Mixdown mastering routines?

Plot some graphs - This place needs more graphs...

Your buddy's setup is really impressive, but who are you really mastering for in that setting? An audio setup where you can hear a pin drop? Because I'm sure you're aware that's not the setting in which most people listen to their music. There's a reason ns10s were in business for a long time.

  Quote

He has a more objective ear because he gets a wide range of stuff to work with.

The problem with this is that there's going to be less specialization in just the type of music that you are making.

  Quote

It's not even a matter of getting a stereo file, sometimes he'll get stems (submixes of sounds and music)

Holy shit! Actual stems?

  Quote

He accounts for things like phasing, stereo spacing, and dynamics.

You mean he puts on a DC filter, sets a mono filter on the bass, widens the stereo and puts a compressor with reasonable settings on it? I'm joking but really, don't try to patronize me.

Engineers are really cool and there's lots to learn from them, but they don't have access to any esoteric knowledge except for the fact that they have trained their ears - something everybody can do.

A few years ago I constructed a setup out of tannoy 8ds, mackie mixer, the best audio card I could find at the time (RME hammerfall 9652) - I didn't have the ears for it so my music still sounded pretty shitty. The most I got out of that setup was routing digital audio through the mixer. These days I'm not the best producer by any means, but I've learnt enough tricks to know it's not about the gear but it's about the ears, and I might not impress Bob Katz & Co, but for me, it's enough to have people with good taste being impressed by my tunes, and specifically the production, when they hear them.

My point is that if you're going to have a certain dip or spike in your audio output, EVERYTHING you play is going to have that dip or spike. So your ears will account for this if you're familiar enough with the setup. Having this kind of gear fetishization where having not only the best audio gear but the best room treatment is good enough is not conducive for new artists. As long as you've got a sound that outputs 20/40hz-16/18khz fairly well and ears to go with it, I'm sure you'll be fine.

lol @ trained ears.

no human can distinguish arriving discrete signals arriving within the haas interval - that's what makes it the haas interval.

chimera, if you yourself would simply study a few aprticular acoustical models, much less confusion would spew from the mouth.

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:41 AM, elusive4 said:

lol @ trained ears.

 

no human can distinguish arriving discrete signals arriving within the haas interval - that's what makes it the haas interval.

chimera, if you yourself would simply study a few aprticular acoustical models, much less confusion would spew from the mouth.

So why should I care about the haas interval if nobody can hear it?

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:35 AM, mcbpete said:

Plot some graphs - This place needs more graphs...

*feels much better*

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:43 AM, chimera slot mom said:

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:41 AM, elusive4 said:

lol @ trained ears.

 

no human can distinguish arriving discrete signals arriving within the haas interval - that's what makes it the haas interval.

chimera, if you yourself would simply study a few aprticular acoustical models, much less confusion would spew from the mouth.

 

So why should I care about the haas interval if nobody can hear it?

the haas interval isn't something to be heard - it's with regards to the brain's inability to distinguish separate signals arriving within a particular length of time from the direct signal - and thus, fuses them together into a single auditory event. as to what dr. richard heyser called: time-smear distortion.

it is with care to give the ear-brain ample amount of time to digest the direct signal.

So.. just use headphones instead?

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:51 AM, chimera slot mom said:

So.. just use headphones instead?

eww, of course not.

attenuate all indirect specular energies arriving within this time window to below the human detection threshold - and verify with the envelope time curve.

the termination (of when specular energy finally does impede the listening position after the ISD), if of high enough gain, will induce a haas trigger that will force the ear-brain to "lock on" to the direct signal and ignore the remaining specular energy (later arriving indirect energies) within the room. ideally, the termination should be of a high-gain, laterally arriving, exponentially decaying diffuse sound-field ... but it is not easy to achieve. the gain of the termination will determine livlines and the rate of decay will determine spaciousness. the length of the ISD-gap will determine perceived size of room. as such, you can artificially make the acoustic size of the room larger than the physical size.

you cannot do any of this with headphones and are doing a diservice to the past 5 decades of psycho-acoustics.

the study of the acoustic models (ever since the advent of the TEF analyzer) would be quite enlightening - but even to this day with all of the knowledge at one's fingertips, it is mindblowing how high the noise floor of this topic is within such audio communities.

they hang on to the frequency-domain like Linus does his blanket.

Just give me a moment, trying to think of why the hell I would want to care about all that...It sounds like making music for robots 101.

My point is being a human, if you're a careful listener you're going to be aware of what sounds good to a human - you can't account for all systems and acoustic aspects, but you can account for attuning your sound to what's accepted in most music today. And regardless of what you think, it's quite possible to train your ears, just as it's possible to train your eyes and your hands. Whether it's the actual hairs in your ears or the brains interpretation of the signal that changes doesn't matter.

ps. this probably fits into this thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

I can personally vouch for a few really talented and average priced mastering engineers

Thomas Dimuzio - ambient and noise legend, look him up on discogs to see how prolific he is, the guy is a genius and plays these wonderful improvised live sets with a moog guitar and an effects box.

his EQ curve ive heard is a little drastic for some, but he's had more experience and mastered more records than anyone else ive used. he prefers analog equipment for mastering

Taylor Dupree - minimalist/ambient musician and great fast affordable mastering job, not to mention he sends you a very nice physical package of your master at the end. he is very easy to reach via email and

is very good about redoing a track you weren't quite happy with, he's very good at making changes. he does a mixture of digital and analogue equipment to master

Xopher Davidson - mastering engineer of at least 50% of the Ashpodel records catalog. his mastering routine usually involves software.

  On 12/15/2011 at 1:07 AM, chimera slot mom said:

Just give me a moment, trying to think of why the hell I would want to care about all that...It sounds like making music for robots 101.

 

My point is being a human, if you're a careful listener you're going to be aware of what sounds good to a human - you can't account for all systems and acoustic aspects, but you can account for attuning your sound to what's accepted in most music today. And regardless of what you think, it's quite possible to train your ears, just as it's possible to train your eyes and your hands. Whether it's the actual hairs in your ears or the brains interpretation of the signal that changes doesn't matter.

i couldnt pool together this much stupid if you gave me a week's time.

Sorry, couldn't hear you over the sound of you jizzing all over yourself.

if you can't comprehendt the magnitude of minimizing the room's masking while making critical mixing decisions, then good luck forcing yourself to work in a more constrained environment. physics is physics.

enjoy living in the frequency-domain, flatlander.

You can talk the talk (my word can you talk! ) but can you post anything you've done using these techniques. As in is there any audio examples out there of your productions? Otherwise this theory work you're posting is kind of just hot air...

Awepittance: Woah, I'm a huge fan of Taylor Deupree's work - do you have any contact details of his mastering services and the sort of pricing plan I'd be looking at?

that is like asking me to prove my understanding of vehicle dynamics on whether i have a formula 1 race car in my garage (and can you please take photos).

the acoustical room models for mixing/control rooms are directly applicable to critical listening rooms - anywhere where accuracy is imperative.

you do not need to make music or produce or master or anything of those fields for such knowledge to be appreciable.

if at all my main interest is to help spread such knowledge to bedroom producers who are entirely constrained to very small acoustical spaces - of which the inherent problems compound. is there anything particularly wrong with that that requires so much rejection?

So you have all this knowledge but have applied it to precisely nothing - doesn't that seem like a bit of a waste?

I'm just curious you must have learnt all of this for some reason...

apply a little reading comprehension before being so quick to reply.

i think you should make a thread elusive called 'ask me anything about acoustics' and well all take a load off, i mean if you want to help and give advice to people in EKT i can see no better way of doing it than making your own thread

  On 12/15/2011 at 1:47 AM, elusive4 said:

apply a little reading comprehension before being so quick to reply.

So all your time and in learning this was to selflessly give acoustical advice to people on a forum and no other reason? I mean it's quite congratulatory, but there must be some personal reason why this would be of use... Are you building studios, visiting locations to give audio advice to people, there must be something?!

I didn't read the thread but my method for mastering my mixes is to chuck the main mix through PSP vintage warmer's 'Track Tape slow/medium/fast' presets then filter out all frequencies above 32khz because fuck high frequencies, man (plus, all of my drum samples are 12bit, 32khz max). Sometimes the filtering happens before mixdown though, with some Buzz machines that don't interpolate, just for a nice toasty sound. By toasty I mean the texture of toast, and not 'warm'.

hey elusive chill man, I'm looking to get my room in better shape for audio, do I need some sort of SPL meter to get calibrated results or can I somehow calibrate a (quality) mic with just the mic, preamp and my room? I just want to get some basic but practical results here, my room could be pretty good for mixing I reckon, but I need to fix a bunch of stuff for sure.. I hear you on the phase distortion smearing, that sounds very plausible actually to what I'm struggling with when I'm mixing in my room, and not on the headphones. didn't read much of what you wrote beyond what I'm interested in for the moment, but you should probably stick to the basics if you want to explain anything here, cause right now you are probably the worst teacher ever, alright? and I believe you're not getting paid or anything.. it's completely beyond me why you want to be so miserable about something you are well into. if you don't have the patience/skill to draw people in then just leave it haha. man I wouldn't want to be a teacher I would probably get tired of that really quickly actual..... tl;dw

  On 12/15/2011 at 12:20 AM, elusive4 said:

it's about the time-domain, not the frequency-domain.

Going thru your posts, are you referring to eg. comb filtering from reflections that occur below the threshold that humans hear an audible reflection?

I always thought of the frequency domain as the standard training one does learning about constructive/destructive interference patterns yadda yadda

  On 12/15/2011 at 1:01 AM, elusive4 said:

attenuate all indirect specular energies arriving within this time window to below the human detection threshold - and verify with the envelope time curve.

the termination (of when specular energy finally does impede the listening position after the ISD), if of high enough gain, will induce a haas trigger that will force the ear-brain to "lock on" to the direct signal and ignore the remaining specular energy (later arriving indirect energies) within the room. ideally, the termination should be of a high-gain, laterally arriving, exponentially decaying diffuse sound-field ... but it is not easy to achieve. the gain of the termination will determine livlines and the rate of decay will determine spaciousness. the length of the ISD-gap will determine perceived size of room. as such, you can artificially make the acoustic size of the room larger than the physical size.

Ah, yes, in our recording engineering classes way back when we talked about interference patterns and reflections but not so much this. Hence my previous comments. I'm still trying to understand though why both time and frequency wouldn't be important. EG proper placement of a subwoofer in a room is very much based on the frequency domain, no?

(ah I see your other thread now, we could move this there I suppose)