In response to a PM:
Hi Yep
I recently tried your home mastering techniques with very good results indeed. Thanks for that - worked a treat, and, for once, got an album that was consistent in RMS levels and track spacing etc.
One question I have is, when I'm at the stage of adjusting the OVERALL level of the album (Stage 2 I think!), this only seems to work for me using the TRIM control - is this okay?? I couldn't seem to raise the *meters* any other way.....kinda confused me, but TRIM worked!!
Any suggestions on that?...
I think this might be more of a "how to work Sonar" than a mastering question, but here goes...
First off, in the digital realm, all gain is created equal, so technically, it doesn't matter which knob or fader you use to adjust level (note that this is not true in analog, but that's a separate topic). The main thing to be careful of is to make sure you know where all of your processors and potential clip points are. Even though the "trim" level works exactly the same as the master fader, it also comes before any eq, compression, etc, and changing the trim level may affect the response of downstream processors. A lot of this is adjustable in sonar and other DAWs, and the particulars of gain-staging and signal routing in any particular program are a little outside the scope of this thread. But the principle still holds-- with digital, gain is gain, and it doesn't really matter where it comes from or when it happens, as long as you're keeping track of your processing downstream.
That said, the working practices developed over decades of multitrack audio work quite well, and in practice, the technical facts are often less relevant than the real-world usability of a system. Mix engineers have developed a standard practice of using gain knobs labeled "trim" or "gain" to control the channel input level so that a healthy, useable signal strength is being fed to the processors that will react and respond in predictable ways to favorite presets or settings. Then, the engineer typically uses the level fader to alter the mixed signal strength without changing the "sound" of the processed track. Most people find this methodology much easier to keep track of, but whatever works.
If you follow my write-up above exactly, it is a non-issue. You are mixing individual songs without much regard for the overall level, then you are dropping the completed stereo mixdowns into a new project as separate clips of audio within a single track in your DAW, then you are using track automation to adjust levels throughout the album. But again, you can use whatever tools work.
Kyle, for many of us (on this forum), Ozone3 works fine (albeit, not as well as a mastering engineer) and is an excellent learning tool for EQ, Reverb, Compression, harmonic excitation, dynamic freq enhancements, and stereo widths of various freqs.
Even after months of Ozone3 myself, the preset "Mix-Master" (with minor tinkering) has brought several of my mixes the right punch at the right frequencies. I'm pretty sure mastering engineers have Ozone3 in their arsenal of magic.
It would be interesting to know more of what Yep may have to say on this.
Well, the whole idea is to do whatever works to make the product sound subjectively better. The objective is easy to understand. The difficult aspects have to do with the ways in which we fool ourselves due to a lot of factors, but primarily the loudness effect coupled with very short auditory memory. This is how a beginner can spend a whole weekend "improving" a track just to have it come out sounding noisier, weaker, and more distorted than when they started:
Every time you add a little bit of level, the track sounds a little better. And everything adds level. So if you add a little reverb, the signal gets a little hotter, and sounds better, but maybe a little less distinct due to reverb masking. So you turn up the highs a little to add clarity, which makes it a little hotter, it sounds a little better, but could use a little more bass to balance the increased highs, so you add a little bass, which makes the signal a little hotter, and it sounds a little better, but now it's clipping, so you turn down the track level a few dB. Now the track is sounding a little weak, so you turn up the mids to get more presence. The track is also starting to sound a little dull, partly because you just turned it down, partly from all the phase distortion from all these eq boosts, partly because your ears are getting burned out from listening to clipped audio on headphones for two hours, and so on. So you turn up the treble again, and then the bass again, for the same reasons as before, and it starts clipping again. When you turn it down, it sounds like crap, so you turn to the compressor/limiter for help. When you come back to listen the next day with fresh ears, you've got a flat-topped square wave with massive phase distortion that hurts the ears to listen to. The solution? Buy more plugins (or preamps, or whatever), which will ultimately be used to add more of more to the sound that is already overloaded.
Whatever you use, whatever you do, make sure to do your before and after A/B evaluations at the same apparent loudness, so that you are compensating for the illusory benefit that comes from simply goosing the level a few dB (which all processors do). This is the single biggest step to "golden ears," and the best hype-deflater ever made. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the main thing is to make sure you do it. The understanding is worth a hundred gigabytes of presets and plugins.
Cheers.