Hi, > On Tuesday 10 August 2004 03:10 am, Jan Weil wrote: > > On Mon Aug 9 13:32:31 2004 Alastair Couper wrote: > > > While we're on the subject, could anyone point > to a tutorial or something > > > similar that covers mastering? Big subject, I > know, but I am wanting to Maybe it's simpler than we think. I'll try to explain by stating that Mastering is all about loudness and nothing else. That statement is close enough to true when there's nothing wrong with the mixes that you're working on. Assume you have 10 great sounding mixes but they aren't loud enough and that everyone of them has a max peak of -10.0dbfs. The first opportunity is to claim 10db--increase peaks to 0.0dbfs. JAMin and every other mastering solution have numerous gain stages; input, eq, compressor, limiter, boost/softclip, output. In this simplified scenario, we fix all ten mixes by increasing input gain 10db. The input gain might give us a max peak of 0.0dbfs for every song but this is unlikely to produce enough loudness. The single remaining challange is to increase the average response. The peak is the loudest frequency while the average is the max response level for the majority of the frequency range. How to describe this: In the audible range of 20Hz to 20kHz, all of our example mixes have one frequency peak from 250Hz to 500Hz. When 250-500Hz is peaked at 0.0dbfs, every other frequency is at -20.0dbfs. Well, how could it be any easier than this? It couldn't! If equalization is used to adjust 250-500Hz by -10.0dbfs the gap between the peak and the average is 10db. But that isn't enough so we select the low band of the compressor and apply a 10:1 ratio of compression to close the rest of the gap. This creates a new average peak at -20.0dbfs. We've got 20db of headroom and all of the aforementioned gain stages can be used to move the average up to 0.0dbfs. Now we've got loudness and a hell of alot of it. Obviously real mixes have numerous "errant" frequency bands and the objective isn't to bash the hell out of them. The example is far from reality but it describes the primary objective and demonstrates how to use the tools of a mastering application to reach the goal. Now we can put bandages on crappy mixes and excersize our last opportunity for creativity--an often mentioned mastering concept that makes me want to load the shotguns. But first-things-first, it's coffee time. ron > > I found the 'Articles' section at > <http://www.digido.com> to be > > a good starting point. > > > > But, of course, they're trying to sell the book. > > Aren't we all (in one way or another) > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
