Topic: Help with mastering my recording, pretty please, oh you audio genii, you?

[powermonkey]

Ahem.

I recorded Queen live in London this last week, tried to get as close to the stack on one side of the venue and kept my mics pointing pretty consistantly all night. I've done a quick mastering job, involving amplifying and then messing around with compression (12db threshold, 2:1 ratio) using Audacity - it sounds ok via my iPod, but I've been scratching my head as to what to do with it to try and make it a little nicer - it's a clean recording, the sound was really good at the venue, levels were ok - perhaps a touch low, but I was running at 24/96 in order to give myself a little wiggle room so not too bad. My CA-11 cards did a nice job in cutting out the tuneless hags screeching behind me, while catching a really nice audience singalong throughout proceedings.

Anyhoo, I thought I'd put up a 16/44.1 flac sample, just to hopefully get some opinions on what folks round here would do with the recording - I've no idea where to start in terms of any processing other than maybe a hi-pass filter, then amplifying and tracking, and I'd love to get some advice from the experience folks if anyone fancies advising. I'd greatly appreciate it!

*edit* To clarify - this sample is not compressed, only amplified.

Lineage: CA11 cards > Edirol R-09HR @ 24/96 > Audacity (amplify, track out sample) > 16bit/44.1 > flac

Here's the flac sample: https://www.yousendit.com/download/QlVqTmZlZ2prYUR2WnNUQw

Thanks so much for any input/advice/ideas.

Cheers all x

[brad.bartels]

Sounds pretty decent to me, I don't know that I'd do a lot to it. Maybe EQ it a bit to your taste (maybe could use a little bit of bass, but that's just listening on my computer speakers). And I would normalize the whole recording (after any EQ, you might have to hard limit or take the levels down before adding anything via EQ, your pretty close to - dB but you've got a little head room). Your levels look good, but based on this small sample (there are probalby louder parts elsewhere though would be my guess, in which case, this does not apply), you could boost the levels by 2.8 dB via normalize or amplify.

Wouldn't call myself an expert, but I've certainly processed a lot of shows. I've had much worse to deal with...

[anr]

IMO, the main thing is two huge notches, one centered on 150Hz, the other 8.9kHz.   Smoothing these out makes the voice jump out, which is what I'd want to hear.  (A personal preference; if you can't make out the words, what's the point?).   I wonder if you got unlucky with your seat and experienced a little cancellation?   

[powermonkey]

IMO, the main thing is two huge notches, one centered on 150Hz, the other 8.9kHz.   Smoothing these out makes the voice jump out, which is what I'd want to hear.  (A personal preference; if you can't make out the words, what's the point?).   I wonder if you got unlucky with your seat and experienced a little cancellation?

AS stupid as perhaps this sounds, how would I go about seeing where these notches are/smoothing them out?

Cheers,

John

[page]

IMO, the main thing is two huge notches, one centered on 150Hz, the other 8.9kHz.   Smoothing these out makes the voice jump out, which is what I'd want to hear.  (A personal preference; if you can't make out the words, what's the point?).   I wonder if you got unlucky with your seat and experienced a little cancellation?   

without reading your reply, I wanted to do something similar (see attached).

My problem was in the 5-6khz band, but I dislike sound there. I saw more energy there than a natural rolloff and didn't like it so I didn't have any qualms with knocking out some. Second, for the bass boost, I didn't see a lot and hear little, I just didn't see much compared to other bands, so it may have just not been really thumping compared to other shows. dunno. The bass adjustment was conservative, you might enlarge the Q value, or add just a touch more there (maybe up to 1db total). More than that and it starts to bloat so I didn't.

[BlindGuyEars]

as for those notches, use a high-quality EQ plug-in, something linear phaze. (Algorithmix, the EQ built into Ozone 5 etc.)
You want to smooth out those regions with as little added coloration as possible.

I'm blind, so I can't tell you how to look for the regions on a fancy spectogram of some kind. But, for a start, 150HZ sounds like a slightly sharp 3rd octave D natural. 9KHZ sounds centered around one octave higher than 8th octave C#, if you can imagine a piano keyboard extending about an octave higher than normal Sorry, I'm a musician with ears so I tend to refer back to musical pitches when I do this.

If you want to train your ears, might I recommend a set of CD's produced by Dave Moulton, of Moulton Labs called Golden Ears. Excellent stuff!
Believe it or not, with enough practice, you'll be able to focus your ears like a lens in on a particular part of the spectrum, first an octave wide, then as narrow as 1/3 octave.