Archive for March, 2009
Audio Mastering Tips
Audio mastering tips
I want to help you understand more about the process of audio mastering. This process may be foreign to some of you. Others may understand it’s importance but don’t really “get” what mastering really is.
Mastering in basic terms is the process that makes your demo sound more professional and radio ready. Now when I say demo, I am not saying your recording and mixing process are not professional. What I am saying is that any song by any artist that is not mastered is essentially a demo and not “radio ready”.
Mastering will make a dramatic difference in the following:
*More Warmth without muddiness
*More Punch
*More Clarity
*The ability to hear each instrument in it’s own space
*More loudness without distortion or over compression
*A more 3 dimensional sound
*Less noise
*A reduction in frequencies that make your speakers work harder than necessary or that are too harsh on your ears.
Mastering uses the best in digital or analog equipment to bring your songs to life. In general the mastering process involves proper use of Compression/Limiting, Noise Reduction, Harmonic Exciters and EQ’s. The most important tool is a trained ear and this is something that takes some time.
Here are some tips about how to prepare your song for mastering:
*Do not compress or limit your final mix. You will be tempted to do this to make things sound louder, but this is counter productive for mastering. Remember, the mastering engineer can’t undo what you have done, so less is more. Of course it’s fine to compress and effect your individual tracks and instruments, but just don’t put one blanket compressor over the whole mix.. bad idea!
*Your final mix should peak at between -6db and -3db. You do not want it to even come close to clipping. Digital clipping is a nasty thing.
*Make sure your song is properly named on a data cd and that your email and phone number are written on both the CDR and the CD case. You would be surprised how easy it is to misplace an unlabeled CDR and not be sure which case it was supposed to go with.
*I typically like when a band or artist send me a song of a band they really like the production and mastering on (make sure that band sounds similar you your sound). This gives the engineer an idea of what results you are hoping for and takes away alot of guess work.
Although I highly recommend that you pay a professional to master your music, I will give you some tips that may help make your songs sound a bit more professional.
*Remove frequencies below 20-25 hz to keep your speakers from working too hard.
*You may want to lower 40hz a few db to see if it gives your mix a cleaner sound.
*There are a few programs that can steal the EQ curve of one song and apply it to yours. Free Filter, HarBal both do this pretty well. Waves and Izotope also have this feature on some of their effects.
*Use a multiband compressor to keep things under control, but make sure not to overdo it. The bass frequencies can handle a 5:1 ratio and the other frequencies you can use between 2.5:1 or 3:1. Keep the threshold where there is only a few db of actually compression going on. There should be times in your song where the compression is not activated at all. Often times you can compress the lower mid frequencies a few db more which will also help to lower the volume in that area. This can make your mix sound less muddy and more clear in many (but certainly not all) cases.
*Try lowering frequencies around 500hz by a couple db’s to get rid of mud
*Use a multiband harmonic exciter to bring out the clarity and warmth of certain frequencies (once again, don’t over do this).
*Raise the overall volume of your mix using a limiter sparingly. 2-3db is usually good.
I hope this has been helpful and I would love your feedback.
Til next time,
Happy music making,
Jason
P.S. – Don’t forget to comment with your questions (down below).
All your feedback & support is appreciated!
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I have been a Mastering engineer for 11 years now and you can find out more details about my services, pricing and before/after samples of my work. Click Here
How to record Live DJ sets in Ableton
How to record live DJ sets in Ableton
I just had someone ask me a good question related to DJ’ing with Ableton.
He was routing ableton from his soundcard into a DJ mixer
(audio 1 – out 1/2, audio 2 out 3/4). and was interesting in recording
his DJ set as audio so all his mixing and eq’ing would be recorded.
If he were to record from the session window to the arrange window,
it would only record the launching of the clips but not any of the mixing
done on the DJ mixer.
Here is how you would set up Ableton to record your live DJ set as audio:
1. You should have a monitor output or tape output on your mixer. Send that to an unused stereo input on your soundcard.
2. Create an audio track,
3. Choose “audio in” from whatever input youve got the mixer
routed into.
4. Make sure on the audio track to turn monitor to off.
5. Arm the audio track to record
6. Launch a clip..
This will record your set.!
You can also use this technique to record loops and mix it
back into your set. For more on that watch the video below.
“Recording on the fly”.
Til next time.. Happy music making!
Jason
P.S. – Don’t forget to comment & tweet (down below) & “like” (up above).
All your feedback & support is appreciated!
How to create a vinyl effect in Ableton
Create Vinyl effect in Ableton
Here’s a tip on how to create the sound of vinyl slowing down in Ableton.
Below the written walkthrough is a video tutorial. Enjoy!
1. Bring a clip into the arrange window
2. Change the warp option from “beat” (it could also be “complex” , “tones” or
“texture”) to “re-pitch”
3. On the master track draw in a tempo decline at the pace you want -
this will sound like vinyl
If you don’t want a permanent tempo change in your song, you can record the results to another audio track and then return the tempo to where it was before.
Here is how:
1. Create a new audio track
2. On the new audio track find your in/out options
3. Below where it says “audio from” choose the audio track with the
clip you want to record
4. Arm the new audio track (the one you want to record to
5. Push the record button at the top
6. Hit play and let it run til you recorded your vinyl effect
7. You will see the new clip recorded
8. Return the master tempo to what is was before
9. Go to your new clip properties and turn off the warp function
Enjoy!
Happy music making!,
Jason
P.S. – Don’t forget to comment & tweet (down below) & “like” (up above).
All your feedback & support is appreciated!
Free Ableton effect and instrument racks
Free Ableton effect and instrument racks
I wanted to share with you a bunch of great goodies! A wonderfull
thing about the Ableton community is that they love to share their
creative inventions. I found these in the forums and wanted to share
them with you.
Below are a whole mess of custom made instrument racks and effect
racks!
I haven’t put all these to the test, but would love feedback from
you as to which ones you had the most fun with.
Enjoy these! I hope this give you weeks of inspiration
and experimentation!
Happy music making!
Jason
Effect Racks
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By fatrabbit: 8 Beat Repeats mapped to a chain control so you
can use a knob on your MIDI controller to select which one
you want.
by ethios4: The Sweepable Crossover allows you to apply an
effects chain to either side of a crossover that can be moved
>freely with perfect transparency.
modified by fatrabbit
This rack uses and requires supatrigga.
Beat Divider One 1/8/07
by ethios4: With these racks, each beat has its own chain.
Therefore you can apply different effects to each beat, over
1 or 2 measures depending on the rack. This is accomplished
by a series of autopans – you can adjust each beat so that it
only plays the first 16th note, 8th note, or entire beat by turning
>on/off the leftmost autopan, or even adding additional autopans
on the left end of the chain, according to the pattern already set.
DJ-EQ 2/11/07
by hoffman2k: “Some people don’t seem to be happy with EQ3 for
Dj’ing and find EQ4/8 too complex to set up. So here’s my attempt
at a DJ EQ. The requests were only as specific as: “It should not
color the sound” and “0dB should be in the middle”.
With those 2 features in mind, I built the rack.”
Requires Dual Comp AU
Blitchmyglitch & Scratcher 4/6/07
by Airwave:
Blitchmyglitch is a realtime glitcher that moves all the time.
It uses a lot of different fx, redux, beatrepeat, grain delay…
quite enjoyable if you like supercollider and livecut stuff.
Scratcher is a tool that lets you program scratches, turntable
stop fx, reverses based on any loop that you will load in it.
It’s extremely addictive and funny.
InstantChip 4/19/07
by Idonotlikebroccoli: Here’s a quick and fun one if you
wanna make that chip-tune whatever kind of thing. It’s a
MIDI effect rack which consists of an arpeggiator and two
pitch plugins.
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Instrument Racks
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by mdk: its an early version of his 808 emulator built using just
>Operator and Live’s built in fx.
Requires Ableton’s Operator
AM drum kit 1/4/07
by AM: It’s an acoustic drum kit… with tweakable mic positions…
sounds strange i know, but you get the idea once you see it in action.
It’s a large download, and it’s processor intensive…. but it’s pretty
good for getting a range of Acoustic drum sounds…. and also for
messing with until you get really odd sounds.
Angstrum Drum Player 2/5/07
by angstrum: Really cool drum kit using the included waveforms
in Lives sample library. Set up well for electronic music- lots of
presence.
Drum Selektor 2/14/07
by wollej: Another small drum rack for selecting different kicks, snares, toms
via macro controls. Built with 8 instances of Impulse and pitch/scale plugins
for selecting the samples in the Impulse players.
P.S. – Don’t forget to comment & tweet (down below) & “like” (up above).
All your feedback & support is appreciated!
I recommend the sites below:
Logic Courses
Reason Courses
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