heres the scoop, i am a newbie to the whole recording music with a computer thing, so bear with me. ok, so i recently upgraded from a 4 track cassette recorder to this: iMac w/ 1.5ghz 1GB ram and a Tascam FW 1884 that came with Cubase LE (probably too big of a jump, i know). so here is my story... with this set-up, some crappy mics (CAD drum mics for kick snare and toms), and some good borrowed mics (SM57s on guitar and bass and some really nice looking shiny Shure pencil mics for the cymbals), i recorded a local band that has several previous recordings (3 demos and one full album). when i played the recording back on my $100 monitors, the band was extremely happy, they said it sounded better then their previous recordings and it was even better than the guy who had a studio built into his house with foam walls, seperate control room, vocal booth and a gigantic mixing board, and this was just my raw recording! needless to say i was pumped cuz this was my first recording so i rushed home, set up my euipment, and began mixing. i added a lil reverb, EQed a bit, and when i thought i had it sounding pretty good i exported it, and it sounded like garbage! first of all, it was really really quiet. even when i play it back on itunes through my monitors its not as loud as it when i play it in Cubase without touching the monitors volume knob. the LEDs on my Tascam only went up about half way when playing in itunes so i decided to go into Cubase and turn the master fader all the way up so the LEDs were blowing out the roof with the top two red lights blinking and all the other lights fully lit, even when i did this when i played it back in itunes i did not get much improvement. i listened to it through several sound systems and i had to turn every one of them all the way up and it still wasnt lound enough. is there something I'm missing? something I'm doing wrong when I'm exporting? ive tried just about every combonation of settings when I'm exporting, is there some sort of software i could use to make it louder? if anyone could answer any of my questions i would be very grateful
Comments
Hard limiting, compression, more compression, more limiting, max
Hard limiting, compression, more compression, more limiting, maximizing the loudness with compression. Maybe more limiting and compression in mastering? Did I mention compression? It's all about getting every last drop of headroom before you distort the input. And to do that you need... well, read the first part again. :D Getting a mix to an accpetable loudness by modern standards takes some practice; it's like how Zorro would draw a Z on people's shirts: he'd cut the shirt but not the skin. Of course, there's always overcompression, which leads to listening fatigue, but you can worry about that after you learn how to flatten your mixes and kill dynamics. :D God bless.
Well there is probably a few things you might be missing but...
Well there is probably a few things you might be missing but...
There are a bunch of seperate issues here but I think there is one that you might address, you mix in Cubase to achieve a good mix relative to the seperate instruments and bring it up so your stereo out channel reads until just before clipping (when it turns red.) Now that is very simplistic but the general idea.
You then export into some other file system usually, that being whatever it is you have chosen, WMA, MP3, etc.
Then I am assuming you are trying to play the WMA, or MP3 on a stereo system, car stereo, Ipoo whatever. You need to boost the volume of the MP3, not the output of Cubase prior to export.
Check this forum this question just got asked two or three days ago.
I hope this is enough
space for you
"Space" LOL (I think he was running out of breath)
Here is another scoop. Use plenty of carriage returns. It is a
Here is another scoop.
Use plenty of carriage returns. It is a big button on your keyboard, may read. It may, like mine, be worn off from over use. We still talking keyboards?
Sure we are.
Moving forward; key will produce more open space between lines of text.
These carriage returns or pressing the
And everyone knows that more open space translates into better ability to READ the users message.