'Home' mastering for radio question. Please advise.

[DeadHead]

All -

I have just recently gotten an opportunity to get some of my songs on three local radio stations. They said they'd work me into the regular rotation and get out a little blurb that I'm a local musician, and a project studio doing my own recording. I live in a small town with a lot of local musicians, and I'm one of the few, if not the only Pro Tools user around. . . .

I have been recording with my PTLE 001 set up for two years now, but have not yet done any work for radio. I am amateur and this is an exciting local opportunity for me.

I have done what I'd call 'home' mastering to get my final stereo mix levels up enough that they sound good on CD and still retain some dynamics. I gently use the Waves L1 for that.

My music is generally acoustic guitar, and my vocal, with occasional bass tracks (very simple) to fill out the sound a bit, and sometimes some additional acoustic tracks to pretty things up a bit. . . . usually just acouostic and a vocal though.

Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas, concerns, for doing amateur 'mastering' for radio play ? Is there anything I should do different ? Anything a newbie to this media might consider ?

Your comments are appreciated.

Regards,
DeadHead

[Duardo]

If you've got the levels good and it still sounds good and retains some dynamics, I'd say leave it alone...the radio station will squash it plenty when they get it, so you should be fine. Further compression may well do more harm than good.

-Duardo

[DeadHead]

Thanks Duardo !!!

Thats sort of the general consensus I'm getting in the TDM forum as well !

I'm going home tonight and when I get in my studio I'm going to pull up the raw sesh and re-evaluate based on the advice I've gotten today and I may make a few minor changes, but its doubtful.

I'm VERY new to playing my stuff on the radio and wanted to make sure there was nothing I need to consider that I haven't already.

Thanks again !!! I read you posts a lot, you've helped me out in the past by replying to others' posts. . . .

Regards,
DeadHead

[Duardo]

Thanks, glad to hear it. I've certainly learned a lot the same way myself.

Let us know how things turn out!

-Duardo

[Stone Knife]

Another thing- Whack off (use High Pass) everything below 60 Hz; it won't go over the air with radio's limited bandwidth anyway and may cause their Optimods to sqish your stuff unnecessarily.

Anything over 15KHz is also a waste.

[where02190]

conservative levels will actually, because of the massive compression of raido boradcasts, make your mix louder on radio, as the lower level keeps the radio compressors from wanting to squash as much.

Hope this is helpful.