when u doin a home made master , usualy which freqs u cut to avoid ear fatigue ?
Vermeee
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Posted : May 26, 2011 12:18:53
beside the very dirty low end, usualy which freq region u cut in a master of the track to make it less "heavy" to the ears and more soft sounding without loosin the power ?
PoM
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Posted : May 26, 2011 12:46
if it s home made master i try to fix everyhting in the mix,for more soft sounding though soft can mean something different for you but for me it s a lot around 100/1000hz, no mudd there to get a more soft round sound and no harsh in the mid highs to not tired the ears but all tunes are different hard to give some specific frequencies.
wihtout loosing power you may not want to soften transients and loose loudnesss cause of some processing and getting tonal balance right is very important but imo it s more something to fix in the mix when possible.
mudpeople
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Posted : May 26, 2011 13:43
same, fix the mix, which is where all that should be done, before final premaster. Get a nice clean sound without fatiguing frequencies.
I wish I could say that its easy or that its something you could be taught... Sadly, at least for me, its somethign that will come eventually.
I tell anyone starting out or just really getting going producing, dont worry about mastering yet, dont worry about final processing yet, first and foremost focus your energy on getting a clean mixdown.
Mastering, really, mainly just means getting a track ready to release on 16 bit 44.1khz CD audio. Which means its not something friendly to clean sound. At least, thats the WIki definition. My own mastering consists of Brainworx XL and a limiter set to -.1db ceiling and 0db thresh. Then after thats output, I load it in audacity, amp it til the peaks are around, say -1db or even -.5db, then run the clip fix tool on it to smooth any clipping that may sound off. I hate to master my own stuff..... Im too kind
Its been 8 yrs of serious work to finally even begin to feel ready to try mastering...
Its not what makes tracks fat, or loud, or crazy, or a magic wand to make a bad mixdown sound good. It makes what sounds good already fatter (slightly), warmer, and mainly louder, at the cost of losing some high and low transiets to clipping, which wouldnt really be missed. A few nanoseconds over 0db isnt going to be obvious, but the trick of mixing down is minimizing those transients, getting everything around the same peak db (but dont be fooled by VU meters, they can mislead, trust your ears). IDEALLY, the waveform in teh end should be nice and flat top and bottom, clean and uniform teh whole track thru. There are exceptions to every rule tho...
But yeah, keep going, keep at it, sooner or later, you'll get the hang of it, and you'll understand just how little is actually done during mastering.
Filters and EQ should be used when necessary, only when, and compression should be used carefully and skillfully; if you dont know what youre doing, dont use a compressor, you can always compress later Youd be surprised how much you can do with notch and bandpasses.
I sometimes, if necessary, put a low shelf at 20hz, and a high at 20khz, only if there are frequencies peaking, and it can help sometimes to put a slight, high-Q notch around 750hz-1000khz, again, only if necessary.
Good rule of thumb for me, first, write the track, second, effects, third, filter/EQ, fourth, mixdown. Very VERY general rule of thumb, theres a lot of steps in tehre, but that order of things leads to the best sounds, fastest, in my experience.
.
Vermeee
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Posted : May 27, 2011 18:48
well i just finished a chill out track, the mix s the most clean possible i can get...and i want to master it to put in soundcloud... so i was wonderin what to clean before raisin the rms...
http://soundcloud.com/bgos
Vermeee
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Posted : May 27, 2011 19:42
well here is the track with the rms already raised....also i cut the region around 4000 to try to avoid that ear fatigue that i asked.. tho i dont know if i kiled any high freqs important with it...also i raised a little of the low to give power to the bass and the kick but then the low ends got even more dirty lol... then i tried to cut a little with low shelf but i dont think i used it right coz it sounds like it didnt cut much...
i wonder what could have been done to make it better in the master process.. imo the track s quite clean from the mix..
Supa Tu Zill
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Posted : May 27, 2011 19:45
it's at least good to check if there is any peaks/notches before limiting.
Locrian
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Posted : May 28, 2011 03:02
Quote:
On 2011-05-26 12:18:53, Vermeee wrote:
beside the very dirty low end, usualy which freq region u cut in a master of the track to make it less "heavy" to the ears and more soft sounding without loosin the power ?
That's a very unusual master. Most masters tend to do the exact opposite(which is one of many reasons why I oppose mastering).
But if you want to make it softer to the ears...
1. Don't boost to much around 3-4kHz. We hear best in this region and it's an easy way to make things seem louder. If there is a lot of energy there you might consider doing a slight, wide cut(high q-value).
2. Don't add any resonant filters(low q-values and a lot of gain) or distortion to the master.
3. Avoid analog compressors or compressors that emulate analog compressors, they will add distortion.
4. Avoid adding a lot of energy in the high frequencies. Natural sounds usually have more energy in the lower and progressively less the higher you get. Adding here can make the sound more harsch.
5. Avoid overcompression and limiting. These things create a kind of distortion called TIM(Transient Intermodulation Distortion). Try using lower ratios and thresholds(that is: a lower dB value) to lessen clipping.
Also, overcompression lessens the dynamic range, increases the RMS and thus makes the sound sound stronger at low levels but can also make it unbearable at higher values.
Lastly. If you have a problem with harshness and ear fatigue I would recommend going back to mixes and try to solve things there instead. If an instrument sounds harsh its better to try and fix that than to apply some emergency fix to the whole mix.
http://soundcloud.com/locrian/tracks
Locrian
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Posted : May 28, 2011 03:05
After listening to your track I would say that the main problem is the compression. Maybe the high frequency range is a bit harsh. Any distortion or eq on the instruments in that range?
http://soundcloud.com/locrian/tracks
Vermeee
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Posted : May 28, 2011 03:45
PoM
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Posted : May 28, 2011 19:37
Quote:
On 2011-05-28 03:02, Locrian wrote:
3. Avoid analog compressors or compressors that emulate analog compressors, they will add distortion.
agree with all your points but not this one, what you want to avoid is digital artifacts coming from compression and limiting, but analog saturation or emulation can sometimes smooth the sound and remove some harshness and make it more polished imo .
its not suited for a clean master but for electronic music lot of people want that coloration to add coehesive sound between all the tunes of a va or album and make it sound less digital.
lot of great bus compressors are also analog.
faxinadu
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Posted : May 30, 2011 13:44
Quote:
On 2011-05-28 19:37, PoM wrote:
Quote:
On 2011-05-28 03:02, Locrian wrote:
3. Avoid analog compressors or compressors that emulate analog compressors, they will add distortion.
agree with all your points but not this one, what you want to avoid is digital artifacts coming from compression and limiting, but analog saturation or emulation can sometimes smooth the sound and remove some harshness and make it more polished imo .
its not suited for a clean master but for electronic music lot of people want that coloration to add coehesive sound between all the tunes of a va or album and make it sound less digital.
lot of great bus compressors are also analog.
PoM
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Posted : May 30, 2011 15:47
he said avoid analog compressor or analog modelled compressor but imo it s not right.
all compressors add distortion except if they are not fast enought ,digital one can add harmonics that are not related to the sound itself so it may make them even less suited
Vermeee
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Posted : Jun 1, 2011 19:56
faxinadu
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Posted : Jun 9, 2011 07:42
i use dsp plugins on my creamware board.
PsyQ - an acoustic enhancer
Optimaster - kinda like ozone, it has normalize with soft clip, multiband compressor, multiband limiter with option to set crossovers for the multibands.
but to be very honest, even after almost 10 years of music-making i still don't like my mastering very much, it is adequate at best. there is music making and there is mastering, to dif skills
The Way Back
https://faxinadu.bandcamp.com/album/the-way-back
Nectarios
Martian Arts
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Posted : Jun 9, 2011 12:12
A simple example of why mixing a tune right is something that is far more important than mastering.
We have re-mixed our released music for our live sets in order to avoid playing the same exact music that has already been released, simply because if we played our tunes as they were released, we might as well stick a CD player in and dance around the stage.
Now upon listening to our released music nowdays, it sounds harsh, lacks substance and definition in the bottom end, but that was not because the professional mastering done by Colin OOOD was "bad", its because I sent him mixes that were far from great. Upon opening the logic song files to make live mixes out of, I cringed at the extent of mix mistakes.
So the new live set mixes of the released music sound 10x better, less harsh, more defined, phatter and louder. My "mastering chain" is as simple as the SonnoxEQ>Inflator>Limiter.
The new mixes sound a lot closer to my reference material as well, in terms of balance and RMS. There was no magic behind this, just 2 years of extra analytical listening, practise that turned into experience and most importantly, acoustic studio treatment.
Unless you have a room that has at least a couple of basstraps and you don't hear the room reflecting all over the place when you clap your hands, there is no point into getting into the anal "which mastering plugs to use" debate.
Something that everyone who reads this post should do. Take a test tone generator/sine wave generator and start sweeping from really high all the way down to 20Hz (or the lowest frequency your speakers can adequally reproduce)...the room rings like a motherfucker/disappears at some bits, don't it?
So for the people that want to get down to mastering their own tracks in order to send them to labels for release, don't spend anymore time/cash on mastering plug ins just yet, buy some or do some DIY and get some good monitors.
Mark my words it will become a lot easier to identify the frequencies that make a mix sound harsh, where to high pass...etc...
And after all this mumbling to actually give an answer to the original question...ear fatigue is mostly related to the mid range frequencies that create resonances in your ear canal, due to its shape and dimensions...looking at the Fletcher n Manson curves, its around 3.5k
http://www.customanalogue.com/elsinore/elsinore_images/Fletcher-Munson_700W.gif After that, over compressed music gets tiring to listen to after a while.
Im too kind
Youd be surprised how much you can do with notch and bandpasses.
