Standard basic mastering procedures, tips?

[anonyq]

Hi,

I've used Tascam portastudios for several years but am completely new to PC based recording.

I know that procedures vary depending on the particular recording and that nothing is simple, but I'm interested in what basic procedures you would generally do if using Audacity for mastering.

So hypothetically, let's say someone hands you a CD with a dozen mixes and you have, say, only 20 minutes to master them, using only Audacity. What things would you automatically do? What standard procedure(s) would improve just about any recording?

[steve]

You could not do any meaningful "Mastering" on a dozen tracks in 20 minutes - it would take more than 20 minutes just to listen to them, so about all you could do is to Normalize them (if the recording level is too low).

20 minutes on one track....
Top and tail (clean up ends of track)
Eq, Compression and Level adjustment.
time up.

[kozikowski]

That is a loaded term. What do you mean by Mastering?

You are dangerously close to asking us for the Professional Audio Filter. This is a little something developed over on the Final Cut Pro video forum in response to enormous number of requests.

The basic idea is you apply the filter to whatever you have and it automatically produces a professional, crisp, clear, quiet audio track. The Pro-Hollywood version of the filter is enormously expensive, but you can leave the microphone in the car during the shoot and it will reconstruct the show sound for you in post production by interpreting the video.

I gotta finish writing this up. April First is right around the corner.

Koz

[anonyq]

Thanks steve... & koz... I'm down to 1 good typing hand today, so sorry but this might be abrupt & missing whatever caps my pc doesn't automatically supply.

By mastering I mean post-mix production of audio. Please note that i did not say i intended to use only audacity for the whole mastering process.

Koz.. Your post reminded me of those expert swiss watchmakers who laughed at the idea of being made obsolete by digital clocks, until it happened. I've seen a lot of highly skilled professions disappear due to technology, from court reporters replaced by videocameras, to orchestral musicians replaced by synths, etc. etc. Of course this could never happen to studio engineers.

If there's no mythical professional audio filter now, there will be a reasonable facsimile soon enough. Audacity is obviously a small step toward that. I'm trying to determine how small.

Here's my imperfect analogy. I have a photo editing program. You give me 12 photos, and in 20 minutes I will sure as hell have all of them looking significantly better. Not perfect, but much better. Am I a photo editing genius? No, but because I know the program & have used it extensively, I know there are certain basic steps I can take right off the bat every time that will improve the quality of the images. I could teach an addled 3rd grader how to do it in 5 minutes.

There's even an "insta-fix" button that automatically sharpens, and adjusts brightness & contrast etc. It takes 2 seconds. This job used to be done by a pro photographer in a few days. 10 out of the 12 photos look better after insta-fix, the other 2, you just hit "undo."

Another bad analogy: give me 12 resumes, 20 minutes and Wordperfect & I'll have them looking much better. I'll use spellcheck (used to be done by a professional proofreader) & a preset style (used to be done by a typesetter, and before that by scribes & copyists).

But my 20 minutes hypothetical was just my poor attempt to bypass all this & the inevitable discussion about how mastering is too mystical & complex to ever be in any part automated. Back to that: Let's say 2 people are given the task, winner gets $10 million (make it interesting). One's a tone deaf, tin-eared novice, the other's an expert. The expert spends the 20 minutes fretting about the impossibility of the task, proceeds a la steve... and doesn't finish 1 track.

With my slow PC (and slow self), it took 15 seconds for me to normalize 1 track. So the novice normalizes all 12 tracks & hits undo when necessary. That takes about 3 minutes. He's already beaten the expert on points and won the contest. I'm interested in what he does with the other 17 minutes.

[steve]

Your post reminded me of those expert swiss watchmakers who laughed at the idea of being made obsolete by digital clocks, until it happened

But you will not find a digital Rolex. To quote Rolex:

Just as video killed the radio star, the quartz boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s nearly snuffed out the mechanical timepiece faster than you can say "Seiko." By substituting low-cost, digital technology for labor-intensive artisanship, the Japanese sent the Swiss horology industry into crisis mode. Yet while most of Geneva's watch houses feverishly hitched their star to the digital bandwagon, Rolex stuck resolutely to its mechanical guns....

"If Rolex had gone to quartz there's no way it would have the image and prestige it has now."....

That Rolex has always produced its own movements separates it from other well-known mechanical brands. More than 200 craftsmen and technicians will work on a watch before it acquires Rolex certification. "There's so much more to a Rolex than the average person will ever need. And in that sense it's the Mercedes-Benz of wristwatches. It's over engineered. Not because Rolex wants to squander money but because that's just the way they do things."

Before leaving Geneva, every Rolex watch must travel through a high-tech obstacle course of quality-control checks. Every dial, bezel and winder will be checked and double-checked for scratches, dust and aesthetic imperfection. The microscopic distance between its hour and minute hands will be painstakingly calibrated to ascertain that they are lying perfectly parallel. An ominous-looking air-pressure chamber will verify that each watch is waterproof to a depth of 330 feet. (The Submariner and Sea-Dweller divers' models are guaranteed to 1,000 and 4,000 feet, respectively.) And every watch will engage in a precision face-off against an atomic-generated "überclock" that loses but two seconds every 100 years. Only after successfully passing dozens of checkpoints does a watch receive the Rolex seal.

If there's no mythical professional audio filter now, there will be a reasonable facsimile soon enough.

There are tools to assist, but "mastering" requires skill, taste, individual preference, opinion, and subjective decision making. There are no "absolute" rules when it comes to mastering, and computers can only run according to pre-defined rules (algorithms).

I have a photo editing program. You give me 12 photos, and in 20 minutes I will sure as hell have all of them looking significantly better.

Provided that the photographs are supposed to have an even colour spread and an average tonal level. As soon as you get a picture that is intentionally dark, or light, or has a deliberate bias toward a particular part of the spectrum, these automatic tools fall over. Professional photographers will either develop their photographs themselves, or will have them developed by hand. For high quality professional photographs this is the only way it can be done. Sure you can get reasonable "snaps" developed while you wait at the chemist, but they will not win any awards.

give me 12 resumes, 20 minutes and Wordperfect & I'll have them looking much better. I'll use spellcheck (used to be done by a professional proofreader)

Which is fine until it comes to a word that is not in the dictionary. I was recently writing a document with the place name "Donnington" which got replaced by the spell checker with "Paddington" - not very useful when giving directions! Proof reading picked up the error.

With my slow PC (and slow self), it took 15 seconds for me to normalize 1 track.

An unfortunately, the track included the sound of an explosion, stage left. You Normalized and now the rest of that channel is way too quiet. You loose - The resulting track is worse than the originals (which I haven't Normalized because I am listening to the tracks first).

Tools that can help improve recording:
Normalize / Amplify
Multi-band compression
Frequency profiling and Equalization.
Phase correction.
Noise reduction.
Click/pop/crackle reduction.

None of these tools should be used blind.
For example, most records of a particular genre have similar frequency profiles (proportions of high and low frequencies), but if you try and make the frequency content of a solo voice the same as that of a full orchestra, the result will be very "off". So perhaps you select "vocal preset" in your "Professional audio filter", but do you really want the same profile for Barry White as you do for Liza Minnelli?

[anonyq]

stevethefiddle,

Thank you for your message. This is all very helpful toward my education.

Sorry for the slow response. I was offline all weekend & swamped today. I hope I haven't ticked anyone off with my impertinent questions. It's just my way of learning to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool.

The digital watch story is an old business cliche. As I recall it, the man who invented the digital clock first offered his idea to swiss watchmakers who laughed him out of the room ( "Don't tell us how to make watches, we've been doing it for centuries.") They took a disastrous economic hit. Similarly, the man who invented photocopying first offered his idea to Kodak. They turned him down because they thought the quality of photocopies were laughable compared to Kodak photos. So he formed his own company & called it Xerox. Kodak wishes it had that money now.

I was remembering when they said a computer would never beat a chessmaster. Not that long ago. Something about it's inability to develop elaborate strategies in advance.

I knew somebody would pick apart the word processing & photo analogies, which is why I called them imperfect, but my point is not that subjective decision making is unnecessary. Problems with spell check are obvious, but when used in conjunction with a human brain, it still saves time. The more time you save the more you have available for necessary subjective decision making.

For example, when they first came out with autocorrect, I was showing 2 supervisors how it could be used to avoid having to type in a full name, title and address every time you start a letter. Type in part of the name and a symbol, and the program fills in the rest. Unfortunately the example I chose on the fly to demonstrate autocorrect produced the name of someone who had since moved. "See," they said, "It's no good, it made a mistake. It's useless." But they missed the point. I didn't say autocorrect was a substitute for proofreading. I said it was a substitute for typing. You can catch an automatically typed mistake as easily as a manually typed one.

You said "There are tools to assist, but "mastering" requires skill, taste, individual preference, opinion, and subjective decision making." I agree with both parts of this sentence, and don't think they need to be mutually exclusive.

I'm sure I've given the erroneous impression that I'm the type of person who wants everything done automatically. Actually by nature, I'm the type who will spend hours agonizing over finding the right sound or perfecting a 2 second clip. But to the extent that shortcuts exist, I need to know of them.

Out of time. I'll have to post this "as is" & supplement later if possible. Thanks again.