DIY "mastering" 2016

Get that song on tape! Errr... disk?
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666stringking
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Re: DIY "mastering" 2016

Post by 666stringking » Fri Sep 23, 2016 4:38 pm

If you are just looking for consistent volume between tracks and are not too concerned about mastering for loudness, you can keep your RMS levels fairly high and perform a basic normalize on all your tracks. Your waveforms should look thick, with no skinny peaks. If you see skinny peaks then you should consider compression or limiting. Mastering compressors generally have a fast attack, threshold in the single negative digits, long release, and high ratio, which you can emulate with just about any compressor. I highly recommend a program called Cool Edit Pro, which gives you a good view of your waveform and has some great audio suite tools. If you don't want to deal with all that nonsense then try Landr automatic mastering, it's cheap and the results are... OK. If you want to get into serious mastering then check out Chris Graham (google). Great guy doing really great work.

Edit: One more tip, I tend to mix with a peak of -6, keeping all of my tracks fairly quiet until the mastering process. You can compensate by turning up your monitors a bit. This headroom really helps in the mastering process.

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