The new site on my own hosting is now over at www.puretonemastering.net . I’ll leave this one up a while, to catch any passers by, but the new site has no nasty external audio links etc. I’m also planning to expand on the tuition side of things, so be sure to keep checking back.

Thanks

Tone

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed my mini breakdown on friday night . I thought i had better give some kind of explanation. So here goes….

I was checking my new followers, and came across some kind of audio based referal service. So i clicked on the “mastering” heading (well i’m going to aren’t i ). In there, i see so called mastering services hawking their wares for £25 a track. Now we all know this goes on, and normally i couldn’t care less, but on this occasion it got to me. It was maybe down to the fact i had just handed over PS010 to public spaces, which i have been working on for a few weeks between jobs. Let me explain…I come from a rock based background…guitars bass and drums(vocals optional :p), so the public spaces compilation was quite a different deal for me. However…when i handed that over, a small part of me went with it.

I’ve said before in my blogs etc, mastering is the very first thing in my life, that i have wanted badly enough to actually keep going at, and anyone reading who has fought through the same thing knows how damn hard it can be. So many facets, so many tools… so many setbacks!. I certainly never thought about getting rich out of it, i invested 2 years of my life and all the money i had left into trying to make it happen.

So….with my fury at reading about cheap “mastering” , i tweeted

“people are mastering for £25 per track. i cant force myself to knock “shit” out that fast. so what am i gonna learn to do next “…..

It may have a smiley face on it, but dont be fooled, for some  reason, the bottom had just fallen out of my sad little world!!. Then, a follower  who i dont think i’ve ever spoken with before replied with “45 minutes a song is too fast? That’s a pretty good living, no? There’s always investment banking…“  . i have no idea if the guy was serious, but either way, it was a wake up call to me, that as with every other god forsaken business on the earth… there are too many people doing the wrong job! .

I then went on to tweet something along the lines of…”i’ve wasted my time learning this stuff”, to which all my twitter mates started asking what was wrong and trying to boost me back up etc, and thanks guys!!, the net may have many bad sides to it, but through it, i’ve met many like minded intelligent people. I could only dream of finding such friends in the cold reality of the semi caveman society we now live in.

So…back to the point. Is it just another job?. I know I haven’t  been doing it long compared to some, but long enough that its no longer a glorified hobby. My approach is still the same….it gets my very best, and sometimes, even when the material isn’t my usual listening style etc, i get a feel for it, get inside it, to be able to make that material all I possibly can.Trust me when i say, theres always something i’m not happy with in a finish, something i couldn’t quite fix…or some trade off in sound somewhere. I actually blame myself for not being able to fix mix mistakes!

All i want, is to replace someone that doesn’t deserve that seat, in front of the great monitors etc. I’m actually worried about what i will go onto, if i cant manage to make this work. Watching a comedy panel show the other night, someone made a comment about the moon landing astronauts, how everything after that must seem very pale/average.

After 25 years of doing complete passionless rubbish, just to put bread on the table for another day of monotony, and also discovering that i’m only about 76pence in the pound,  i’ve had a small taste of that moon landing. There wont be any going back, one way or another.

Thanks for reading my sad little heart felt rant. I thought i’d better explain

Tone

Just to let you all know, this week I was invited to write a weekly Audio article for Public Spaces Netlabel (@publicspaceslab /    http://lab.pubspaces.com) . I’m pretty excited about this, as I do seem to be heading down the writing road as well as hands on doing the stuff (I’ll never stop that   ). Seems like a great opportunity to hand out some info that may help readers polish their sound skills, and become more effective in today’s competitive and ever changing music industry.

Now I just have to work out some stuff to waffle about

Check out their website, and keep watching for upcoming posts.

Later people

Tone

so, whats the story behind this one? . i’ve mentioned a few times, that Donald Fagens”the nightfly” is one of my favourite albums, material/production and mastering. its very slightly bass light around 80-120 (ish), but the sub detail, and indeed the whole thing is so beautiful i dont really notice. anyway….i wrongly presumed it was his only solo album, until my lass surprised me with “kamakiriad” on my 40th birthday. considering it was recorded about 10 years later, i expected something at least as good as nightfly.

unfortunately, fagen decided to overlook the previously fantastic Gary Katz and go with a different producer, his Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker, a superb writer and player. i can actually see what fagen was trying to do with this album. the whole essence of the writing , and the story behind it Read Here did beg a slightly different finish. its just a shame it went slightly wide of the mark.

so what are my issues with the finish of this album??

I dont care for meters too much, they have a limited use, but the peak analysis pic shows some of whats going on. the 60hz area actually gets a bit more violent, but i was in a rush, so didnt run it long enough to show up….DOH!  . but that peak at 98 is the serious offender. its not actually the whole track creating it, its a 2db overshoot in the bass guitar at 98 and 135ish(i think, come on…its 2 days back i did this   )   . anyway, its making the whole thing sound like bass karaoke, creating a separation between the bass and the rest of the instruments etc, and stealing all the nice low end from everything and creating harsh upper mids. add to this the fact the under 60 is very inconsistant and boisterous its a bit of a frankenstein’s monster.

so, having put the album on a few times, loving the songs and playing, but craving a smoother finish i decided to do my own remaster of it. “remastering an album from a great name like Fagen Tone??!!!” , yeah!. luckily, this album is very pre loudness war, “countermoon” only averages -21 db rms, so there is enough room for me to work.

how spikey is this!!!

as you can see, there are some severe spikes in the waveform, mainly coming from the snare (the non limited attack through the compressor). i should have drawn these out in the editor, but its a long process, and the multiband comp dealt with them pretty well. but i may well go back over it when i have a bit more time.

The Audio

Here are the before and after tracks. there has been a slight trade off with vocal level, as they were strongly relying on overshoots at between 1-4k , but still clearly audible, and considering the smooth/clear overall finish, a much more listenable song…..  exactly what i intended. i havent brought the RMS volume  up by much, this kind of material can lose its feel very easily, for the sake of a few db.

Before

After

Revised (latest tweaked output, slightly better vocal clarity using a couple of tricks)

thanks for reading people

Tone

many of you (the 2 people reading)will have heard me mention “the curve”. in this article, inspired by some of my synesthesis (images), i will try to expand on exactly what it is, and how its affected in so many ways.

i’ll try not to sound like a computer, but thats hard when talking about this stuff.

to get the best out of your sound skills, you really need a firm grasp of how fluid and delicate the tonal curve is. the idea that a mastering engineer can push and pull the sound around into any shape they please is quite common and quite wrong. i was also guilty of holding that opinion before being able to do it. but there really is only so far you can bend it out of its natural shape before it falls apart. there are also many ways to damage it with various dynamics tools etc. often in ways that are less obvious than just setting the ratio too high on the compressor. i’ll cover some of these pitfalls to hopefully keep you from running round in circles in future.

Bumps and holes

“whats he on about now??” . thats the vision i get of the tonal curve. so…you’ve mixed your track, been as careful as possible to remove frequency overlaps, and compressed everything that needs it. but its still not that beautiful even clear/constant finish that your fav albums offer. why?? ….mainly…bumps and holes!!. i’ll explain.

if you are conscious of it or not, the ear and brain hate holes in the curve. the greatest sounding albums are full from 20hz to 20k (roughly). too many bumps, and clarity is lost momentarily in other freq areas. this can even be a 14k spike in the hi hat knocking out the kick…and i know that sounds crazy. too many holes, and instruments dont ring right. what i mean is, lets say there is too little at 725hz . when the otherwise beautifully recorded acoustic guitar strums, there is a tiny delay/lack of continuity in the chord/note as it passes through the lacking area (725hz). now multiply that x however many instruments etc, and how ever many bumps and holes in the spectrum (tonal…not the old computer from the 80′s lol). thats where the jumpy unbalanced sound happens.

How do we fix it??

ideally most things should be fixed in mixing. but dont trim/fill too much. its essential to leave some fat to trim and holes to fill for the mastering engineer, or you will suck the life from your material.

the first thing everyone will jump to for a fix, is compression. i did too, and was very bemused when it didnt fix everything. even multiband compression, as powerful as it is in the right hands, will not fill all the holes/flatten the bumps. it will go some way to smoothing out and bringing some clarity to each band/freq range with the right settings, but its only part of the whole process. dont even attempt to use one until you can fully read the curve. it can be a seriously destructive tool!!.

Straightening the wire

this is where my work gets harder…trying to explain what i’m on about. as i mentioned earlier, the curve is a fluid thing. “every action, has an equal and opposite reaction”. audio work is a classic example of this rule. your tracks sounding great, the low end is prominent as it should be. and then you decide you want a bit more at 9k. but add slightly too much at 9k or any other frequency, and the bass detail you had has gone. let me explain…..

the ear has a natural preferred curve. sure…it varies slightly per person, but not by much. so the ideal tonal balance of recorded material should match that curve. its called the “A weighted” curve. looks like this

the mastering engineers job, is to gently nudge the material into that “A” Curve. note the word “gently”. you may be making a 2.01 db cut at 400hz, but its the .01 that makes the sound. you cant just round the cut off to 2.0 db, as there will still be slightly too much at 400hz. and if you make it 2.02db you just made a slight hole, a tiny delay. so you almost fixed nothing!! . if your mastering eq plugin only goes to .1 increments.. bin it!!. you wont quite get that beautiful constant sound with it. and if it does, but jumps in increments, get close and dial in the number. so the freq isnt too much or too little, “nudging the curve”.recently my hearing became even more acute, so i hear this slight mistake in my own work from the last few months.

Plot the points, then adjust to suit

so….you have slightly too much at 400hz, and a hole at 450hz. cut the 400,then boost at 450, but one has an effect on the other, so there is no “set and forget”. you could also then find, that a tiny cut or boost is required 425hz ish. it really depends how tight you want the finish (i’m one picky @~#’#@, so i use a lot of eq).

i never master a track in one day.its better to go back over eq choices with fresh ears the next day. plot and adjust day1, check and tweak the next. some of the material i work on is quite out of shape, and this can “print” on your ears. i’ve had days when a spike at 20k has been hitting my ears hard for a while. then immediately after, listening to a well produced cd will sound dull. now imagine the mistake you could make by working on another song with the “printed ears”. the level 42 stuff is a classic example. i had to peck away at this for days. the imbalance was so bad, that after only a short while, i had gone deaf to certain freq’s, until the next day.

“so what are the other things that damage the curve?”

yeh, as i mentioned earlier. even once you’ve fixed the eq balance, there are still ways to undo your good work. heres a list of things to check, before you jump back on the eq.

release times in compressors and limiters is a big one. in fact every damn control in almost every plugin/tool can do damage. wrong threshold..attack times, ratio’s….crossovers. just about everything. “hmmm thanks tone…very bloody helpful!!” . i know, and i’m sorry, but its the facts! . all of these settings are curve controls. get this….the very first thing i do with my multiband comp is set the crossovers. every setting is at zero. so how do i set them…..by their effect on ….sorry…gotta use the word again  the curve. in fact, with all the settings still at zero, but with the correct crossovers, the sound is more steady. the effect of the x-overs at the right freq’s actually has a positive effect….crazy! . then when i move on to all the other settings…lets say the threshold, am i listening to where he compression sets in? ……nope. i’m listening to where the compression works, but doesn’t pinch the curve. same for every other setting in every other tool. this is where the fluidity of the balance becomes a pain. for the best results, you need to maintain a consistent level into every threshold. also, writing automation in for limiter release times is essential. if some of the more experienced M E’s etc are reading this, they may think i’m mad. i’m not used to getting well recorded/mixed material. so i have to get creative to make the stuff sit alongside commercial audio as best as possible.

before i could use multiband comp…no…before i could read the whole curve properly, i would solo the band i was working on (band 2, 100-800hz for example) this is never going to work. if your soloing anything in mastering…..your not ready for the tools!! . i would actually avoid some of the better plugins, as they didnt have solo’s on them. one of the plugins i avoided has since blown my mind since i can hear exactly what its doing.

“whats your point tone??” if your agonising over comp attack, or any of the other controls…your missing the point. i’m certainly not saying give up. but keep an open mind, know your monitoring well. keep pushing high quality cd’s through them to give yourself a tonal template.

well…i cant think of anything else to write just now. apologies if this isnt written too well, and for sounding like a total narcissist with all the i’s and me’s. but i can only speak from my own experience. despite how i write, and the image some may have of me,  i actually doubt myself plenty. nearly given all this up lots of times recently and applied to work in mcdonalds. luckily i have a very encouraging lady, who refuses to let me drop something i seem to have some amount of ability at.

thanks for reading (all 2 of you) and please please comment or ask questions

Tone

A very popular subject right now. i’ll try to put my own points to the already OLD debate.

what is it?,how does it happen?,whats wrong with it?

well…we cant go above 0db on a cd, it just distorts over that, so the way we make thing seem louder is by cheating with some audio tools. mainly compressors and limiters. this has  been the case for quite some years, and it used to work. but some things have happened…..its being abused….and some of the people doing it arent very good at it!!.

i think part of the reason loudness became an issue, was when tape was pushed out of the scene. we used to have the multitrack machine, plus the mix down to tape. thats a lot of saturation along the way. it certainly didnt create recordings at -8db rms , but helped to keep everything audible throughout a song. digital offers none of that.

Tech stuff

“i always normalize my audio to 0 db, why isnt it as loud as commercial stuff?”

this will make some of you smile, but the fact is, plenty of people dont know. the 0db is a peak level, which we cant exceed. to make the track louder, we need to keep the peak level as high and as constant as possible. This is measured in RMS…. root mean square(yeh, that dont mean much).

why are we hearing so much about it now?

over squashed material has pretty much been kept quiet (sorry, no pun intended)until some huge blunders brought it to everyones attention recently. the metallica “death magnetic” fiasco (brought to my attention and many others via fellow Mastering Engineer  ian shepherd) never should have happened. if nobody heard that level of sonic destruction before it hit cd, then a few people are in the wrong job, and i’m gonna do just fine in the audio game . after all…we’re not talking about someone mixing death magnetic in an acoustically untreated room in front of some reasonably priced monitors. That cockup took a lot of money to make!!

which brings me to my next item…..producers

i’m gonna get this out the way fast….the music game is all about money, so their job is to shape the audio material into something that will sell. the major percentage of listeners cant even hear the difference between poor mp3 or cd quality these days anyhow. as long as its cheap or preferably free….they dont care. so…thats that then??…..NO!! .

the word “producer” seems to have many meanings today. some bloke raps over an old popular record….he’s a producer?. another says “lets put a triangle in there” ,he’s a producer?. another says “lets squash that some more”, he’s a producer? . there doesnt seem to be any real definition for the word anymore. For the record, a Producer to me, is Bob Rock, Gary Katz,Michael Brauer, a new fav.. Mutt Lange(Nickelbacks “Dark Horse” is an awesome rock album), and of course Trevor Horn.  there are loads more greats of course, but this is my memorable hit list.

one of my all time favourites, Donald Fagens 1982  “The Nightfly” is a highly lamented album, well produced by Gary Katz. this album will be in many audio geeks collections

side note its slightly light around 80-120 hz ish, but the sub detail is so good that you hardly notice.

But then check his 1993 “Kamakiriad”. this was produced by Walter Becker, the superb writer and guitarist from steely dan. this album, although containing some good tunes, is full of mistakes. its harsh in the mid/upper mids, the low end is thin, and the mastering engineer clipped a freq 50hz ish which makes it a bit buzzy. there is even distortion in a few sections (not sure what stage this happened at though). i know every album cant sound exactly the same, but changing production on this was a mistake….sorry walter

i dont think anyone should have the final say on the sound of an album unless they have THE BEST HEARING.

Examples

HOW LOUD BEN!!!

squashed amy

Metallica's "enter sandman" More realistic dynamics

The examples above show amy winehouse and ben folds both averaging -9dbrms and peaking at -5. enter sandman averaged -15 and peaked at -9. it could push slightly harder, but this is not a “quiet” track by any means.

one artist i must applaud, is Ben Folds. His album “way to normal” was mixed by a guy i consider the best mix engineer in the world….Michael Brauer. it should have been an instant ear pleaser. however…i can only presume it was fold’s producer Dennis Herring, who said “louder”, and managed to create an album i didnt even hear all the way through. it was that bad, that the album i had been waiting for got binned !!. i recently asked Brauer if he had anything to do with the crushing (already knowing his style too well to think he did), to which he replied  he was” a bit pissed off with the mastered job, but the Mastering Engineer was under instructions”. Ben listened to what his fans said, and went back and remixed/mastered it. so i bought it again.

this will make me sound very fickle, but although its a great album, both in writing and sound, it doesnt have what his early albums had. “but tone…you love sound, and the early material wasnt as well recorded”…..very true! , however, if you get the chance, give his self titled album a listen. there is just so much atmosphere in those songs, that i can quite easily forget the recording quality and disappear into the very room they were playing in….and thats a true recording to me.

The Eagles “Long road out of eden” . a long awaited album. although not being over loud, the sound of this album was sterile. new valves needed in some of the outboard possibly.

so yeh…i’m slightly off topic, but am i? . loudness is just one of the issues currently being missed in the quality control department of the audio world. but why? . is it because most of the target audience have tinny little pc speakers. or the fact most of them will convert down to 128kbps mp3 and think its fine. is it because budgets are being cut, and job turnaround has to be quicker?.whatever it is, i dont like it.

Summing up

a song has an optimum level, push it further, and you just hear its crap….LOUD!!

its going to take some bold moves from major artists to start to fix this problem. but somehow people need reminding how fantastic a well produced cd sounds.

Not the best structured read, just the way my brain seems to spew information. but Thanks for reading

Tone

for anyone reading for the first time, go check my other level 42 posts, where i explain where the source cassette came from for the gig etc.

next track on the cassette (remember those?) is “sandstorm”. the engineer seems to have got his act together at this stage. as far as automated EQ goes, i’ve only had to ride slightly at 7.5k . i also spent a while going over every freq and Q. but this time closing my eyes finding the sweetspots. i dont pretend to know exactly what goes on in eq work, i can only trust my ears. i find, if i’m looking at the screen while setting a Q width, i’ll try to avoid using low (wide) numbers. we’re told “0.7 is closest to human hearing”, but in mastering that seems to bear no significance (please write a comment if you can expand on some theory).

so anyway….some of them down low came out at 0.55 . and i previously had them at 0.65 for instance. the low freq curve is very influential on the total sound. mistakes higher up may lose slight clarity, but mess them up down low and it goes to crap. i had also clipped freq’s higher up, which made the already nasty sounding hats and cymbals sound even worse.   i had set the multiband comp ratios slightly high and thresholds slightly low(tiny amounts). so correcting these items made a big difference. i’m sure there have been a couple of people through here with analytical hearing who noticed on the previous songs. anyway, those mistakes wont be made again. as far as eq and comp goes, i think i’m now close to pushing the limits of my gear.

i keep getting a visual of how the mb comp affects the curve. while adjusting any of the settings, its like i see  the waveform, and while the setting is wrong, i see it slightly offset, not continuous. then as i hit the sweetspot it joins up and thats where the clarity is. one continuous curve through all 5 of the mb comps bands.  as i’ve said before, i dont see multiband compression as a creative tool, its to fix the curve. start trying to get fancy with one of the freq bands and you create a confusing sound. i’m not 100% sure how far you can push things before the average joe can hear it, but i dont do things in mastering that i dont like myself. i’ll no doubt change my mind before starving to death

The Audio

The mastered version does sound slightly pushed in areas. but this is from the in house compression at the gig. mainly audible in the snare. i doubt you will notice this in the source, as there are so many covering issues.

Heres the source (before) file  DOWNLOAD

And heres my version  DOWNLOAD

I’m re tweaking this. some new techniques i’ve worked on lately should make this kick a bit . Will re post

Thanks for reading people. and please feel free to leave comments or ask me some questions.

Tone

Hi to anyone reading. well…its been a good day. got this done and a couple of other bits too.

as promised, here are a couple of working screen caps.

unique eq issue

the pic above shows the automation i had to write in to reverse the strange 4 band eq sweep. as mentioned before, i tried to plot start and end freq’s., but it ran out of sync for some reason. so i wrote it in on the fly. thats 12 complete runs through the track following and correcting the freq, cut and Q .my hand was nearly falling off after that   . if you never read about this elsewhere on the blog, heres the deal…. 2 bands run slowly up through the song, and 2 run down and up a few times. the only thing i can think it might be, is some kind of flanger type things on the mixing console. except with width and delay turned off or something. shout if you have any clue

Circled section

i had to use 2 bands for one of the down and up sweeps. it went from 800 down to 20 hz, and the eq wouldnt stretch that far. the part in the circle is where they crossover. inaudible on the mix too

EQ

some dots and mad curves and stuff

EQ

This isnt all the project eq, theres a couple of other automated eq’s for changing sections too.

Dynamics

a little smoothing pre limiter

The source material wasnt massively dynamic, but it was a bit jumpy in different freq ranges. so i  used multiband compression to stop parts stomping over others, and balance the sound in general. then wideband comp to bring the rms up to a workable level. The model shown is purely to smooth the signal before it hits the limiter. note the low ratio. i have a fav compressor that is so good it pokes fun at all the others. so although that will get used on nearly every track, i still try to work some character in with a different model here and there.

Audio clips

“enough of the talk Tone….give us the goods!!”

ok as promised…before and after examples. please note….i hate mp3, but its still the most accepted format (WHY???!!!) . sorry if jazz isnt your thing. but this is some smooth stuff. i love the amount of clarity thats been brought back to the upright bass solo.

Source file (before)

My Master (well…temp master, nothings ever good enough for me   )

comments welcome….but keep in mind, its a strange little recording, even with the issues removed. it also came from a .wma file…not the best compression in the world . theres also a strange glitch 40 ish secs in. i couldnt match it with eq, a tape issue i think.

thanks for reading

Tone

might get this posted tomorrow. i never jump straight in and post same day, always a check with fresh ears after resetting with plenty of commercial tunes. but lately, finding my work is rarely far off . when i heard M E’s say they didnt use reference material while mastering, i thought that sounded mad. but since i figured how to read the total curve i dont use it either.

this recording should yield a good finish. the static eq job on it isnt too far off. but the mad 4 band sweeping eq lift totally blurs the whole sound. so until you get past that, its hard to tell. mastering really is one issue at a time.

onwards!!!

Tone

update 26-05-09

rain stopped play yesterday. had a massive storm. we usually get small breaks in the juice, and my ups system has failed (yet another thing). so will carry on today. i’ve been taking screen shots of different bits while working, to give a better idea of what i’m upto.

will have stuff on here later. thanks for reading people

Tone