Speaker and Room Calibration

I recently discovered speaker calibration. I thought I was doing everything right by putting broad band sound absorption on my walls etc, but my mixes (and then later my masters) were still pretty messed up. Specifically despite nearly a year of work, they still ended up sounding cheap. I couldn't figure it out.

Mastering is HARD!

Before I get into this, I'll front load the conclusion: In all the talk about mastering, if your monitoring isn't flat, even the best ears won't do any good. Of course, the compromise is to intimately know what your gear sounds like ... but I think that takes thousands of hours of critical listening and an extensive knowledge of acoustics.

I self-mastered my last album (The End of Silence). I was very excited about it. I had resolved to remove myself from my music in order to master it. I couldn't afford an ME at the time, but I badly wanted to release my album.

 

I believe I got 70% of the way there with the help of the free videos and articles at productionadvice.co.uk, as well as the information available at http://www.masteringtuition.com/

I think I managed to successfully divorce myself from my music so that I could look at it as objectively as possible. I analyzed it intently for problems without thinking about the mix and the compromises that led to things sounding the way they did.  I carefully selected and manipulated various plugins to (as transparently as possible) make my music loud as well as dynamic as well as punchy as well as clear as well as crisp. I compared it  on various playback systems. I also compared it to Auto mastering (mastering box, AAMS, e-mastered, LANDR), other pro masters, and the final mixes - and I level matched them all so that I could be as accurate as possible!

It was extremely painstaking, aggravating, frustrating, rewarding, happy , sad ... it was every emotion I can think of wrapped into one giant hairball. 

But I have now realized my monitoring situation was utterly inadequate for mastering. 

............... :(

After listening to one track (Swallowed) and then every other track on a system tuned to be (what I believe is) flat (using Sonarworks reference 3), I can hear a terribly pronounced bump in the upper mid range which is making everything sound cheap. I re-checked on my car, and listened again on everything I have.  Now in every case, I hear that cheap sounding boost in the 4-6k region. The sadness of this realization is nearly overwhelming.

So the long and short is that after listening on the tuned system, I decided to make two changes - a wide 3db cut at 4.1kz and a narrow 1 db boost at 10khz ... the result in the song :swallowed' is that it's become the song I was envisioning in my head all along, and it sounds pretty well the same on everything I play it through.

Now my hope is that there isn't some other etherial thing I'm missing ....

Sheesh mastering is HARD! 

More Thoughts on Robo Mastering

It seems whenever the topic of auto mastering comes up, a fire gets lit. It's easy to forget that real people on all sides are working with a common goal in mind: to help people make better recordings with less effort and less out of pocket cost.

And I don't really have a beef with Auto Mastering programs. I just have rarely been happy with the results I've gotten from them. However, I have gotten results that I've kept and released, and AAMS in particular was one of the programs I used to get results on my most recent Album "The End of Silence". I also used EZ Mix 2 on one of the Masters and in the mixes for certain things that I wanted to hear, which my others plugins couldn't do.

The end result was that I used a combination of things, not just AAMS and EZ mix to get the results I wanted out of the final Masters. Most important of all, I used my ears and a monitoring system that I trust and know.

To this end, I want to point out something - getting truly great results out of your mixes takes at least these five things:

1) Recordings that are well done
2) Mixes that sound great and are well balanced
3) Mastering that fills in the gaps and tweaks the balance of the EQ curve.
4) A monitoring system you absolutely trust
5) Objective 'ears'

This is much harder than it looks, so I encourage you to learn as much as you can from sources that are reputable. I love recording forums, but many times the advice I've gotten on them has led me astray.

For The End of Silence, I had mixes I was happy with overall, but there were also problems due to some bad sampling software that introduced a ton of aliasing into the Mix. Because I couldn't afford to just go out and get new sampling software, I had to fix the aliasing in the mix using EQ. This was no small task. I also did some early takes where I had done a sloppy job at recording the instruments. I re-tracked and re-mixed lot of the material this past year to get things up to a standard I was happy with. I would say that I'm overall pleased with the results, but I also think I can do better. That's perhaps a perfectionist tenancy I have, but it also propels me into more learning.

I found that I was also able to use some Mid/side processing techniques to fix more of the aliasing during mastering. The final masters cleaned up nicely and are 100% better than the original mixes. Many of those tracks were run through AAMS, but it also took me making decisions about what I liked and didn't like each time I ran a track through the program. And those decisions did not come until I had listened meticulously to each master on several playback systems that I trust. Some of the masters lacked punch, others lacked clarity while others had some combination of both.

So what I ended up doing was subduing the loudness maximizing from AAMS, then I ran my final mixes through the program until I found something I was happy with. I then imported the 32-bit masters from AAMS into REAPER, and completed some final EQ adjustments, compression, and limiting to get what I chose as the final versions.

On one song, "Our Father", the results I got from AAMS were pretty well exactly what I was looking for. I only took out a bit of harshness in the mid and sides, and did the final loudness maximizing. It was done very quickly.

On another song, "Disappear", I ran it through LANDR and wasn't at all happy with the results. Then I ran it through AAMS and wasn't happy with the results. Then I ran it through Mastering Box and generally liked what I heard, except there was an insane amount of bass distortion and the mids were too scooped. So, what I decided to do with that one was loudness match each with the original and make manual adjustments until I had something I liked better than the other automated masters.

This begs the question: Is auto mastering worthwhile? I think the answer is yes and no. It is not an either/or situation.

I think it's important to test the automated waters and see if the results are better than what you are able to do on your own. If you can afford it (sometimes we will do it for free), get a mastering engineer to master a song and then compare the pro or semi-pro master with the automated masters. Whichever one you like best, go with it! Because this is really about your music and what will make you the most comfortable releasing your art into the public sphere.

Level Matching and "Robo Mastering"

I ran a poll recently on a couple of home recording forums where I asked people to identify the best sounding master out of 5 possible masters.

I used the following to "remaster" an old song called "Future"
AAMS
LANDR
Masteringbox
A Professional Mastering Engineer
A Master that I produced myself

If you want to do this blind test yourself, check out my web page:
http://www.levityproject.com/home-mastering/mastering/audio-mastering-shootout

Since was a blind test, no one knew which one was which. This made things interesting ... and the results surprised me (sort of). One of the auto services actually got more love than the rest, but the reason why might be more predictable than you would think. I'll explain in a later post.

To complete the test, you will need to download Reaper, which can be found at http://reaper.fm/download.php

There are two Reaper Files in the test. One is not level matched, and one contains masters that I have level matched so they are all the same perceived volume. Try out both and see which master you like best in each.

Once you made your choices, check the results page to see which master you chose! Leave a comment to let me know which you preferred.

Leave a comment here or on the facebook page about which master you chose. I'll explain why you may have chosen it in a future post, but I believe the results will be fairly consistent (as they were when I ran the tests in some audiophile forums).

Photo Source: Wikmedia

Audio Production Podcasts: My Top 4 Favourite

I can't count the number of times I've seen lists of 20 or 50 *recommended* podcasts for listening.

Who has time for that?

As an educator myself, I hate unnecessary fluff.  Large lists of podcasts are just that. It's impossible to keep up with more than 4 or 5 podcasts at a time, unless you are a long distance runner, drive a semi for a living, or have nothing better to do than listen for hours on end to podcasts in your spare time.

Another factor I go for is brevity. If it takes you two hours to say what could have taken 20 minutes, I'm out. Keep it simple and keep it short. I think that'll be my new motto.

I've whittled the list down to my top 4. To make it on this list, the podcast needs to be educational in nature and generally interesting to listen to.

1. The Mastering Show - http://themasteringshow.com/
I love, love, LOVE this podcast! Ian Sheppard is a mastering engineer and a natural educator. He is able to distill complicated concepts down to simple anecdotes that are not only easy to understand but also highly actionable. This is almost a master class in Mastering. If you are into mastering, or just want it demystified, I can't recommend this podcast enough! Ian has several products that I highly recommend as well.

2. Recording Revolution's Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/recordingrevolution
This guy is prolific. And an excellent educator as well. Highly, highly recommended. Grahm's vlogs and products completely changed how I approached recording and mixing, for the better!

3. Recording Studio Rock Stars - http://recordingstudiorockstars.com
I'm only a couple of episodes into this interview style podcast produced by Lij Shaw, but I've found the information already to be invaluable.

4. CD Baby Podcast - http://cdbabypodcast.com/
This podcast is a bit long winded, but they deal with a lot of music industry business stuff, which is important. CD baby is an important part of my own journey as an independent artist.

There you have it, my 4 podcasts faves!
enjoy!