mastering techniques

SONAR - all of them - provide a fine mastering platform.  A lot of stuff is not as easy as on a dedicated stereo editor (say, Sound Forge, which I use), but you can work around SONAR's limitations.  It is easier to make cuts and edits w/ a stereo editor, rather than bouncing, and stuff like that.  Audio wise, SONAR is fine.

How I do it is to export my mix as a 24 bit "mix" and add that to the SONAR project.  Now I have a numbered mix attached to the project and I don't touch that.  What I do is make a copy of it and put it in another folder - masters or some name like that.  Now open a new SONAR project and bring that file into it and you can start to work.

I haven't used the mastering effects in SONAR to master.  I got Voxengo's elephant limiter and Curve EQ before Cake came out with those and have no real reason to change.  You can pick up Voxengo's stuff cheap and it is really good.  If not, I'm sure Cake's mastering stuff will work well.  I'd use the Eq and Multiband comp, not boost 11 or the ProChannel.   Alright, probably the ProChannel EQ, which I love, and maybe the SSL bus comp but I haven't tried that for mastering.  Boost 11 doesn't work for me, esp. since I have Elephant.

Mastering is like mixing, in that there are rules and tricks, but it is basically coming up w/ your own variations of tried and true techniques.  You could use both the ProChannel and the Multiband.  On vox and masters it is quite common to use a fast time on the compressor to shape the sound and level down transients while following it with a slower compressor to fill out the sound and raise the overall volume.  Nowdays, I use an analog compressor combined with hardware dsp.  Another thing, don't try to make your song sound as loud as the latest commercial CD.  Those guys have more experience, better tools and perfect rooms.  Even then, getting a -.1 dB average level sounds, well, bad.  Strained.  Undynamic.  And some other words that would break the TOS.  Try for something more natural sounding -1 dB or lower.  Your stuff will sound better and no one will notice the volumen difference.

Keeping that in mind, experiment, and realize it will take some time to grab the basics of mastering w/o butchering your wonderful mix.

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One thing I like to do is to mix certain instruments together in a wav file, export them and then use these to create my mastered track in a new project.

For instance I will work on the mix until I feel it is ready to be mastered. Then I will export all the guitar tracks. Say perhaps the bass and drums together, vocals together and so on. This gives me the option of applying more compression and low end to the drums, more highend to the vocals or whatever is needed for a particular song. I will often apply a limiter to each individual track so that the peaks in that particular zone can be tamed rather than it effecting the enitre track. Another thing I do is then apply an effect like channel tools to say the guitars or keyboards or backing vocals to clear up some room in the middle of the mix for the lead vocals. After that I then take a mixed down stereo track and add a few final touches to it and check to make sure it is loud enough.

In other words I get my mix close, then narrow down the number of tracks I am working with, mix those with mastering in mind and then apply anything that is still needed in that final step. Hope that helps!

Yeah, I have been doing that lately but sometimes it is just easier to start fresh. Sometimes I have 40 or 50 tracks going so it is eaiser to break it all down to just 4-5 tracks and keep it cleaner.

The latest Computer Music Magazine has a nice article about recording and editing acoustic recordings. There's a nice description of 4-stage compressing of a track, the how and why.
Never tried it that way yet, but I surely will.

So all the body have to one inside to have master of the one thing.  So I have to all the time to make repair to electronic device. So starting to make electronic device to not proper way repair it. So after to make master of the electronic to make starting device it.