Live for mastering

czernoss · Post by **czernoss** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 12:22 am

Hello all,

I'm a DJ and have been learning to write music for about 12 months now. Most of the time, just solely using Reason 2.5. I also own Live - which I have been using for DJ'ing and creating mixes (up to now).

I'm now at the stage where I've written some tunes in Reason, that I'm really happy with. However, as expected, when mixed in with other published music (i.e. off vinyl) it sounds very muffled - hence needing some serious mastering to get that crispness to the leads and percussion.

The way I have been mastering so far, is to use Live to master each of the channels from Reason through reWiring and the standard plug-ins - which works ok, but not great. I have been doing some research and have not seen much about Live being used for mastering... so I suppose the questions I have are:

Is Live decent for mastering? Can it produce decent sound quality?
Would specific plug-ins help? If so, which ones?
When I research on the internet, I keep getting steered towards ProTools as being the most recommended DAW, however, it seems a waste of money to me if I already own Live and it does everything that ProTools can do - thoughts?

All feedback is appreciated, and thanks in advance!

Joshua Boden · Post by **Joshua Boden** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 12:29 am

Sound forge is one option....great peice of software......
Check it out.

jerry123 · Post by **jerry123** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 1:00 am

One thing worth noting is that if your tracks sound muffled, mastering is not a soultion. I would advise remixing your tracks, paying attention to the detail of individual sounds within, to try and up the quality level there. If it sounds muffled before mastering, it should sound muffled after mastering as well.

inis · Post by **inis** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 1:03 am

jerry123 wrote:One thing worth noting is that if your tracks sound muffled, mastering is not a soultion. I would advise remixing your tracks, paying attention to the detail of individual sounds within, to try and up the quality level there. If it sounds muffled before mastering, it should sound muffled after mastering as well.

very true. Mastering can make a recording sound amazing, but it cant fix much if the original music is messed up.

czernoss · Post by **czernoss** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 1:12 am

yeah maybe muffled was the wrong adjective to describe it. it's more that the hihats, synth leads etc. just don't have the real "punch" that i want. I'm sure that using a good compressor and EQ would help that.

stinky · Post by **stinky** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 1:54 am

There are mastering tools within Reason... you're best bet is to follow jerry's advice, and make it sound as best as you can in reason, without using a seperate application. Just getting a seperate app is not going to help you out... admittedly, Reason doesn't have the best sound quality alone(however, i do know several producers that use Reason, and their shit sounds dope..), but the mastering tools do a way better job than 2.5 .. that is, if you have 3.0... which, if you don't, you'll want to use something like Soundforge, T-racks, Ozone, wavelab, etc... i could go on all day, there are so many tools out there for mastering. But, you should really do the best with what you have, because like Inis said, nothing's going to help you if the original tracks sound like shit.

mr-e · Post by **mr-e** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:41 am

yeah maybe muffled was the wrong adjective to describe it. it's more that the hihats, synth leads etc. just don't have the real "punch" that i want. I'm sure that using a good compressor and EQ would help that.

- panning might also help to create separate spaces for each sound
- layering your main synth with a sin wave an octave lower might help

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:59 am

Live should work fine for mastering. It is not really the program that matters, but the plugs you use.

On the other han I can't really see that Live's built in plugs (Compressor II, EQ 4) should be any better than Reasons MClass devices.

But using Live will give you acccess to the whole VST universe, so if you want to go shopping you could use something like Izotope Ozone or the Kjaerhus devices.

Make really sure that warping is off for all tracks in Live before you try to mix/master!

jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:06 am

i can get to a certain point with live - then its of to my mates powercore... run it thorugh the dance master plugin

njh · Post by **njh** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:09 am

i have been using izotopes ozone on the master channel within live.
so far i have found ozone to be the best mastering plug in around. i could never get my levels up without distortion until i used ozone.

minimal · Post by **minimal** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:10 am

my advice is: get used to treat each single sounds in your mixes before going to the final "mastering" stage.
Mastering is kind of misused word sometimes... lots of skills, experience and gear knowledge are required to master a track, let's say "fine tune it".
It'not a ultramaximizer or any limiter that masters a track.
At the beginning I had no care of the sounds until the track was done, I thought I could have fixed everything later but after a while I changed approach, work on every sound as soon as it gets in the mix and since then I'm kind of more productive and my tracks start to sound quite pro now.
be careful with levels because if you end up with a 12 tracks song which 10 needs to be err.. leveled it's a mess and you loose track of the work!
EQ is the key, where is normally better to cut than to boost.
Don't misuse compression, maybe get some tutorials from the internet (www.digido.com for example, lots of useful and well written tutorials) to understand the basic of compression, take your time to have fat sounding tracks, you'll be more satisfied with your own work.
Another great thing to do is to pass along to some friend your tracks and let they mix them, it can be good since they hear it for the first time and can spot little errors or come up with new ideas.

sgingras · Post by **sgingras** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 5:11 pm

The may issue of computer music has a great article titled "build your own mastering suite"....It's done in Cubase sx, but all the steps are easily transposed to live.

Essentially you are breaking your track down into 3 sections: lows, mids and highs using roll-off eq and routing through return tracks. It is very simple and easy to use and my tracks came out sound much clearer (but make sure not to over eq your highs too much or it will sound really tinny). the entire thing was done using lives internal plugins except for a stereo imagizer (i used wave arts) but pluggo and mda (free) have them as well.

I was having much the same trouble as you....and this helped alot. The other thing i would look into is some mixing tutorials. It's amazing how far a little information about proper use of compression/panning/levels/eq can get you.

it is a steep learning curve and good luck.

*'mastering' is being used here in the loosest of terms. these steps will help for basic listening..but remember that mastering is a true art and I've been told by an industry friend that there are only a handful of true expert mastering engineers.

-Stefan

dj superflat · Post by **dj superflat** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 5:32 pm

i don't understand this fear of mastering in the digital age. mastering's not voodoo, anyone who's fiddled with the eq on a car stereo has effectively done it. don't get me wrong, guys like bob ludwig are wizards, and you can really screw up a track by overcompressing, etc. but the main problem used to be that you went in and paid bob a gazillion dollars for his time, you did it once, and couldn't do it again (you couldn't really get track mixes back either, even with SSL automation or whatever). so if you blew it in matering, you really blew it, permanently. now, you can "master" your track, burn it to disk, and listen to it on all sorts of systems over the course of a month to figure out what you did wrong, try to fix it, repeat, etc.

i'm not discounting the value of the star masterer who doesn't need multiple takes, can master once in a way that makes your music better in almost all environments. but most of us don't need that level of help. and there are many, many engineers who claim to be able to master who will nonetheless do radical harm to your mix. (i've also never understood the whole maximizing levels fetish -- good way to ensure you music has no life, and people can just turn it up anyway (i know, you don't want your track to sound lame when it comes on after someone else's pumping mix, etc.).)

jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 5:32 pm

sgingras wrote:The may issue of computer music has a great article titled "build your own mastering suite"....It's done in Cubase sx, but all the steps are easily transposed to live.

Essentially you are breaking your track down into 3 sections: lows, mids and highs using roll-off eq and routing through return tracks. It is very simple and easy to use and my tracks came out sound much clearer (but make sure not to over eq your highs too much or it will sound really tinny). the entire thing was done using lives internal plugins except for a stereo imagizer (i used wave arts) but pluggo and mda (free) have them as well.

I was having much the same trouble as you....and this helped alot. The other thing i would look into is some mixing tutorials. It's amazing how far a little information about proper use of compression/panning/levels/eq can get you.

it is a steep learning curve and good luck.

*'mastering' is being used here in the loosest of terms. these steps will help for basic listening..but remember that mastering is a true art and I've been told by an industry friend that there are only a handful of true expert mastering engineers.

-Stefan

HOw would you route hi, mid and low from channels to seperate "master" channels???? multi band compressor on your master would that do the same job

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:30 pm

jeskola wrote: HOw would you route hi, mid and low from channels to seperate "master" channels???? multi band compressor on your master would that do the same job

Route all channels to a bus. Split into three new tracks. Cutoff EQ. Besides doing multi band compression, the idea was to be able to further treat each frequency band. This is very much how Ozone does it.