[Ardour-Users] Plugins for mastering: suggestions ?
Niko Efthymiou
nefthy at nefthy.de
Tue Sep 8 08:12:16 PDT 2015
On 08.09.2015 16:09, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> On 09/08/2015 04:03 PM, mn0 wrote:
> I should mention an interesting approach used by a colleague of mine: he
> always uses a multiband compression tool with his favourite setup in the
> master bus (something like the Waves L3), and mixes "into" that. This
> could be a handy approach for quick results. You have the fatness of a
> multiband compressed sound, and you have immediate control over what
> each of your mixing decisions does in the sum compressor.
Mixing is about:
- take your recorded sources, process and combine them to make them
sound good according to your taste and imagination.
Mastering about:
- make the mix translate as good as possible on a wide variety of
devices, from your smartphone to a highend stereo (just try listening to
one of your mixes on 10 device... the way to madness here lies).
- reduce dynamic range, so that the mix sounds louder preferably without
loosing too much punch and dynamic feeling (which is quite often
overdone IMHO, but people will complain and *dislike* it if its not
somewhere along the usual lines of the genre)
- make a set of songs sound more consistent, like they are an album and
not a compilation of randomly selected tracks.
- make crossfades, queue points, etc.
To me it makes sense to do that as a separate step, after your done with
mixing, else you will always have to think about how the master bus
compressor or whatever plays along with the parameter changes you make
at a totaly different place. Things can sound totally crappy, if the
parameters on the mastering plugins are wrong and those parameters
depend on your input signal. There are some advocates of mixing into bus
compression though.
Greets Niko
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