"Take a walk within the walls of my mind and watch my thoughts ravage the spaces between the walls"
- David Sawang
- David Sawang
Mastering8/24/2018 The mastering intensive seemed to be relatively easy for me, personally speaking. During the intensive we were grouped into pairs of three and I was lucky enough to be grouped with Izzy and Denver. Denver and I seemed to kick it off immediately leeching from each other as we went through the whole process of mastering tracks. The first week of mastering was difficult since I was put into a group and all I could think of was sorting out a few issues with my visa extension. I seem to have bad luck with my visa, they literally banned me from working and I couldn’t pay rent, I was literally homeless looking for a place to stay for 3 days. I’m staying in my friends’ room and I sleep on the floor, but I managed to rock up for class the next week.
In the second week of mastering, we managed to do a good job with mastering a lot of tracks. Our aim was not to just get it louder but to focus more on fixing the problems with the tracks. One of the tracks had an annoying static sound, which we fixed quite quickly using Izotope RX5. Finding the information online was pretty easy for us, but implementing it seemed to be difficult since we had no prior experience with reducing static sound. Another track had a problem where the vocals weren’t popping out as much. It seemed as though the guitars were overpowering the vocals and we needed to somehow tame the guitars and not affect the overall sound. In a real-world scenario, it would be difficult, but because we were only in the learning stages of mastering, the audio conveniently had the guitars panned on each side. Denver was quick to point that out as I was figuring out a way push the vocals forward using a multiband eq raising the frequencies where the vocals sounded like they were in ever so slightly. After we noticed the guitars were panned I remember Clarkey talking about mid-side compression from the week before, so we managed to tame the guitars using mid-side compression and successfully brought out the vocals. Izzy was going wild using outboard gear for one of the tracks, we noticed the drums had to be tamed a lot, particularly that snare. After getting our hands on the outboard gear and failing miserably (mind you we were in the big audient), we decided not to touch it and rely solely in the box. What we learned that week proved to be useful for the next week since we managed to utilise everything for next week. The following week we were put into the same groups but in the S6. We had to master 3 tracks and were not given any information on how to do so. So, each of us chose 1 track (since there were three of us) and we decided we would master it alone and only ask for feedback once we finished. We were given Soundalike tracks, Denver did Smooth Sailing, Izzy did Bring Me To Life and I did Show Me How To Live. A big hint into mastering tracks is knowing what sound you want and knowing what the artists want as well. The problem was, I had no clue what Audioslave sounded like (I do know now). Denver did an amazing job with Smooth Sailing, we could have paid attention to that hum in the background and use the RX5 to take it out, but we were just sloppy and didn’t notice it. Izzy and her Bring Me To Life master was good as usual. I can only extensively talk about Show Me How To Live because I know exactly what I did to it. I never heard of the song before and delved right into what I thought the song should sound like. I felt like the vocals were a bit lacking and so again, I utilised what I learned last week, MS Compression. I compressed to guitars on the side and made the vocals come out a bit to a point where you could hear what he was saying. A real Audioslave fan wouldn’t do that, but I was mixing with absolutely no bias whatsoever. I did more compression, got rid of some low end, boosted some of the bass as well, used a vintage limiter on it and got the RMS to about – 9.8 with the limiter set to limit audio at -0.3. This was the morning session. The afternoon session was fun since we could master whatever we wanted, and I ended up mastering on of Denver’s Soundalike. Knowing Denver, I wasn’t surprised at all in the way he changed Shape Of You. There was a lot to be done regarding mixing, but it was already in the mastering stage, so I couldn’t do as much as I wanted to in order for me to fix it completely. I first added an equaliser to the song trying to take out and highlight the sounds I liked. I cut out anything coming in from below 40hz and added a 0.8dB boost at about 180hz. I took away about 2dB at 2kHz and 1.5dB at 9.5kHz all in the Mid. In the Side I took out more than 3dB at 7.5kHz. I then added dynamic compression where I compressed the song in bands. Band 1: 20Hz – 140Hz Compressor – Ratio 13.1:1, Attack 3ms, Release 51ms. Knee 10.0 Band 2: 140Hz – 3.09kHz Compressor – Ratio 9.0:1, Attack 3ms, Release 22ms, Knee 10.0 Band 3: 3.09kHz – 9.39kHz Compressor – Ratio 30.0:1, Attack 3ms, Release 27ms, Knee 10.0 Band 4 9.39kHz – 20kHz Compressor – Ratio 11.0:1, Attack 3ms, Release 22ms, Knee 10.0 I also applied a vintage compressor in the Mid with a Threshold of -14.2dB a ratio of 5.6:1, Attack of 1.0ms and Release of 30.0ms in Smooth Mode. I compressed the side at a Threshold of -29.4dB, a Ratio of 2.4:1, Attack 24.0ms and a Realease of 100.0ms in Balanced Mode. I then put a maximizer with a ceiling of -0.3dB and a threshold of -9.0. I added 3.55 of Character and Stereo Unlinked the track at 5%.
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