Ableton Forum

Alright folks,

Just finished messing with a track, and have mastered it up so it sounds pretty sweet on my studio monitors and headphones, but it fails miserably on my car-test, and no matter what I do I can't seem to get it to a point where I'm happy with the levels and general EQing! (it's *really* high on the mid in the car, and sounds pretty muddy, whereas tracks are normally quite balanced in there!)

Does anyone fancy having a listen and seeing if it's as muddy on their speakers, cus if so I guess I'm gonna have to spend more time screwing about with the levels!

Anyways, track lives at http://soundcloud.com/ed-j/fraught-with-static

Cheers, Ed


*EDIT*

Ok, I checked this out a bit more, and it seems that the export to audio is screwing the EQ on my track:

I'm exporting at 24/92 with dithering on pow-r 3, same as I normally do, but it seems to be messing with the levels a lot: could it be the dither, or is it just bypassing the multiband dynamics on the master for some reason?

Any ideas?

Cheers, Ed

it's *really* high on the mid in the car, and sounds pretty muddy

Yeah, thats what it sounds like to me on my crappy set up.

Cool track

Its a very busy track and you have quite a few elements in the track that are in the same mid to high frequency range competing with each other.
little bit of tweaking the eq's to give sounds their 'own space' wont hurt

nice track dude

Bump

I don't understand this and I'm not being sarcastic.

Why are you adding dither when rendering at 24bit?

As far as i understand it ( and thats not very much to be fair) dither needs to be applied when reducing the bit depth.

So for a final mastering act, you shoud have had a 24 bit stereo file in Live, then master with your multiband comp, limiter etc. then when you come to render you render at 16bit 44.1, with dither.

If you are rendering at 24 bit again then dither is not required, right?

Like i say, I'm no expert, but thats as i understood it and therefore it would be top of my list as to why your track sounds good before rendering and not afterwards.

Fair enough, neither do I sometimes, hence why I ask stuff like that

I was dithering mainly due to my background as a programmer, and the knowledge that, in most cases, selecting the bottom option in a drop-down results in the best results

I understand the concept of dithering (wrote a good few dithering algorithms in image processing domians for uni stuff), however I figured that it wouldn't make much difference when I was exporting on a high sample rate etc, and would drop the size of my exported file (which is already upwards of 800meg)!

With out being able to listen to your Song right now:

Dithering is ONLY needed/a good thing when reducing the Bitrate (24 to 16 bit for a cd for example)

Dithering should under all circumstances only be applied ONCE (or you will degrade your sound)

and dithering has to be the VERY LAST step in your processing, after all mixing, mastering and so on.

and pow-r dithering shapes the sound quite a bit, which works good with some material, not so good with other. For sure, it is not the safest dithering option to use. You should read about dithering in the Live Manual.

is there a beat?

bump!

Re-did it without the dither, sounds a lot nicer but it's still not the same quality as in Live, no matter what bit rate I use!

Anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers, Ed

How many total tracks in Live are you using?

Did you eq every track?

16 tracks, 11 with their own EQs (not one on the noises)
Generally 3-4 plus the drums playing at any one time

Master has multiband dynamics and compressor on it, sounds ace in Live, fails a little when I render it!

Would have thought the render would be very close to the sounbd coming from Live! ='[

iTunes sound enhancer / EQ enabled?

However, if you render at 32-bit and on the exact same sample rate that you had set up in your audio preferences, then the rendered file should be 100% identical with what you've heard. You might do a phase cancellation test to verify this.

Best,
Nico

sounds like a good song but yeah the levels are off, it is muddy during some of the song

As well as a muddy bass, the other points are this -

your midrange around 1.5k is VERY prominent, I would back that off 3-4dB.

you high end - all those fizzy Operator sounds are going FizzZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzz because there is too much high end in the 11-14kHz range. Try low pass filtering some of those synths at around 8-9Khz or bring down the 11-14 Khz range about 3 to 3.5dB - You mid highs are fairly quiet but balanced but then it's like someone introduced a 'female' flasher with 3 breasts and a huge penis in the 11-14 Khz range, it stands out that much !

Some other tips. Use lo cut filters on your synths (play around in the 250-500 Hz range until you find a good place where the bass cuts through without muddiness but the synths are not tamed too much as to lose potency) and reverb (try cutting 400-800 Hz on the low end, again sweeping through the EQ bands to find the best balance)to take out some of the muddiness in the bass end and also hi cut filter your reverb around 8.5 to 9 Khz as it is contributing both to low end mush and high end sparklie overload - if I burned this to CD and took it out to my car stereo (which naturally boosts highs by default) it would really sound like STATIC ! Also, that kick drum is a little too clicky for my taste, it's not a disaster but I would probably layer another sample on top, or change the kick sound.

The actual song itself was pretty decent though, so with a little fine tuning you'll get there.

Also - dither - you MUST dither if you are taking the file to a lower bit depth, so if you recorded 24 bit, mp3 and CD are 16 bit formats, so yes, you need to dither. Also, don't always think Pow-r 3 will be best. FOr this type of music, with less dynamic range, Pow-r 2 might be a better choice but try them both out.

leedsquietman wrote:but then it's like someone introduced a 'female' flasher with 3 breasts and a huge penis in the 11-14 Khz range

There's my new sig.