Re: Mastering music

[David Gans <david@trufun.com>]

At 5:19 PM -0700 4/13/07, Ronan Chris Murphy wrote:
>
>These days it is very common to use some sort of extreme limiting to 
>get the final levels louder (L1, L2, Finalizers, etc), but many 
>times a sense of presence or bigness comes from judicious EQ; and 
>often more cutting than boosting.

That's been my experience w/ projects I have mastered with Joe 
Gastwirt, Paul Stubblebine, Jeffrey Norman and others.  Mastering 
involves subtle and judicious use of signal processing tools to 
clarify the sound and improve consistency of levels and EQ form track 
to track.  It alost always has to dow ith cutting a little than with 
boosting.

>
>If you are going to be using extreme limiting be cautious. At first 
>it can be a little exciting but if overused can sometimes hurt some 
>of the natural dynamics and change of texture that makes so much 
>looping music interesting.

Amen!  I am on a mailing list with a lot of mastering engineers 
(Sonic Solutions), and they've been upset for years at the amount of 
squashing they have to do to please the record companies.  If you 
look at most commercial CDs as waveforms in the Sonic edit window, 
they resemble solid blocks of audio rather than the nice peaky 
dynamic streams you' expect from real music.


-- 

David Gans - david@trufun.com or david@gdhour.com
Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave. #102, Oakland CA 94610-2730
Blog:  http://logblog.gdhour.com
Web site: http://www.dgans.com