Blogging in B Minor

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Like most of us who have home studios, I perform my own mastering. I’m definitely not an expert – I’m a songwriter and that’s what I love to do. However, this is a necessary part of the process and over the years I have come up with some techniques that seem to work pretty well. I was only able to do this purely out of reading a lot of books, articles and learning from others who can execute this part of the production process quite well. As I will never be able to equal the quality of what you would achieve by sending the native tracks out to a mastering facility, my final tracks do end up coming out with what I believe is a good balance between compression, eq, spatial qualities and that extra “sheen” that is needed to make the tracks shine. It’s also worth noting that I don’t have to pay the $300-$500 per track that a higher-end mastering facility would charge to make this happen and I’m fairly satisfied with the results.

First of all, to provide background I utilize Cakewalk Sonar Producer on the Windows platform. I use primarily a RAID (striped) disk array that is 1 terabyte in size. From a hardware standpoint, I use an EMU 1820m as the digital audio interface which receives my condensor mic, all guitars, basses and other instruments that require an XLR input, preamp or direct 1/4″ connection. The condensor mic I use for all vocals is a Studio Projects C1 – this is an amazing mic for the cost. You can read more about this mic by accessing this post in the blog. Enough said for purposes of this post.

In this post I will briefly run down what I do. I’ve tried all kinds of different plug-ins and processes but I found myself going back to a few core, staple processes that seem to be the right mix for what I am at least looking for. If you’d like to see the results, all of my tracks employ these tools and you can just go to http://www.markmillermusic.org/mp3/ and listen to a few of the songs.

First off, I work in the Sonar Producer environment on Windows. I have worked in this environment since it was DOS-based, thus my reasoning for not switching to Pro Tools or another system such as Cubase SuX. Following is a snapshot of a fully tracked out production I am currently working on in the Sonar environment

I use various plugins here, particularly the BBE Sonic Maximizer, Waves Renaissance deessers and TCWorks Native Reverb on vocal tracks as well as Antares Auto Tune. Here is a view from the mixing board in Sonar:

Once I have finished my work here, I mixdown the entire project (export it) into two (left and right) stereo tracks. Step two is to pull it into the mastering environment which for me is Wavelab. The mixdown process is simple for me. Most of my music is built upon soft-synths triggered by playing external keyboards. Guitars and so forth are plugged into preamps but other than that, it’s straight-forward. Effects are applied at the time of mix-down and any routing on the console above, such as the aux send you see, is also done at the time of mix-down.

Mastering

Here is the Wavelab environment with a song I am currently working on called “Angels of the Night” loaded up.

You’ll notice on the bottom I have metering loaded to monitor the mix. On the right I have the mastering section where you can load VST/DX plugins of your choice to apply to the digital audio file. I have a staple preset that I tend to use for all of my songs. Presets here work great. You can build a preset by loading all of the plugins you’d like to use for a preset, setting all of the dials and settings exactly as you’d like and then saving it. Later, you can call up that preset and everything is as you left it. It’s also very helpful if you decide to build presets song by song.

My primary preset consists of the following plugins:

Roger Nichols Detailer – for me this applies compression mainly and brings the amplification up without distorting. You obviously don’t want listeners having to crank up their stereo volume to 30 to hear your songs on CD. I have noticed that this plug-in makes a huge difference and it has a lot more capabilities than I am even tapping. I need to spend more time with it frankly. I have heard great things about Roger Nichols other plugins as well but I just haven’t had a chance to look into them. They are quite affordable as well so I would definitely take a look at them. You can check them out at http://www.rogernicholsdigital.com/

BBE Sonic Maximizer – this plug-in just gives the mix a certain sheen – you really have to hear it to tell the difference. If you turn it on and then hit bypass while the song is playing, you’ll know that you cannot live without it. The primary control that gives you that sheen is the “process” knob. You can also get some very nice low contour with the knob on the left and of course you have an output level knob. I typically just leave that pegged.

Izotope Ozone Mastering Tools – for me, I simply use the CD Mastering preset here. It employs a harmonic exciter, eq, loudness maximizer and multiband dynamics. Also, the loudness maximizer does not conflict with the Detailer compression as noted above. With most of my songs, I don’t normalize tracks in Sonar. I peg them up to about -1 o 0 and then export. Once out, I use the detailer and bring them up by about 3-4dB there and then use the CD Mastering preset here as is. There are many other presets available here and you can experiment with them. Izotope has an array of other plugins but if you look around on the web and in any mags, Ozone is the one that gets the press. It’s a staple.

Waves Deesser – As I mentioned, I deess my vocal tracks in Sonar, but once in the mastering environment I deess the entire mix with a “full mix” preset found in the Waves Renaissance Deesser. It will take any last artifacts out of the vocals and so forth leaving you with a clean mix – and it’s a great deesser. Some will over compensate and leave you with a mangled track. This does not.

Again, I am NOT a mastering master by any stretch of the imagination but I have been able to find some pretty good methods over the years of making my tracks sound pretty good, not by my own ears but based on the input of others so I at least know I’m doing some things right. Again, feel free to take a listen at http://www.markmillermusic.org/mp3 for the results. To hear the end result of the project you saw loaded up in Wavelab above, Angels of the Night, you can do that with the embedded player below:

Learning all of this took time – when I first started trying to do all of this I had tracks that sounded absolutely awful. Like anything, it takes practice and I still have a lot to learn. It would be great to have an engineer, producer, etc. etc. and just be able to focus on writing songs which is what I love but this is also something that I do actually enjoy – it’s just not the part that reeeeally inspires me.

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