Topic: Audio Mastering Websites?

[Chimney Top]

Does anyone know of a good mastering website?  mastering tips, information, etc?

Thank you


edit http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=117279.msg1567216#msg1567216

[yates7592]

Ozone has an excellent guide on mastering audio - it is based on use of their plug-ins but the principles are the same for any software suite.

It is a really good step by step explanation of the do's and don'ts...

http://izotope.fileburst.com/guides/Mastering_With_Ozone.pdf

[DigiGal]

Try these out for starters; Mastering Podcast... http://squarecad.net/index.html   Website...  http://www.digido.com/index.php  Book... Mastering Audio 2nd Ed by Bob Katz

[BlindGuyEars]

If you're serious, the Bob Katz book is excellent.
Also check out his honour roll of recordings on his Website. Although he tends towards the conservative end of mastering, you need to build up a collection of some excellent recordings with which to compare your work. All things Bob Katz are at
http://www.digido.com

If you need to train your ears to recognize and focus like a lens on various areas of the spectrum, a good place to start would be a set of CD's called Golden Ears, from Dave Moulton of Moulton Labs.
http://www.moultonlabs.com/full/product01/

If you are a musician with good ears - I'm one of those perfect pitch assholes check out a chart that shows the frequencies of the musical pitches you are used to hearing. You need to start thinking "oh that's 500 HZ" not "oh that's around 4th octave B natural".
http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

And for god sake, before you worry about expensive monitors, get the acoustics in your room sorted out. The amateurs all overlook that step, and I'd say that room response accounts for about 50% of what you are hearing.

Speaking of monitors, you'll be listening to unmastered recordings, with intact transients. You want something that can really let you hear those very short peaks. A sealed box type speaker will do that more likely than ported designs which tend to ring.

Re. room acoustics, read:
www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html
and check out
www.realtraps.com
or you can build your own traps and pannels and save lots of $$$.

Although I can't find the link, Brad Blackwood runs a mastering forum you may want to join.
and, Berkleemusic Online runs a 12-week mastering course that uses the Bob Katz book as textbook.

[Chimney Top]

Thanks, y'all


I'm going to check out several of those links.


I have some nice speakers... I picked up (2) Definitive Tech towers (with built-in subs) and a center channel under $500 about year and half ago (clearance, getting ready for new models - but about $2,000 atleast worth of equipment).  The acoustic setup is one of the first links I'll read, but my speakers have been calibrated and sound pretty good (angled ceiling towards sweet spot)

Is there some kind of white noise test with Logic or similar programs to hear particular frequencies?

[Gutbucket]

I think Harmon's How to Listen app includes frequency band identification. I downloaded it when they made it publicly available but haven't played with it much-
http://harmanhowtolisten.blogspot.com/

The Dave Moulton discs probably cover that in much more in depth.

[kennedy]

marking thread. carry on.

[Gutbucket]

One thing to keep in mind is that the information linked above is very good and helpful for a general sense of understanding how the commmercial mastering principles and processes work, yet none of the information on audio mastering which I've come across deals specificly with a number of critical issues unique to live music recording as we do it.  Most everything is focued on mastering individual song based studio-recorded material where the focus is on final polishing and packaging of basically finished product.  Some info on mastering classical recordings and other non-studio type stuff applies more closely, yet even there, mastering is what is done to an essentially finished recording to prepare it for release on a specific medium, whereas much of what we are doing is correcting far less subtle things which would typically be addressed long before any thought of "mastering", in the tracking and/or mixing stages. 

The basic principals are valuable and apply, and the lines have become more blurred than they used to be, but the specifics covered in most of what I've seen don't really address many of the core problems we deal with regularly in our loose use of the term 'mastering' as applied to amature live music recording.

[Gutbucket]

One example which comes to mind of the differences between the professional/commercial world and what we do doesn't have anything to do with the signal processing applied to a recording, but rather highlights an ironic difference in the use of the term master in identifying it's lineage.  We tend to use that term around here to denote the original raw version of a recording before anything is done to it, where in the commercial world, a master is a final format specifically targeting at a particular release medium and sent along to the duplication plant. A commercial title may have a version mastered for cutting an LP record and a differently mastered version for CD, each specifically targeting a different delivery format or target audience.  So in the professional world, referring to a recording as a master means pretty much exactly the opposite of the common use of that term around here. 

[Chimney Top]

One example which comes to mind of the differences between the professional/commercial world and what we do doesn't have anything to do with the signal processing applied to a recording, but rather highlights an ironic difference in the use of the term master in identifying it's lineage.  We tend to use that term around here to denote the original raw version of a recording before anything is done to it, where in the commercial world, a master is a final format specifically targeting at a particular release medium and sent along to the duplication plant. A commercial title may have a version mastered for cutting an LP record and a differently mastered version for CD, each specifically targeting a different delivery format or target audience.  So in the professional world, referring to a recording as a master means pretty much exactly the opposite of the common use of that term around here.

yep...

I have several multi-track sessions to begin re-working.  I've also been working on a few audience recordings, all at the same venue... I'd say it's good to work on the recordings from one venue before moving to another, since the room has similar/same acoustics.

[Gutbucket]

Possibly.  A good argument could also be made for switching between different projects to keep a fresh ear/mind.  Always a good idea to come back and listen another day as a sanity check.  Sometimes recognizing things you began to overlook or mentally compensate for during a focused session can be suprising.. and enlightening, and frustrating.  It's very easy to fool yourself, and helpful to aknowlege that fooling yourself is not only possible but common.