Mastering the Mastering

Some of the tracks for Sandra's album have ben last minute specials, but I'm not ready to do the mastering.

Mastering is super deluxe highly specialist process of preparing a track for public consumption. We're strapped for cash and time, so I'm doing it on a pair of hifi speakers in a living room using Garageband, some free plugins and Audacity.

Sandra's tracks are pretty simple, there are no drums and usually very few instruments taking up space on the track, so I think I get away with my meagre setup. It's also a home/lo-fi recording so I don't think it benefits from unrealistic reverb and a lot of effects. I mix the track down and separate the stereo and non-stereo material so that I have two tracks. Then with each of these tracks I do a little light peak limiting, normalisation and multiband compressing until I'm quite happy with the signal. I give the stereo file a little bit of stereo enhancement. This I do in audacity, cos I can see the wave better etc. Then they both go back into garageband and I mix them together, maybe adding some more compression across the track or some really light EQ. I found a really nice plugin called Pro-Q from fabfilter. It costs, but I used he 30 day free trial. You can see what oyu are doing and drag a tight band filter across the EQ spectrum till you find a sweets pot and then mess around with the Q setting till you add some subtlety.

Once I've got it sounding good, I take it back into audacity to top and tail it, sort any clips and then max out the volume as much as I can while retaining some dynamics.

While there is no doubt that a professional would do a better job if I paid him a grand or so, I think the process has been a great learning experience, and the results fit the bill given the lo-fi nature of the project.

Jesus has risen!!!

Thanks to Ascension/Hemelvaart, I have 2 days off to make a 4 day weekend to catch up on all things Sandra. I made an interesting version of “raise your sunshine” from an old isolated vocal track that was lying around. I pulled another 2 tracks from a really early session I did with Sandra, my mixing of her guitar has got better though and I was surprised how good I was able to make the tracks sound. 5 down 7 to go.

Progress is slowing though; It’s starting to feel quite daunting to get this all finished in the next week before Sandra leaves. What was previously a lot of fun is now starting to feel a little like creativity on demand. As I probably suspected if I was honest with myself, my ambition will have to be curtailed a little, and if I have a decent track, I don’t have time to experiment with 20 different ways of doing an additional guitar. At the end of the day if the room I’m recording, mixing and mastering in isn’t up to much then I shouldn't be too perfectionist about what we can achieve.

Sick and still working...

I spent the night puking ... so I've taken the day off to drink green tea and experiment with Mastering. The tracks don't need to much mastering but I can't decide whether to bring the peaks up with audaity and add some basic compression or whether to use a mastering plugin like Ozone... my sick body seems to be too tired to be able to tell, but I'm going to plough through some basic tasks so that there is more material there when I'm ready to use it.