Advise on Mastering Vocals

[proactive]

We are a not for profit spiritual organization and cannot offered to go for professional mastering. We record strictly male vocals in a semi-studio setup (sound proof & acoustic treated). We have only one speaker and we don't even add music. We are able to record fairly well.

NOW - please advise how to do the mastering, to the release quality. We do not sell the disks/audio material but do play it to groups of audience and want to give them the best experience. So, any detailed explanation as well as relevant links are greatly appreciated.
BTW - how does normalization improve audio quality; or does it create any problems.

We use Sonar 4.0 with Digi 002. And we need to ensure that the audio does NOT change in anyway from the original recording, even if it sounds better. Thanks.

[Scott Goldberg]

Originally Posted by proactive

We are a not for profit spiritual organization and cannot offered to go for professional mastering. We record strictly male vocals in a semi-studio setup (sound proof & acoustic treated). We have only one speaker and we don't even add music. We are able to record fairly well.

NOW - please advise how to do the mastering, to the release quality. We do not sell the disks/audio material but do play it to groups of audience and want to give them the best experience. So, any detailed explanation as well as relevant links are greatly appreciated.

If you are using Pro Tools I can help but I don't know Sonor.
For PT:
1. Bounce out NO mastering plug-in (Massey-free L2007) for example,
2. Do same for all songs.
3. Import all bounces to new session (church bounces 1)
4. YOu now have several mult mono bounces ready for finalizing and putting on one disk. Put something like the Massey L2007 (free!!) on each song and start to mute others and get relative volumes and mastering sound as good as you like it. FYI, Massey recommends that you leave settings alone) and once you have them all at proper volumes, taste, THEN bounce out each sone with the plug0in ACTIVE and bounce them 16 bit, 44.1 KHZ, and use perform bounce calculations after the song has run it's course. It's all in the bounce window. Use "Tweak Head" or slowest, and then you can run them out to a CD as one "album."
BTW - how does normalization improve audio quality; or does it create any problems.

Be careful with normalizing, it brings under recorded tracks (one that didn't get enough umph going into your session and try to normalize them to about 92% of zero DB. I use the gain plug-in which works a bit different but I like it better. Normalization (and gain) may have to be done to a track a few times, until you get it to match the normal waveforms that you already have.

We use Sonar 4.0 with Digi 002. And we need to ensure that the audio does NOT change in anyway from the original recording, even if it sounds better. Thanks.

Hope that helps. I wish I knew if you were using pt or sonar as the final route out to bounce.