Thursday, January 24, 2008

Dave mastered my track for me and it sounds about 100x better then before. I'll post the before and after at some point. My mastering had the track sounds loud but not really pounding; the high/mid range stuff was taking up a lot of the head room. After listening to Dave's mix it suddenly sounded totally off. So anyways, I asked Dave to enlighten me, and here is his description of how he mastered the track:

I did all the mastering in FL Studio just because I like the way it
routes everything.

I used an EQ to roll off the freqs below 25Hz and above 20,000k.
Those are frequencies that people cant hear, but can still effect how
loud you can make the song. Then I used another eq to pull down some
of the midrange around 350hz.

After that I used the BBE Sonic Maximizer. Its a super bad ass
exciter which is part of that 'crispness' that you are talking about.
It does some weird phasing thing to the low end and the high end to
make the highs sizzle and the lows thicken up. I didnt use much of it
though because it's really easy to overdo it.

I also sent the master into a reverb but really quiet at about 9%. I
did that because I've found it tends to give the whole songs a little
more dimension, and also make the high mid range stand out a little
more in rear speakers that usually come with home theaters. I set the
decay super short and had the damping up enough to make it sound like
a short room. The reverb I used is called Arts Acoustic Reverb.

I adjusted the levels so that everything was just barely hitting 0db
then ran it all through PSP Xenon which is a really nice
limiter/volume maximizer. I just used a preset that made it sound
nice and loud without distorting anything.

Thanks Dave! What a difference mastering makes.

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