songblog

A.I.C.D. Part 14

I actually finish something!

After yet even more work, I am happy to say that I have finally finished the mastering on my CD.
It seems as if every stage is more difficult than the last, and only time and feeback, if I get any, will tell if I have done the job well. Certainly I have learned a lot of things along the way:
As you have read everyplace, it’s a great idea not to try and master too many things at one time. I wasted a lot of time on a couple of days thinking that I had the one preset that would work with every song. This might be true if you only wrote one style of music and used the exact same instrumentation for everything………nah, probably not even then.
In my case, my songs are all different from each other. Different synths, drums, basses and wind instruments plus my guitar – there was no way I could master them all with one mega-preset in Ozone.
As I mentioned earlier, I did take a sampling of the eq of a commercial CD and used the matching feature in Ozone to put a basic eq on each track.
From there everything was different for each song. I found that, as Rick Snoman in the Dance Music Manual says, you have to do mastering quickly so that your ears don’t get used to the sound. What I ended up doing was building on each Ozone preset the tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, mostly with the loudness and multiband dynamics and multiband harmonic exciter.
I made a project in Sonar and had tracks for each un-mastered song, and then a track below each song with the mastered version, once I had it.
In some cases, I had to make many, many changes and so I would 1) save the preset in Ozone and 2) dump different versions so that I could easily hear the difference.
This was a great help to me as the process moved along. Each day I would dump the complete CD to a rewritable disk, listen to it on my portable CD player and then on my headphones at work and my crappy computer speakers at work.
What I found was that while I could not hear significant differences in overall volume from track to track on my studio speakers, the much poorer quality of the other devices I listened on made the differences quite apparent. This got pretty frustrating at times, when I thought I had it all done and bam, found out that some of the songs just didn’t cut it compared with the others.
That is fine however, since it would have been stupid to spend so much time in the writing and mixing of these songs to give up right then.
In some cases I had to go back to the actual mix to add or usually subtract something using eq, or on some of the tracks cutting a part of the stereo mix wav boosting a portion of the file. In one song, I dropped out a synth part during part of a verse, and the entire song took on a better, clearer sound. Its difficult, but its always better to cut parts of a song than add them; it always seems to make everything much more focused, especially if you are like me and are melody mad. Restrain yourself!
One last test was to hear the CD on my regular stereo, and for the first time ever I was able to listen to my own stuff in my living room and not cringe at the results. That was the final, final test and it passed. How cool is that!
Now I can move onto the last things, which are getting the artwork complete and getting it pressed, and then selling a million copies. Well, probably not that last part. I would be quite happy just to sell enough to make back my costs, which are not great, but if I can then I can look forward to making my next CD, and starting to work with my friend Jeff on our new project.
Another benefit of this is that now I can start learning some of the new tools, like Project 5 and Reaktor 5, that I have had to put off until I finish the CD. Exciting stuff!
And last but not least, to perhaps finally get these finished songs dumped into my XL7, and start practicing to perform. Isn’t that what I have been trying to do, all these years sitting in the studio, trying to get back on stage? YEAH!