-ish budget ME, you can get it done much faster and better than you can do it yourself.

[echoraven]

...is it possible to bookmark a darn thread!

[Ancient Astronaught]

yes, buttons are at the bottom for subscribing and bookmarking.

Clifton, you can master by yourself but it is extremely hard and will often come out subpar without the dedicated equipment and listening environment that a mastering engineer has and needs. I use a plugin called Ozone that does a decent job for an al inclusive plugin but no matter what I've done or tried it still falls very short of using an actual engineer. There's a reasn that Mastering is an art / science all its own.

[antennafarm]

whatever you do, listen to your product on a bunch of different sound systems. multiple speaker sets, your car, your headphones, your backup headphones, your gym headphones (am i the only one that has purpose-driven headphones?), that ratty old boombox from 1990 that you for some reason haven't gotten rid of, etc.

also, if you can afford it, get a little space from the recording. don't listen to it at all for a while, but DO listen to sonic references. then reapproach the recording with a freshish mind.

[mmurphy1000]

There's a reasn that Mastering is an art / science all its own.

absolutely. Over the years, many bands I was in tried the DIY route for recording, mixing etc. and it was pretty much always terrible. We always figured we were saving money, or staying true to our vision, or some other nonsense lol.
We'd either end up with an album we were really unhappy with, or we'd end up re-doing the whole the thing with a proper engineer, etc.
Just like having a guitar doesn't make you a good guitarist, having a DAW or some software doesn't make you a good engineer. There's a whole world of skill and experience and art that goes into that stuff.

not to say that there aren't some musicians who are good at the recording part - it's just that it requires a lot of dedication and work. and I am the first to admit I am not willing to put the effort into learning it. I don't have a lot of free time so I want to spend as much of it on songwriting/playing as I can.

[maggot]

I find that if you're having to go DIY by necessity, it helps to cut it into specific chunks. The last time I did a full-on band recording, we recorded the basic tracks at a basic low-cost local studio with an engineer who knew what he has doing. We set up for a day only. Then I recorded the few overdubs that we didn't get done in that day (cuz any dumbshit can throw a mic in front of a cabinet or vocalist). I mixed it on Reaper with freeware plugins. I made some rookie mistakes but did a decent job in the end. It took me about 10 times as long as it would have taken someone who knew what they were doing. The drums sounded a little dry, some of the cymbals got lost here and there, but it sounds pretty pro.

Then I sent it off to get mastered at Old Colony. $140 for a 4-song EP. I feel like I got much better results by not compounding my problems; not having the same dumb ideas and monitoring issues every step of the way w/ recording, mixing and mastering. If you don't have cash for mastering, maybe you can barter with someone whose ears you trust who has a decent home studio. They'll hear things that you don't.

[Ancient Astronaught]

There's a reasn that Mastering is an art / science all its own.

absolutely. Over the years, many bands I was in tried the DIY route for recording, mixing etc. and it was pretty much always terrible. We always figured we were saving money, or staying true to our vision, or some other nonsense lol.
We'd either end up with an album we were really unhappy with, or we'd end up re-doing the whole the thing with a proper engineer, etc.
Just like having a guitar doesn't make you a good guitarist, having a DAW or some software doesn't make you a good engineer. There's a whole world of skill and experience and art that goes into that stuff.

not to say that there aren't some musicians who are good at the recording part - it's just that it requires a lot of dedication and work. and I am the first to admit I am not willing to put the effort into learning it. I don't have a lot of free time so I want to spend as much of it on songwriting/playing as I can.

I started out this way, but we all start some where, spending ten times longer than necessary to mix an album. I eventually decided to go to school to learn recording and am very glad that I did as it is definitely paying for its self now. Everyone does things differently or prefers one way over another because all though there is science behind it its a subjective science meaning that while there are absolutes its the improper ways of doing things that lead to innovation or uniqueness.

Here's something else I thought of that hasn't been brought up. A mastering engineer (a pro one anyways) doesn't just polish the mix and bring it up to proper volume levels, etc... It goes far beyond that. A true pro will register your tracks BMI, ASCAP, etc, setup proper routes for getting royalties and credits, provide you with a true CD Master, as well as all the proper paperwork for encoding to be sent witht he master for pressing. They do alot more than just finalize the tracks, and that is what is worth paying them for. Now not every mastering engineer will do these things, but if your gonna pay someone to do it, they should be doing these things.

[oscillateur]

I mostly know that I don't really know that much about mastering or even proper recording/mixing but I always appreciate reading/hearing Stefan Betke (Pole, Scape label) talking about mastering. Because it's his job and he's damn good at it. Might sometimes apply a bit more to electronic music than non-electronic music, but worth reading/listening to for anybody even remotely interested in that. There's also a nice video of him talking about this in his studio that I saw recently but can't find again...

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1232
http://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/in-conve ... -york-2012

[echoraven]

Have a song I'm recording in GarageBand (I'm new at this, so don't judge!) and there is a youtube channel called "Garageband and Beyond" that has several videos on mixing/mastering that I'm going to rewatch. I have only 1 or 2 more tracks to add, then hopefully to finalize.

[D.o.S.]

Skully uses GarageBand for a lot of his stuff and it always comes out sounding super rad.