ORIGINAL: pdarg

ORIGINAL: danhazer

Until the end of the year I am on 9th and Marquette in the AT&T tower. My cube pretty much looks right at the word "Foshay"

Howdy neighbor. I'm in the AEFA Headquarters building @ 3rd & 7th. You're about 3 minutes walking (skyway) distance from me. Cool huh?

Wow! Too much! THREE GUYS FROM MINNEAPOLIS on the same thread!
Two out of three love Har-Bal, me . . . still undecided.

But the recommendations from fellow Minnesotans goes a long ways. Har-Bal has a 30 day try-refund policy, so I am now leaning towards just taking the plunge.

I'm stuck in the 'burbs so I'll have to take a rain check for lunch.

Real men work in the cities!

Oh, and I know Earle and Paavo, they have their trial period, and they honor it. They are good people and honest people...I consider them friends...but honestly I wonder if anyone has asked for their money back?

I think I'll ask next time I speak with them...I can't imagine anyone not loving it...

I'm just going to repeat this so it doesn't get lost:

Can someone clarify something for me? Does Har-Bal actually have over 8,000 "bands" of EQ?

I assume then that the parametric nudging cursor is a simplified way of dealing with such resolution??

Also, why is there nothing showing over 10k? Is that just the demo, and the real version goes above that?

ORIGINAL: Dave

BTW, you might be one of "those people" with a great set of ears, and able to achieve a mix that many others only dream of, seriously. So if you nail it, you nail it.

..., I'm finding it very educational to load up real tracks of commercially released music, and have a look at the spectrum. Then I begin making changes to it, as if it were my own mix. Sometimes, it sounds better, sometimes it doesn't, and that's where the education is.

I think I agree with you on your whole comment. My contribution to this thread was really for people like me who don't want to be left out if there is some secret tool to creating great sounding mixes.

Har-bal is a great tool to help you get there, but its not a requirement. You might get more bang for the buck in results from a mastering suite, but, you are probably most likely to learn the most from using Har-Bal.

Eric

Well, I did my experiment and har-bal'ed a track to har-bals "rock" reference curve. Then I analyized that track with Curve EQ and got a spectrum to use from it. Applied that spectrum to a "un-eq'ed" song in sonar and exported it. Then bought that song into har-bal and anaylized it to see if it matched up with the original "rock" curve in harbal. It was pretty close but not right on. I assume because curve EQ matches to 70 bands and not a continuous curve. But now I have a good enough Curve EQ spectrum to try out some stuff in sonar.

Okay, I bought it. I have a 30 day trial so I can really hear what it does.

I have to confess that to really use it well, it's going to take some learning on my part, so give me a few days here before I render a final opinion.

I will say this, so far the results are pretty amazing. It's true that it's not a plug-in, and the interface/look is a bit old, but what matters is the sound, and so far, it sounds good.

More to come - I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

Drjee,
Basically to get a more "educational" tool with the visual spectrum, and also the reference curves are averages of hundreds of mixes from my understanding. 95.00 with 30 day guarentee is a great deal.

Here's a way to check the product out. First, get the full version, because they are offering the money-back guarantee.

Go to the Har-Bal forum "Har-Bal .mfl Filter Bank". Download a few of the songs that are posted there. Convert them to wavs. Then go to http://www.har-bal.com/filter and save the filter that corresponds to the songs you downloaded.

Use these songs and their filters as a real demo of the har-bal system. In some cases you'll be amazed at how Har-Bal transforms the mix from amateur to professional. In other cases, there will be only slight improvement. But there were a couple of songs that sounded pretty good, which were *excellent* after Har-Bal.

Then, as they recommend, save the Harbalized song, import it into Sonar, apply multiband compression and limiting, and it will pretty much sound incredible.

[And personally, I'd delete the music you downloaded beause it is copyrighted material, but that's another post! :-) ]

That's just the tip of the iceburg. They also have loudness matching capability too, for mastering entire CDs.

I'm just learning to use this tool, but so far, it seems extremely useful. I now wouldn't want to be without it. (I must say though that I have not used CurveEQ so I'm not able to compare.)

I find HAR-BAL easy to use and rarely use reference filters for mixes. References are best used to match mixes belonging to an album of songs you are trying to sequence to get them to have similar character and thus give the impression that each song fits together within the album.

Below is a good suggested way to work with HAR-BAL on individual songs (excerpt is from the HAR-BAL forum). If you are not happy with HAR-BAL, it is a sign that you don't fully understand how to work with it. Suggest everyone read the HAR-BAL forum tops and the tutorial.

Don't flatten out your peaks (yellow line), particularly in higher frequencies! Only lower peaks that are usually high and seem odd. The peaks represent your unique recorded sound and the collection of instruments you used in the arrangement.

Do even out your significant valleys (green line), particularly in the mid to low frequency range. You want similar energy across most frequencies...with the traditional down turn on the extreme low and high ends. You don't need a reference file to figure out this stuff.

=============================

Try the process below to establish a workflow.

1. Load a file into Har-Bal and just sit back and look at it for a few seconds.
2. Press the red button on the bottom right of screen (cos you don't need it)
3. Now there are two lines.
a) Yellow (peak) in top shows the peaks
b) Green (average) on the bottom shows the holes.
4. Start with the top line...are there any peaks more than 1/8 inches up to the 3khz region? If so, bring them down.
***********************************
Hint: Hold the left mouse button down while pressing the tab button to switch between the lines
************************************
5. Look at the green line and determine if there are any large dips/holes in the spectrum. If so, pull them up. Notice how you can determine the "Q" width moving the mouse from side to side.

************************************
Hint: Make sure your "eq" button is depressed while making changes so you can hear them.
************************************

The whole idea is to sculpt your spectrum so that you have no major peaks or holes. This will enable your mix to sound great on all systems because the spectral content of your song is correct.

When you are satisfied press the red record button and save the new file. It will be appended with an eq extension.
Old song name "yoursong.wav" becomes
"yoursong_eq.wav".

=============================

BillC

I think that the second one sounds better.

urock

I got it two days ago.

It seems powerful, but I am having trouble getting the zen of comparing to a reference.

Plan on a long learning curve.

http://www.edusim.net/music/mp3/sample-d1.mp3 and
http://www.edusim.net/music/mp3/sample-d2.mp3

Second one was HarBalized, right?

Dave, just a quick look at their page tells me that both products are trying to do the same thing, but I'm not sure if they're exactly the same, because Voxengo describes theirs as a compressor of sorts, whereas Har-Bal seems to describe theirs in terms of EQ and gain. But I'm not well-versed in EQ technology anyway. Suffice to say, they both claim to modify the spectrum of your finished or near-finished recording.

Maybe I should download Soniformer's "before" samples, and see what I come up with in Har-Bal. :-)
-Dave

It is the first one that has Har-Bal. The second was mastered similarly except that a different EQ plug was used in that step in the chain.

Hmm . . maybe it's not as good as I thought . . .

Of course, we may have to take into account such things as what monitor types etc. people are listening to these on.

Don't give up on it that easily. My take was that the first one sounded flatter where as the second was more 'hi-fi', even listening through computer speakers. A hi-fi sound may be pleasing in the right environment, but it generally doesn't translate well to all speakers. I haven't tried HAR-BAL but my take is that it is intended to help balance a mix, not make it sound pleasing. Let the listener do that to their own taste.

How does the Har-Bal'ed version compare on different system -- car, through TV speakers, boombox, etc.? Does it help in that sense?

ORIGINAL: jsaras

Why was there additional EQ after Har-Bal? Isn't the point of it to take care of that chore completely?

Actually, there was no EQ used after the Har-Bal in the first sample.