Mastering, gain, levels...

[mandinga79]

I have a number of projects mixed and ready for pressing...or so I thought...

I was given some tips on mastering within protools: ie, dithering down to 16bit on the masterfader, and bouncing the mix to a left/right wav file -- then opening a new project with said wav file. from here, adding compression, limiting, etc and re bouncing to a final wav/mp3....

does this sound right? ive always had an issue with having enough gain - "filling tape" - when bouncing out of PT...

thoughts?

[Dorian Green]

If you have some nice plugins that can handle 24 bitdepth then use you dither at the very end.
For the final level of your mix, I find L2 by Waves very good.It also inclues the IDR which is a very good dither aswell.Place it at the end of your chain.

Also you really should use another software to make you mastering (Wavelab for example!) It has some features PT doesn't have (Like cue sheet, meters, CD edition and burning.)

But always trust you ears ad listen you final product on different medium thereafter.

Good luck.Have fun in thé World of Mastering!

[albee1952]

I agree. Dither should be the dead last process. Waves L2 is a good tool(and can do the dithering as well). The most important trick with the L2 is to not make it do more than 2-3db of reduction. If you still feel you need more, insert another L2 to get more. Set the output target to -.02. (can't say if this advice would be good with any other limiter as L2 is my choice). I prefer to master in WaveLab, but PT can do it(WaveLab can render the file in a few seconds). FWIW, I always leave about .25 seconds of silence on the front of the final file(after having some CD players miss a bit of audio when skipping track numbers).

[mandinga79]

Thanks guys! will see what I can figure out....

[1ace1]

Originally Posted by mandinga79

Iive always had an issue with having enough gain - "filling tape" - when bouncing out of PT...

This is a funny one in the world of audio. By 'filling tape' do you mean compared to other mastered mixes you have a/b checked? It'll be very difficult to get the same results as a mastering house using only Pro-tools.

What is the genre/style of audio you are mastering?

There is an awful lot of super squashing going on in audio at the mo. Almost like people are trying to 'out squash' eachother ('my mix is louder than your mix' does not mean it is better!).

I believe this is taking the beauty of dynamics away from final mixes. Very few people turn their stereos up beyond two or three nowadays as audio is so squashed. Let them turn it up a bit more and feel the dynamics of the piece.

I understand the need to compress for radio/tv and their limited bandwidth but most broadcasters have multiband compression before broadcasting anything anyway.

How can we, as an audio community stop the over squashing of audio?
(That question almost needs its own thread!)

Reminds me of a favourite quote from Bob Katz

'It's not how loud you make it, it's how you make it loud'

(bit of an off topic rant. Sorry bout that!)

A:)

[Dorian Green]

Yeah that's very important! You MUST keep a decent Dynamic Range respecting the song intentions.You can't reach a max level in an acoustic guitar/vocal song as you would with a full band song on the same album.You have to keep the intimacy of the first one.
If after a good mastering session, an artist is not happy cause it's not loud enough just tell him to turm his stereo volume knob up!That's it, you can't overcompress a song it sounds awful and become lifeless.

Use your ears...really.Don't mix or master on the "screen".