Hello again, guys. There are tons of posts and ideas here I'd like to reply to but I am currently in a flurry of meatworld stuff but as I wait for offices run by boring people to open again so I continue doing boring but important (to me) stuff I want to just make a quick comment on Clint's post...
clintmartin
This morning I took a troublesome mix and did what Beepster did. I took everything off...Eq's, comps, tape sims, PC modules, whatever extra other than the recordings itself. (or themselves) Well guess what? Other than being about -12db quieter it sounds a lot better. My engineer sucks!
Hello, Clint. First off I think we have and probably continue to be in the same realm of how we are dealing with stuff and where we're at. You'll have to excuse me for perhaps separating the man (you) from the concept here but I think it exemplifies EXACTLY the most important lesson I have learned here and speaks DIRECTLY to what Danny was talking about in his first long post in the thread. I have been mulling it over for a couple days now and I think that despite all the other absolutely stunning info he and others have provided it is still the absolutely, posimalutely, indeedlydoodly the BIGGEST point that should be taken from all this.
I was embarrassed after I realized how badly I had screwed up my "mastering" job. Really if I had just not gone all OCD freaky on it and pushed myself to post this thread on some arbitrary deadline I would have caught my mistakes and that atrocity never would have befouled this fine forum. I mean I still think it is FAR better than the original for MY tastes and apparently some others but I took something reasonably okay and stomped all over it.
HOWEVER... perhaps it was fate because here it is garnering some very invaluable lessons not just for me but seemingly for a bunch of us. If it had not been so abrasive, squashed, overprocessed, etc... would this convo even had happened? Probably not.
Anyway... my point is, and this is how it relates to your specific post, is that when Danny said, to paraphrase, "Don't MASTER when you are still learning to mix!! And don't MIX counting on the MASTER to FIX anything! Mix to make the MIX good".
This is ringing through my brain over and over again and it was exactly what was going on. I kept telling myself that I would fix some of the stuff I was hearing that irked me in the Master. I also just piled a bunch of techniques/effects I associated with mastering on top of my mix just because... well that's what I had been "told" to do by a bunch of tutorials and articles.
So yeah... I guess really like myself and my good buddy Clint here if you're kind of listening to one of your self mastered works rip all that crap off of there and read Danny's first post about this (and then all those after). At first I was kind of thinking "well... there isn't really any specific stuff in there to help with my mix" but there WAS... and it was MORE important than any of the little specific advice about levels, pan, compression, etc. That advice was, in the most polite of terms, "You are not a mastering engineer. YOU ARE NOT A MASTERING ENGINEER!! WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO BE A MASTERING ENGINEER?!!"
So now... I'm going back to how I used to do stuff. I will make my mix sound as awesome as I can, export it then just tweak the EQ a little, bring up the level a bit and maybe some very light compression.
That said... tons of really wicked advice about the actual mix some of which I knew but needed to be reminded of and some of which is new to me. I'll redo this probably over the weekend and I don't expect it to be amazing or anything or some outstanding improvement but I will try out some of the ideas here and deal with some of the issues discussed.
Then I will move on. This entire project was more about learning how to use Sonar and it's features, use various effects/plugins/mixing concepts/etc and get a project done from start to finish.
In that regard this has been a success... like a huge one. When I first recorded this I barely knew how to get the bloody thing to record my tracks or use MIDI or... well anything. That was a little over a year and a half ago. Now we're talking about all these finite concepts about the actual audio instead of "durrr... how do I make the things make noise?"
So even though this all could be construed as somewhat of a failure from the perspective of "THIS SHOULD SOUND AWESOME AND LABELS SHOULD BE KNOCKING DOWN MY DOOR!!!" it is a TOTAL success that I don't even really worry about just using the damned program or have absolutely no idea what an effect is supposed to do... even if I may not be that good at dialing it in or knowing when to just leave it off.
So yeah... got more calls to make but just some stuff bouncing around in my crazy Beepster noodle that Clint stirred up.
I'll be back later today or tomorrow to reply to other points made but for now thanks again guys and really even if this ain't great just getting to this point would not have been possible without all you guys helping me out.
Cheers!