Sonar and HarBal

Hey,

I just purchased a copy of HarBal and took it for a spin last night and it seems pretty cool.

I applied it to a mix I've just completed.

I'm curious as to what others' methods are for using HarBal along with Sonar.

What I did:

I determined that the song I was working on was similar to John Mayer's "Waiting on The World To Change" so I used it as me reference track.

In Sonar, I did a Bounce to Tracks of my mix without any final limiting or EQ. The peaks were around -6dB.

I cut and pasted this mix into a new Sonar project and reduced the bit rate from 24 to 16 and applied dithering.

Then I exported this as a 16 bit wav file and loaded it into HarBal.

Then I loaded in the John Mayer song as the reference track.

I only used the RMS waveform in HarBal and tweaked it to match the reference track. This sounded pretty good, but I made some other adjustments by ear. I then applied about 5dB of limiting using HarBal's limiter. Then I exported the HarBal'd wave file and I was done.

I'm pretty impressed. It made a significant improvement to my mix. Although I really wasn't confident that I was using it correctly.

One thing I wonder is if I should make my mix (Pre-HarBal) as loud as possible without clipping before loading it into HarBal. The reason for this is because I had to increase the EQ settings in HarBal approximately 6dB across the entire spectrum. If I started out with a hotter mix, I wonder if this would be reduced. I'll have to experiment.

Anyway, it would be nice to hear how others are using HarBal and their likes and dislikes with the program.

Thanks!

The great thing about Har-Bal is that it automatically adjusts levels so that you don't have to worry about the overall level going up or down while you tweak the EQ. This makes a huge difference when you're A/Bing the EQ changes.

When I'm using Har-Bal, I position the mouse over the EQ bypass button, close my eyes and toggle the button many times, intentionally losing track of whether it's in or out. After a while I settle on which one sounds better, open my eyes and see if the EQ is in or out.

Often, I cannot distinguish one from the other, the applied EQ is just too subtle. But I take that as goodness, since it means I've done a good job in the mix.

The better I get at mixing, the less often Har-Bal ends up making a significant difference. Nowadays, 90% of the time I elect not to make any alterations. The other 10% of the time, I go back into the SONAR project and tweak the EQ there rather than doing it via Har-Bal.

Bit-flipper +1 on that.

I think Har-Bal is a fantastic sonic tool and educational tool. If you find yourself having to make huge moves in Har-Bal, go back to the project and fix it.

Helps you learn to trust your ears. I am not where I want to be 100%, but getting much closer thanks to Har-bal

jr

No. Ozone is linear-phase like Har-Bal, but it does not automatically compensate for equalization.