I’m currently mastering Rocket To The Moon and Sea of Tranquility, and it’s informative because the two songs sound very different and what works for one doesn’t work for the other. So it’s a good exercise to learn this set of plugins and what to do with them. One thing I can tell you is my studio monitors don’t have enough low-end power and precision, so it’s hard to get a strong and balanced bass. So it’s alot of listening on different systems.
My good stereo upstairs has great speakers and lets me listen to a bunch of discs in shuffle mode, which is great to compare tracks, but right now the left channel seems to be on the fritz. Hope it’s just a wire but I haven’t had the chance to investigate. The downstairs stereo is almost as good – not quite as clear but good mid and bottom – but only has a single CD deck. Hoban (the Pilot) has a pretty good stereo, but the bottom is a bit muddy and I’ve been fiddling with that since I got the car and am not really satisfied yet. It supposedly has a subwoofer but I don’t even know where the speaker is. Probably somewhere stupid like under the back seat. I wonder if the phase is reversed. Or maybe it’s a virtual subwoofer with bad bass management software. The ipod with the cheap earbud headphones on a noisy train is the lowest common denominator. My train reading these days, BTW is the Mastering Engineer’s Handbook, the third in the series along with tracking and mixing.
I’ve done three shots at masters of both the songs. The second RTTM was pretty good. On my first attempt I thought the cymbals were a bit clanky and bass a bit muddy, and I ended up going back to the mix to clean that up. My signal chain includes a dynamic eq/compressor and then a compressor/limiter. I find the limiter is the single most important thing in a song with drums, since most of the peaks are on drum hits. It’s pretty easy to get an extra 3dB, but past that it’s hard. I’m realizing my mixes are already pretty hot, and the compressors start to change the sound if you put them on too thick. Two moderate compressors in series seems to work better than a single strong one.
SOT, on the other hand, was completely destroyed by the same setup. All my carefully nuanced blends of instruments, reverbs and synths were smeared into an undifferentiated gob of sonic goo while the percussion suddenly jumped out in front. I did another set of mixes last night, and I’m hoping they’ll be the ones. But I need to listen back to them.
Also, I invented a new origami model last night: two intersecting cubes from a single sheet. Awesome model, but I stayed up way too late folding.