Mixing / Mastering music

[Dagan]

I figured that I would start a thread on this specifically. There are many plugins that folks use, and everyone seems to have wildly various results.

I'm currently using the Master Plan plugin for "mastering" overall. I like it better than the Landr plugin. I get to make changes on the front end, rather than selecting a preset and waiting for the program to get done before hearing anything at all.

Soundly Shape It is my favorite mixing tool only, at the moment I've created presets of my own with it - one for bass, one for rhythm guitars, one for lead guitars, one for vocals and even one for synth use.

Anyone else around here into all of this?

 

[Crabcore]

Oh, hehehe, how much time do you have...?

Most of my mastering chain just consists of a custom multiband limiter and clipmax, possibly with a side of TDR Nova (dynamic EQ). Labels hate me for it ("waah, it's clipping!") but I swear to god, this is the best way to get a few extra DB of headroom without having to use something like OTT or gullfoss and thus compromise the heck out of the mix.

With that said, mastering your own work is kind of an oxymoron -- if you like the mix, what's there to change? Maybe that's best-suited for someone else entirely*. If you don't like the mix, there's a 99.9% (my stupid estimate) that you're just overproducing or don't know exactly what your compressors or EQs are trying to achieve. Most of the time, a little bit of dry / wet (parallel) modulation is in order to pump the breaks on it a little.

* = I also wouldn't outsource to AI just for the fact that most of it is either (assumed) heavy multiband and / or spectral processing, both of which are nearly-destined to ruin a mix entirely. Sure, the poison is in the dose, but from what I've heard it's just complete overkill for the job.

Also if you get me started on sound design, well, you'll never hear the end of it . My favorite plugins are as deep as the ocean, and I think I've made something like 100 commercial sample packs over the past 5 years. A little insane? Absolutely, but I love this stuff so much.

 

[Dagan]

Definitely talk away. I'm full on learning in regards to my music per all of this. For cinematic audio I create (foley fx), it's simple, easy, done and done. No issues. With music, I have fallen down the rabbit hole and am admittedly getting overwhelmed.

I do agree that my mixes were favorable and made me happy, but then I found out that "mastering" options made them louder and in certain minute ways, just a bit fuller...somehow under said hoods. I may not ever understand it fully, either. I'll admit that up front. I want to. I'm reading / listening to what I can, all the while, I'm catching contradictions and trying to weed out the BS.

I'll read anything folks post about this, especially from personal experiences of trial and error, too.

 

[fattymeatysardine]

I do not master music, I am primarily a listener. Listening to an album after the 2000s is a complete dice roll for me. Modern mastering has made music so loud that it fatigues me after the first song.

 

[Judge]

I do not master music, I am primarily a listener. Listening to an album after the 2000s is a complete dice roll for me. Modern mastering has made music so loud that it fatigues me after the first song.

That's what I love about applications like Audacity. That if you don't like how a song was mastered, you can change it to a certain extent. Particularly when it comes to amplifying or reducing sound, either incrementally or over an entire piece of music.

Though I've learned to refrain from attempting to edit analogue vinyl record recordings. When it comes to eliminating all the audio "artifacts" vinyl can make. Ticks, pops, hiss....etc. A bit too tedious at times...

 

[Dagan]

I specifically use Audacity, too. I'm told to move to Reaper over and over again, but I'm also told that it's best to stick to what you know and understand best - there's no "best" DAW, per se. I do want options that Audacity doesn't have, still, but they are minor things probably coming in this year's later, big upgrade. It uses plug ins without issue. It records straight from my modeler, my mics, my midi - I don't have major gripes. I started using it about ten years ago when I did film review podcasts, and all I had was a Blue Yeti set up.

Again, though, I'm open to suggestions.

 

[Dagan]

I do not master music, I am primarily a listener. Listening to an album after the 2000s is a complete dice roll for me. Modern mastering has made music so loud that it fatigues me after the first song.

I'm a big fan of watching Glenn Fricker on youtube, and I'm thinking that his same evidence of speaker cabinet quality in classic-to-modern amps is directly relatable to the quality of speakers we get in our cars and such these days. I feel like mixing and mastering has evolved together in that rather "louder" tandem we have gotten.

 

[fattymeatysardine]

I'm a big fan of watching Glenn Fricker on youtube, and I'm thinking that his same evidence of speaker cabinet quality in classic-to-modern amps is directly relatable to the quality of speakers we get in our cars and such these days. I feel like mixing and mastering has evolved together in that rather "louder" tandem we have gotten.

I don't know much about guitar amps so I assume you're saying that the amps have gotten louder over the years. Is that right?

 

[Dagan]

Glenn does speaker tests a lot and shows the evidence in the sound waves. Yeah, so many speakers to amps have crazy frequency ranges, coupled with the ones that have gotten popular, I feel like the speakers we listen to everything on have been designed in ways to either work well....or even force folks to use other speakers to sound better. All of it being a full blown industry, nothing would surprise me.

 

[fattymeatysardine]

I don't think that's the case. Besides the Harman Target Curve, I have not noticed a specific pattern in frequency responses here in the headphone world I live in. Also, good audio has gotten A LOT cheaper and accessible over the past decade. When I started trying headphones 8 years ago, all big name headphones were awful and the best under $100 were KOSS and SHP9500. Now, big brands like Apple have the new Airpods, which really surprised me when I heard them, and all of these massdrop headphones like 6xx and HExx set the bar high for under $200.

I could've just simplified this to: Popular brand makes decent audio now. Good audio accessible to masses.

 

[Crabcore]

I'm reading / listening to what I can, all the while, I'm catching contradictions and trying to weed out the BS.

I'll read anything folks post about this, especially from personal experiences of trial and error, too.

TBH, there are a lot of them. This is mostly because there isn't a hard and fast 'right way' to really do anything artistic -- even while adhering to a certain amount of lufs or dynamic range reduction, it really boils down to taste and what you actually like at the end of the day. Most of the pros are working more from the gut than the brain, instinctively giving select bands a +1 dB / -1 dB shift and often resting their ears for a while and coming back to it. The tools don't even have to be that fancy, as we've probably all heard a great master created on a potato with a stock EQ and a terrible one created with thousands of dollars worth of hardware.

The worst thing anyone can do is overengineer (imo), so if it's mostly transparent and sounds good to you, it's probably a good master. Some people are known for coloring harder outside the lines than others, and I think that's where a lot of the crazy / awesomeness comes from. Selectively naming a rule and deciding to break it can really give your work a unique flavor. It's also wise to only put stock in people whose music you actually respect, otherwise it's just a bunch of 'here's how I do it' from someone who's been at it for like 2 months and thinks they've seen it all.

I won't clog this thread up with sound design stuff (which is very subjective and highly creative in comparison), but I'll definitely post in a thread if there ever is one

 

[Crabcore]

Though I've learned to refrain from attempting to edit analogue vinyl record recordings. When it comes to eliminating all the audio "artifacts" vinyl can make. Ticks, pops, hiss....etc. A bit too tedious at times...

They've got some good plugins for stuff like this. Izotope Rx will pretty much do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so you don't have to micro-edit. The downside? They're always a bit expensive.

Audio editing is definitely another crazy rabbit hole. Audacity really shines with this, especially due to batch / macro processing. I send everything (sample pack-wise) I make through a custom macro normalizer because it saves so much time

Also, lot of people still use Audacity's Paulstretch!