I haven’t had much chance to work on the masters, but what I have done has been productive.
What I am realizing is that mastering itself can highlight many problems on the basic mix, that I wasn’t aware of. Its interesting to me how differently I think of these songs when they are just stereo wav files, as opposed to the project files will all the tracks. Maybe its partially visual: I am not looking at all the sliders and virtual mixer, etc etc in Sonar, but just this little wave form.
In any event, I hear things differently than when inside the project file.
What this has lead to is having to go back and adjust things within the project. For instance, in one my songs there is a lot of midrange instruments, and it can make things muddy. I realized the ‘mud’ was coming from this marimba/vibraphone patch that I was using, that is quite integral to the sound of the piece.
I thought of eq’ing it, but that didn’t work, since there was a certain amount of fuzz that is part of the sound. My next thought was to simply replace the sound with more a more traditional vibraphone sample. I called up Kontakt and grabbed a vibe patch from a sample CD. It was good, but not quite was I was looking for, although it is always difficult when you are not working in the context of the material.
I dropped into the song, keying it off the original midi notes, and muting the original instrument. That was better, in that it cut off the muddiness, but it lost some of the character I was looking for. Just for the heck of it, I unmated the original part and – bam! – the sound I was looking for.
I did have to change the volume on both parts, so that the fuzzy original sound was down in the mix, and I panned both parts together so there would be no problem with taking too much of the mix up. It really sounds good now, makes all the difference in the world.
On other songs, using advice from books I have, I have been carving out specific frequency ranges on certain instruments. Also changing the pan has a great positive effect in some cases.
Another cause of problems has been the relative volume and sound between the different pieces of music for the CD. One of my kinks is that I don’t use the same instrumentation, or at least not much of it, in the different songs. This makes mixing and mastering much more difficult, since one song may have screaming guitars and the next just synth sounds.
As an example, the song that I think will start the CD is without question the loudest and busiest arrangement of the bunch: vocals, several guitars, lots of drums and tons of synths. Oh yeah, and background vocals too.
I have working like crazy on this one. It has a pulsing synth bassline that runs thru the whole thing, as well as a second bassline on parts of it too. Sure, it sounds big and full, but again, it may just be too big for its own good.
A couple of things moved me in the right direction: I did some eq carving on the synth bassline. I also reduced, several times, the volume of this repeating bass. What is helping more is reducing the gain even more where the bass is running under the vocals, and competing for with space the rhythm guitar this helps. Still, I think it may require even more cutting: one of the hardest things to do is get rid of a part of a composed piece of music. I don’t think I will bag the bassline totally, but may cut it out when the guitar starts. There actually can be too much of a good thing. I know for a certainty that the song I plan to have on the CD after it has much more clarity, due to the reduced number of parts on the song, and a different structure.
And so it goes: one idea I have been working with: I grabbed the eq for a commercially released CD, and matched it in Ozone, sort of as a starting point for mixing. I have then been building up on this for my first preset.
After that, I have based my presets around this eq and subsequent additions to Ozone, like the loudness maximizer, harmonic enhancer, and all the rest. I know this may not be the best way to do things, but its not like all the presets will be the same at all, just a bit of commonality to begin with. This isn’t nearly done yet, and all I have been checking the mixes on are the junk speakers at work, or even worse headphones, so I will need to do the car stereo thing at some point.
Honestly, its still very confusing and most difficult to try and get these songs sounding like they are at least somewhat as good as a commercial CD, but hey, I don’t have a choice!