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Ammitsboel 17 October 2004

While i was reading a 500 pages manual and adjusting tape guides today i thought about... is it time to make a new group project?

Does anybody have a good idea?
If we do a song/number again then why not bring on the artist's opinion of the different results?

...And let's have Don and Thomas with os this time... if they dare? 8-)

Best Regards

Comments

Michael Fossenkemper Tue, 11/30/2004 - 22:19

Bob, I don't think you'll be able to hear what's going on with those events. They are probably OK speakers for tracking, but not for mastering. If you can't hear a difference between 7 and the original except for volume, then something isn't quite right.

Mantiger, I don't think non participants will be able to hear the versions. Trilliums server would have a heart attack.

Massive Mastering Tue, 11/30/2004 - 23:23

Richard - That's all cool. I'm content waiting - That's the fun of the holiday season, isn't it? :D After even more careful listening, I'm reasonably certain which one it is anyway. If I'm right, I'm happy dude. If I'm wrong, it's time for new monitors. :shock:

Or, I could just unzip the damn file... But where's the fun in that?

Karl (assuming MF's comments were for Karl instead of Bob) - I hate to say it, but I agree with Michael on your monitoring situation. Without getting into my feelings for the 20/20's, I have the same problem with most boxes that say "Studio Monitor" on it - Some larger ones can work resonably well, but nearfields just don't cut it for me. Especially for mastering. Picking loudspeakers with the detail, fullness and "vibe" that I wanted was probably the most intensive search I ever went through for any piece of gear. I lucked out that my current speakers almost fell into my lap (after going through model after model and dealer after dealer for over a year). The amps are another story... Much easier, but still a pain trying to find the *right* one to go with these speakers.

Not that I don't use nearfields & midfields for tracking and some mixing tasks...

zemlin Wed, 12/01/2004 - 03:46

Massive Mastering wrote: Karl (assuming MF's comments were for Karl instead of Bob) - I hate to say it, but I agree with Michael on your monitoring situation. Without getting into my feelings for the 20/20's ...

My ears aren't all they could be either. I'm learning - but I have a lot to learn.

Well, I'll quietly sweep the word "Mastering" back under the rug and get on with what I've been doing. I don't give up, but I try to know my limits. It will be a while before I can spend money on a monitor upgrade - and the space situation isn't likely to change - whatever I buy will have to be small.

Enjoyed it - and if there's another of these I'll probably be back for more.

anonymous Wed, 12/01/2004 - 07:09

Richard, my CDs arrived today, thank you. Afraid however no track 8. It maybe a couple of days before I can get back with comments but if people want to move on to the next phase thats fine with me.

I've been reading with great interest the comments about monitors. I'm using Genelec 1029a's, ( I'm not an ME ) could I have some opinions on them ? ( he says trembling )

Cheers

Liam

TrilliumSound Thu, 12/09/2004 - 08:46

Hi everyone,

Sorry, I was sooo busy ! :-?

I asked before to vote if everyone wanted to know who is who but looks like no one answered :? So, I will put the list tonight 8-) this will be interesting.

Hope that everyone will take some little time to provide their settings and approach to the song.

All the best and see ya tonight !

Richard

anonymous Tue, 12/14/2004 - 05:24

Yesterday a friend of mine picked me up with a rented car at home, it got smashed by another car 30 seconds after we had left. So then we toke my car instead and it got stolen later in the evening. :evil: In Sweden a stolen car is probably lost unless it is found all smashed up, turning out to be a really cousy x-mas. :(

Looking forward to the list. :) Except for exposing my number. :mrgreen:

Cheers
Bob
:roll:

TrilliumSound Tue, 12/14/2004 - 08:43

:D Hi Everyone !

Here it is:

1- Beachhunt

2- Mixandmaster

3- Bernard Belley

4- Massive Mastering

5- Trilliumsound

6- Bob Yordan

7- Michael Fossenkemper

8- Chris Cali

9- Zemlin

10- Bennyg

11- Soundfreely

12- Ed Littman

So this is it ! Let's talk and share ! 8-)

Thanks for your patience everybody, it is appreciated !!

Richard

Massive Mastering Tue, 12/14/2004 - 09:36

I guess there's a reason I liked 4 so much... :o

Anyway, here's the notes I made during the "session" - They were pretty raw, so I cleaned them up a little. Hope they make sense... Most is whatever I was thinking at the time (I took out the parts about wanting more coffee :lol: ) Gear choice, settings, all of it.

---- FIRST THOUGHTS ----

Load into Samplitude - START

First thought - Fate's Warning - "At Fate's Hands" - Similar feel...

Acoustic intro - Lots of hiss. Violins... No, Violas. Big image - Yup. Fuzzy lead guitars... Organ... Wow! Electric guitar intro feels like Fates Warning here (which is very cool)... Bit scratchy around 2.5kHz...

ProgRock! Big bass lines. Nice :)

Very "Rush-like" now. Vocals getting buried in spread. Bit boomy. Solo guitar... Nice B-vox, making lead vox sound even quieter... Rocking again... This must be chorus... Vocals swallowed. Great transition into second (?) verse... Nice loud vocal there - Something about "losing control" - B-vox again - So nice level-wise... Tune getting infectious - Will it hold for four more minutes? Guitar led instrumental bridge - Dream Theatre-esque. Enter the acoustic again and into a guitar lead with "Q & A" with octaved "A's" Sensible key change... Ouch! What the hell was that ( 07:08 )? Almost sounded like distortion. NOTE LATER: It was the spiky strummed acoustic for two measures on right channel - Very "in your face" and "above" the rest of the mix. Hey! Fake ending! Nice... What a great snare sound - Don't want to lose that... Might want to take a little tub off it and bring out the THWACK. "Q & A" guitar revisited - No octaves - Some higher harmonies. Very tasty. Ending for real this time? - STOP.

Excellent musicianship all around. Nice sounds, possibly mixed fairly loud on larger speakers with slightly attenuated tweeters.

---- GAME PLAN - while tune plays at very low level in the backgound ----

There's nothing "freaky" wrong here - Start at the beginning - Deal with the hiss first -- A little de-essing for the vox & over-energetic hat parts -- A little corrective EQ in the lows, low mids (snare), upper mids (direct-sounding guitar), highs (sibilance & hat). MidSide compression on the sides only to uncover the vocals a little (hopefully, not at the expense of the stereo spread. Some light super-slow compression on the whole mix and level up to "modern standards" (ha!) or until it get out of hand. Whichever comes first. This sounds like it would live comfortably at around -14 or -13dB RMS. Thank Gawd they *want* some dynamics...

---- WORK SHEET ----

Hiss reduction first - Native Samplitude DeHiss working well. Sibilance - SpitFish around 7.5kHz and soft. Low sensitivity (the sibilance will trigger it plenty). Going lazy on the M/S with the UAD Fairchild (gotta use the damn thing once in a while, right?). Lat/Vert and compressing the (sides) to give me about 1.5dB of reduction during the loud parts (where the lead vocal really gets swallowed). Working well.

Out through the Lavry M*DA824 into the Orban 642 - Not liking it off the bat (too "warm") - Into the Massenburg 8200 - Okay - Shallow cuts - All are at around 1.5-2dB. Shelf at 20Hz. Medium Q at 200 making the snare sound great. Medium Q at 500 letting vocal come through a little better. Medium Q at 2.5kHz taking a little edge off the guitar. Fairly tight Q at 16kHz smoothing the hat a little. Into the Vari-Mu... Gain is surprisingly low - Adding 2dB at the front end. Looking for 1-2dB average reduction. -11.5 threshold in compression mode (1.5:1), attack at 90ms (K), release at 4 seconds. Too fast - Make that 8 seconds. Output at -7 (which is around 5dB make-up). Needles sitting linked around -1.5dB on average. Into the Lavry M*AD824 at 24 bit with A-Sat engaged and a relatively hot signal from the Vari-Mu and A-Sat engaging on scattered snare hits.

Back in the box - UAD Pultec - "ON" (my favorite preset) bringing the "air" in right where it needs it. UAD Precision Limiter set at -0.3 just to catch the peaks. Watching... One here and there on the snare reducing less than a dB or so. "Pultec-ing" the sub-bass a little at 20Hz (+1.5/-1).

Going back to 16 bit through POW-r #3.

TIME: 62 minutes including listening stage and note-typing. A little long, but it's a 9-1/2 minute tune :D Not including the time to reformat my hastily-typed notes into somewhat coherent paragraphs. :)

---- END OF NOTES ----

And that's the way it was... :?

Massive Mastering Tue, 12/14/2004 - 13:33

He certainly has an unpronounceable name. :? He's got some nice plugs, though...

The mid-side is the mod that I DON'T have on my Vari-Mu... However, the UAD Fairchild has the "mod" in the plug. Just an old vinyl thing for the most part - You can compress the mid (mono) info separate from the side (stereo) info.

The stereo spread in the tune was pretty grand, and the vocals were well-centered. So, I set up the FC in lat/vert (M/S) mode and compressed the stereo information to (about 1.5dB?) during the louder passages. That allowed the center to be a dB or so louder, bringing up the vocals. I shouldn't say "bringing up" - I should say "giving them room" - As the sides went down, there was just that little bit less to distract you from what was going on in the center. I wanted to push it a little harder, but then the image started to get screwy fast...

{EDIT} I suppose that I should make it clear that "normally" I'd set up a proper M/S matrix and do it the "right" way. However in this case (A) I was trying to be quick, as there were jobs stacking up and (B) the FC plug actually sounded nice on this particular occasion. {/EDIT}

Michael Fossenkemper Tue, 12/14/2004 - 20:26

thanks again to trillium for heading this project.

Notes:
listened to the song 3 times through, made mental notes as to what I though was good and not. In general I thought the mix was thin but good. fatting too much would bury the vocal, limiting too much would kill the snare and kick. Mental note was to not over do anything.

Step one, upsample mix to 96k through rosetta 200. while listening for the 3rd time.

Dess a little with the waves desser. MS eq using the wiess, bring up the mid channel around 2 db relative to the sides. boost mid in the upper mid for more fundamental of the vocal. bring up the low mids for some bass definition. roll out some lows on the sides and boost the low mids on the side to get some body to the guitars. bring down the upper mids on the side to take out some of the hash in the guitars. Bring down the highs in the sides and boost it in the mid. Helped the hiss as it seemed to be coming from mic pre's on the guitars. Decided not to use any noise reduction. Out of the eq into the weiss compressor. Slowish attack to retain the snare, maybe 1 db of reduction. Out of the comp into the L2 for a little limiting, maybe 2-3 db. I wanted to retain while beefing it up. downsample to 44.1 and used pow-r #2. I pushed the mid up to try and push the snare and kick into the limiter a little cause I felt it had a little spike to it but not much body. I guess I had the most trouble with the vocal, seemed like it had a little sweet spot that wanted to sing but was thin. I liked the way the original made me feel and didn't want to veer to far away from that. I liked what John did also, I listened again to both and can't decide which one I like best.

anonymous Wed, 12/15/2004 - 04:23

Here is my unorthodox approach. :) :mrgreen:

I actually put the mix into Cubase SX. Made 3 parallell stereo audio tracks. The first stereo track was the 'dry" almost untouch mix. The second stereo pair was a run through the built in reverb A in Cubase, just to increase the depth of the mix some more. The third stereo track pair was run through heavy compression (sonalksis eq & comp demo's) and only hf, tried to make an exiter. :mrgreen: Then it was all about balance. Because my ears was rather tired I definitly failed on that part. :D Sounded okay when I did the mixdown, but afterwards the hf was just to much. The stereo tracks with hf (exiter) was treated with fish plug for dessing that I never used before this occation, also the untouched stereo track had the dessing. On the master the UAD-1 precission limiter last and minor Pultec pro.

Was searching for a Journey sound, because I really liked the guitars and vocal on this track. :) I also wanted to remove the frett noises from the bass, but I think I lost some low end there.

It is so cool, that now when I listen to it, with distance, I hear that it is also squashed in the mid, lacking all dynamics. My brain was not receptive to make that analyse when I did the mixdown.

Cheers
Bob
:roll:

ps
My car showed up almost not damaged yesterday evening in a nearby town, the thief had probably used it to steal some boat??
Because I found boat keys in it.
ds

anonymous Wed, 12/15/2004 - 08:40

Ok,
I ran two instances of wavelab assigned to two sound cards. I used instance 1 to play original file & go through my mytek stereo96 DAC.
fist hit was the

Cranesong stc-8 (yes, i like comp first) set to a very high threashold on the B & ki setting...hardly working.

Cranesong ibis,
boosted 104hz tight q, 440hz mid q, 932hz bell, & 19k bell

I used the mytek ADC at 44.1 to go to my 2nd instance of wavelab set to live input with the waves de-esser at 6k & the waves Transx wide plug for the huge snare dynamics.

i went back & treated the intro individually in sections

from the original file (not the processed file above), I ran some light de-ssing & noise reduction, & went in by hand to deal with the bad ess spots only.(maybe this is why massive heard the hiss coming & going). I boosted 100hz a bit for the bottom of the viola& Guitar.

for the guitar intro i only added a bit of 220hz for beef & a bell curve going up to 20k for some light sheen.

after lining the clips up I copied the main body of the tune to another track. I used the s1 imager to go mono. i wanted to get more vocal out, so I cut 472hz, boosted 1k, & cut 7k & mixed it in lightly. i could have pushed this more but I didn't want to loose the stereo immage & snare snap. Yes at the cost of the singer...sorry.

I wanted to keep all the dynamics I have created so i didn't push the l2 at all with the out at -0.1 & used the IDR type 1/normal
dither.

I not only wanted to retain the snap & existing dynamics...but create more. I know if I pushed the l2 harder I would blend the snare in more to the mix & raised the level to what people are more used to. And still remains an easy adjustment if the "client" wanted.

Because of the producers requests of keeping the dynamics I just went the oppisite of the norm & tried some new things.
thanks,
Ed

anonymous Sun, 12/19/2004 - 21:51

I lost the hard drive that contained the work I did so I cannot tell you exactly what I did. All of the work was done within Wavelab 4.

I remember using the C1 with sidechain to tame some of the boomier moments. I just used the Waves deesser to catch the wild esses. Then I think I used Q4 to bump up the vocal region some. Lastly, I tried the Endorphin plug (freebie) for its ability to do MS compression. I compressed the side info in order to further bring out the vocal. Then I dithered with a very little limiting with Waves L1 (exactly how I set it I do not recall).

Overall, I spent about 25 minutes on this one. I wanted to try working fast enough that I didn't go into "tunnel vision" mode and lose sight of my goal. I liked the way my work came out on this one as I had achieved the goals I set.

Once again, thank you Richard and everyone else. I learned even more. Look out world, you have a master engineer learning and growing! :wink: Now I just need to win the lottery or have someone give me a load of cash so I can upgrade my gear.

Thanks all,
Erik

mixandmaster Wed, 12/22/2004 - 21:52

I don't remember exactly what I did, nor have I had a chance to listen to the second batch of masters, as I had an extension ladder fall out from under me a few weeks back, and I broke my tailbone, severely bruised my hip and both heels. It's been hell just trying to finish/reschedule everything that needed to be done work wise - As I can't sit down, and won't for a while.

I moved my computer monitor to the floor, and have to kneel to get in the proper stereo field!!! :-? The good news is that without the chair the studio looks TONS bigger. The great news is that I suffered no back/nerve damage, and should be good as new in two months.

Anyway, as with the last project I used this to do some experimenting. I didn't like the way the lo end of the tune felt at all. It just seemed kind of wimpy, especially in light of the vocal sound being kind of wimpy (to me) as well. So I went out on a limb and used the waves multiband to expand the lo end as well as de-essing. The other bands were turned off.

Though everyone seemed to not agree with the result of the added bass, I was very satisfied that the low end I achieved was punch AND i felt that it cleaned up some of the slop that was hanging out down there.

I SHOULD have definitely MS-ed the whole thing. When John mentioned he did that I felt like a complete clown for not doing it. As I said in my analysis post, I used too much compression and not enough limiting, as I was going for a "Pre L1" sound, since (to me) this music sounded...well, "Pre L1".

It was odd that some people said that mine had a spike in the high mids, while others said it was lacking in the high mids....made me feel :? As I said, I de-essed using Waves Multiband. That's the only thing that I can think of causing any inconsistancies from system to system.

Anyway, can't remember what I exactly did, and don't have the time/energy/ability to dig up my session notes. Was a great experience, and I like I said in my "analysis" post, everyone really did an EXCELLENT job on this one.

8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-)

Cucco Mon, 02/13/2006 - 10:02

Massive Mastering wrote: I know - 14 months later, eh?

Yesterday, I was rummaging through the center console in my car and I found a disc with no writing, no label - No nuttin'.

Turned out to be this tune - I listened to it three times on the way to the PCA. Cool tune - Still infectious after all that time.

Holy sh*t John. If you haven't vacuumed your car in 14 months, I'd say it's time to trade it in, not go seat surfing... :lol:

So, when's the next group project coming? I want in this time!

TrilliumSound Mon, 02/13/2006 - 10:07

Massive Mastering wrote: I know - 14 months later, eh?

Yesterday, I was rummaging through the center console in my car and I found a disc with no writing, no label - No nuttin'.

Turned out to be this tune - I listened to it three times on the way to the PCA. Cool tune - Still infectious after all that time.

After listening, did you put the CD back in the center console? :lol:

Cucco Wed, 02/15/2006 - 09:33

Massive Mastering wrote: I haven't taken it out yet... Had the radio on today.

But I vaccum the car... It was in the center console (along with a stack).

Yeah, but not thoroughly!

Didn't your mother teach you that when you vacuum, you must MOVE things and vacuum under them. And you have to get into the nooks and crannies - such as a center console.... :lol:

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