I can't afford to get my songs mastered...

[Patrick McAnulty]

Limited experience, limited gear, limited time, limited money. If these things don?t stop us from recording ourselves in the first place, why would mastering be any different? You just got to be realistic about your intended use of the final product.

you forgot about limited talent.

I prefer to compress talent. Compression is more creative. Limiting is purely mechanical.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZg3-Y1Q ... re=related

[James B]

Wow. The impatience of getting a recording out and saying "this is me playing" is a pretty urgent matter, isn't it?

Have you ever written a song that you actually like? If you have, you'd know the answer to your own question.
And a lot of us (the OP included, I'd bet) record songs and/or albums too, not just "people playing". Huge difference, that. Recording songs is fun and exciting and I'd venture to say that its what gets most of us out of bed in the morning. Recording "people playing" is work. I doubt anyone who has recorded their own band is doing it as "work".

I just had a meeting with this metal band. They were playing me this half-baked demo to get my read on it so they could go back to finish it with whoever they were working with in Nashville. The studio was boning these guys $1600/day to record. They cut 8 songs in 8 hours- basic tracks-wise. The guy who is supposedly producing is getting paid $500, but they said he didn't really seem like he was into the project- they said there was one song the guy was totally into.

The band are now playing this entire recording for people. Problem is, the songs are half-baked and their vision is not clearing up working with this guy in Nashville. The rate the studio is charging is obscene. The recording will not be mastered and will not be manufactured- but they will have spent ALOT on it.

Does this not sound like the original post?

I couldn't think of a situation more different to that one. I mean, seriously, the two things seem so far removed that I can't even see your point. We've spent nothing on this, it's just a bit of fun, I enjoy recording the songs and mixing them (although I'd like to be able to do it more seriously one day), and we like making noise with our guitars for the hell of it.

Again, I don't understand your post.

And I suppose I'll just use the same excuse for not being 'GREAT'. It's far from that, but it's a start and I feel like we're getting better even if we're probably never going to write anyone's favourite song. That's not to sound defeatist, it's just kind of not our intention, we're just typical suburban kids in a boring town trying to keep ourselves busy. I guess.

are you in Cardiff UK or Cardiff CA?

It's Cardiff UK... I'm guessing you're not local looking at your location there.

[Smitty]

...we're just typical suburban kids in a boring town trying to keep ourselves busy. I guess.

hey, beats impregnating the governor's daughter, right?

[Jay Reynolds]

Look at it this way: you can refuse to go in the water because you have no hope of swimming as well as Michael Phelps, or you can just enjoy your day at the beach.
That being said, if you can afford it, its never a bad idea to have someone else finish your product.

[TV Lenny]

The best and most consistant mastering technique is have your listeners get loaded prior to hearing the EP. This will work no matter what stereo, mp3 player, or half assed car system you play it on.

Better get some horse, we've got an album coming out.

tOm

[losthighway]

Dude that one part with the guitar was like......whoaah. I get what you're saying man. I get it.


Master it yourself. Or at least try. I guarantee you will learn something. When you want to drop a ton of cash on pressing a thousand cd's or making the big internet push to new markets, then drop some dough on mastering.

[rwc]

I think the comparing mastering to swimming is a terrible analogy. I think the same of recording and mixing.. it'd still be a bad analogy.

Here's why.

A recording of your band is going to sound more like your band than no recording at all. If you give an inspiring performance, of a good song, a shitty three mic recording is still more inspiring than silence.

But if you don't have a proper setup for mastering, or the experience, you can make what you have worse. If you don't swim like an olympian, and it's hot outside, and you're bored, and your friends are in a large pool - you can't make things worse by getting in the pool.

but you can make your audio worse if you add the 2.7K your monitors and room are sucking out, put a stereo widener on that makes it sound cooler for ten seconds but like shit in the long run, and ozone it to death.

The issue with self mastering is making the stuff sound worse after mastering than before.

[James B]

which is why the general message from this thread is to go easy with it, i'm not going to do any drastic stuff with the EQ and basically just get the levels right.

and i took the swimming analogy to relate more to making music as a whole rather than specifically mastering, it made a lot of sense to me anyway.

[losthighway]

You can probably do a DIY mastering job and not EQ at all. I wouldn't. I don't when I try to master small run releases. Because I just don't know it well enough. I end up ruining shit. If something is wrong in the EQ I know how to fix it by mixing, but not mastering.

Mix it great. Then work with the volume/compression. Gently.

[drumsound]

Especially as anivice it's best to think of mastering using the doctors credo of "First do no harm."

[vvv]

That said, if you wanna do something, maybe play with some pass-filters.

For example, you might try to do an easy roll-off below mebbe 50Hz, and above mebbe 15kHz. Or try a steep roll-off, if just to try it (especially on the lows.)

And run everything through a limiter, lightly if you boost the level, so your peaks are mebbe .5dB below digi-0.

Listen to what you do, compare b/4 and after, as YMMV.

[Cellotron]

That said, if you wanna do something, maybe play with some pass-filters.

For example, you might try to do an easy roll-off below mebbe 50Hz, and above mebbe 15kHz. Or try a steep roll-off, if just to try it (especially on the lows.)

I'd actually suggest that High Pass and Low Pass filters should only be applied if there is in fact an audible problem in these areas!! - i.e. some amount of non-musical rumble or too boomy sub-frequencies, or presence of an overly high amount ultra-high frequencies that are creating an irritating effect - not as a default or as an "experiment" - as applying these when not necessary can make the bottom end anemic and the high end veiled.

And run everything through a limiter, lightly if you boost the level, so your peaks are mebbe .5dB below digi-0.

Unless of course a track (or more) sounds fine without any limiting relative to other tracks when matching their perceived average levels.

As far as output ceilings - generally somewhere from -0.1dBFs to -0.5dBFs will work towards minimizing the possibility of having any distortions occur from intersample peak overs from occuring during playback on lower quality DAC's or after encoding with some compression codecs. Where precisely this output ceiling should be set varies a little bit with what limiting or clipping has been applied to the track. Generally I put most tracks output ceiling at -0.3dBFs.

Listen to what you do, compare b/4 and after, as YMMV.

THIS is an excellent piece of advice - in fact I'd say it's critical when mastering to have a monitor controller at hand that allows you to do level matched a/b's between the original source and the fully processed results with one button push in order to make sure that any changes being made are in fact actually to the benefit of the track - and not just giving the illusion of being an improvement simply because they are being monitored louder than the original source.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[vvv]

Just to defend my position, , I mentioned trying the pass-filters for a guy doing it on the cheap because they are fairly "non-invasive", and, especially as regards the low, pretty typical settings for home recordings.

OK, my home recordings, anyway.

I mention the -.5dB cap from limiting because I have noticed, at least when using Cool Edit, that setting it at -.1 while still a 32bit float *.wav, and converting to 128kbps *.mp3, can result in sample (as opposed to "intersample") overs. I actually use -.4dB as my default.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

You can probably do a DIY mastering job and not EQ at all.

except in a lot of cases mixes need EQ more than they need anything else.

[dsw]

Don't turn up the suck knob.