New examples of ToTc Free Mastering Service!

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Hi there,

Nice attempt on mastering those 2 tracks but the boosted highs might be a bit overkilling to a certain extend ear piercing, especially the last (really loud) trumpet line in the end of the song "Barbarian" (By the way the trumpet is a real nasty guy to deal with if you attempt to tweak the highs in that song :wink: ) That part nearly blew my ears off :shock:

Perhaps you have been blasted by mastering heavy metal for too long (no offence) that it has either caused some damage to your hearing of high frequencies, or you have got too used to the sharp and bright distortion guitar tone quality in heavy metal music. My advice is get an EQ unit, hook it up to your monitor speakers and use it to compensate for your hearing imbalances be it due to damage or acquired taste. I myself has the problem of preference for bright tones.

Get a reference music CD or even any songs that you like and feel (or being recommended) that it has a good mix (I do not recommend heavy metal!) play it on your monitors and start tweaking your EQ til you get the sound that you think it's "right" to you. Do it with a couple of songs preferbably of different style and do it again after a week or many times more (but stick to the minimium interval of 1 week) until you are totally satisfied with what you are hearing from your monitors and each time you playback those same reference tracks it always sounds the same everytime.

The common saying goes as "you gotta get to know your monitors" but I would also add that you gotta get to know your own ears :)

Actually the original mixes done by mm de jong is already pretty good sounding by themselves as mentioned by M'Snah as well. Impressive :phones: Sometimes there can be mixes so perfectly done that it doesn't need any or minimal mastering at all.

By the way, I have attempted the 2 mixes as well for the fun of it so you don't mind I join in the fun? I can try to post my 2 horrible sounding masters here if you like (I still feel my masters are still a lil' too bright lol :idiot: ). I need to replace my power amp..... :cry:

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TotcProductions wrote:Really though, i'd like more comments on these....especially from people like kriminal and cptgone who asked to hear my work.
I didn't... but I'll try to have a listen this weekend (I'm at work now :( )

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TotcProductions, I'm intrigued, what exactly do you use for the "digital mastering" you do? Is it hardware master boxes or plugins? really expensive stuff or free/shareware?

just curious!

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You guys mind if I join in too? This is exactly the thing I'm interested in to learn masterin as well. I can't even blame my equipment only the accoustics of my room (and my ears :oops: ).

- bManic

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UrielKael wrote:Hi there,

Nice attempt on mastering those 2 tracks but the boosted highs might be a bit overkilling to a certain extend ear piercing, especially the last (really loud) trumpet line in the end of the song "Barbarian" (By the way the trumpet is a real nasty guy to deal with if you attempt to tweak the highs in that song :wink: ) That part nearly blew my ears off :shock:

Perhaps you have been blasted by mastering heavy metal for too long (no offence) that it has either caused some damage to your hearing of high frequencies, or you have got too used to the sharp and bright distortion guitar tone quality in heavy metal music. My advice is get an EQ unit, hook it up to your monitor speakers and use it to compensate for your hearing imbalances be it due to damage or acquired taste. I myself has the problem of preference for bright tones.

Get a reference music CD or even any songs that you like and feel (or being recommended) that it has a good mix (I do not recommend heavy metal!) play it on your monitors and start tweaking your EQ til you get the sound that you think it's "right" to you. Do it with a couple of songs preferbably of different style and do it again after a week or many times more (but stick to the minimium interval of 1 week) until you are totally satisfied with what you are hearing from your monitors and each time you playback those same reference tracks it always sounds the same everytime.

The common saying goes as "you gotta get to know your monitors" but I would also add that you gotta get to know your own ears :)

Actually the original mixes done by mm de jong is already pretty good sounding by themselves as mentioned by M'Snah as well. Impressive :phones: Sometimes there can be mixes so perfectly done that it doesn't need any or minimal mastering at all.

By the way, I have attempted the 2 mixes as well for the fun of it so you don't mind I join in the fun? I can try to post my 2 horrible sounding masters here if you like (I still feel my masters are still a lil' too bright lol :idiot: ). I need to replace my power amp..... :cry:
Yes, they are a bit heavy...I was aware of this at the time of mixdown....but it wasn't as easy as just EQing it, to get them to tone down...actually, i did quite alot of EQing on the high ends to soften the horn a bit....that's a soft as it got without making the whole track sound filtered...I suppose I could of set the limiter to a lower ceiling, but when I tried that, it flattened out the timpanies and all the nice gutsy booming of the low end. so this was what I could do. However, that one posted there isn't the final one....that was a remaster of the mp3....if you visit MM De Jonge's site, I've remastered all of his songs, there are "mastered" links to each one up there. go check those out...they're a little more under control.

Snooky: what i use here at home is Nuendo and a mix between various plugins. I try not to process the sound too much, as it tends to flatten it out. Just careful compression, maximizing, and light eq so far.....oh, and a limiter of course to keep the signal from going over the desired level. If I get a chance to bring it into the studio I apprentice at though, we've got well over a million dollars worth of equipment there....mostly vintage stuff....universal audio, lexicon, etc..etc....so i'd really like to bring it into their and see what can be done with everything.

peace!

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IMHO, as part of the examples, the original attempt at mastering (if there is 1) should be posted along with the pre-mastered.

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androidlove wrote:IMHO, as part of the examples, the original attempt at mastering (if there is 1) should be posted along with the pre-mastered.
what do you mean? There are before and after...which is the original mm version...and then my mastered version. so whats missing?

peace! 8)

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i mean, to get copies of my tunes for ya, i'll have to remove my mastering. what's missing is an example of mastering by the less than talented client so we know how much better you are than us :wink:

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androidlove wrote:i mean, to get copies of my tunes for ya, i'll have to remove my mastering. what's missing is an example of mastering by the less than talented client so we know how much better you are than us :wink:
oooooooh, i see. gotchya. lol, i don't know if i'd say that. ; )

peace!

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Just a quick note about these examples: I was pretty much unaware of mastering when I wrote these tracks :oops:
And still I'm figuring out how to properly mix, use eq etc.
So for the record you can safely consider both tracks 'unmastered' :wink:

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I just did a quick little master of Voyager.

Download bManic's master of voyager

Note that I was in a slight disadvantage as I used the posted .mp3 as the source, not the original .wav. Still, I'm quite happy with the results. I took a very different approach to TotcProductions, where instead of removing mids, I enhanced them as I felt the track is a bit 'thin'. Also, some of the beefing up comes trough 2 compressors in series (VariMu and Fairchild samples), former of them set to be stereo linked and the latter unlinked for some movement in the stereo field. I also used the SPL PQ2050 sample on the sintefex to tame the extremely aliasing highs. I also put the sonalksis EQ on the track for it's "dithering" kind of quality, it takes away harshness by just inserting it on a track. Then I put the lowpass filter on at -6dB setting from 19kHz.

[ Side note:

Mr de Jonge, what synth did you use for that 80's ripping chime/keyboard kind of sound? That vangelis like main sound? It aliases like crazy and really hurts the ears. You might consider replacing it with something more highfidelity. Or maybe you used a bad quality EQ to boost the highs on it? ]

I used hydratone eq to cut some -2dB at around 700hz to get that slight 'upright piano' sound to disappear. I also cut some at around 5khz with the avalon setting.
My monitoring was done trough genelec 8030a's but I currently have the subwoofer in the basement so I couldn't use it. This might result in me adding too much bass to the track. I tried to verify this with Voxengo SPAN but as always, a picture only tells half the truth. Finally I added some stereo widening with Voxengo Soniformer 2 (my favourite plugin of all time) and some limiting with Elephant 2 (RMS trough track around -11 dBFS).

Equipment used:

Sintefex Fx8000 (VariMu, Fairchild, SPL PQ2050)
Sonalksis EQ
Hydratone EQ
Voxengo Soniformer 2
Voxengo Elephant 2
Genelec 8030a monitoring from RME HDSP 9632

Time used in mastering: Approx 20 minutes.

Cheers!
bManic

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Great Thread Guys,
I'll give the tracks a listen over the week-end

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bmanic wrote:Mr de Jonge, what synth did you use for that 80's ripping chime/keyboard kind of sound? That vangelis like main sound?
There's lots of layered synths in it; my best guess is that you mean the imposcar or fm7xpress. When exactly does the sound set in? Let me know and I'll try to replace it with another one this weekend :)
B.t.w. no eq was used.

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bmanic wrote:You guys mind if I join in too? This is exactly the thing I'm interested in to learn masterin as well. I can't even blame my equipment only the accoustics of my room (and my ears :oops: ).

- bManic
lol. Mine too. Good mastering you got there :wink: and oh yes I love elephant 2. It's one of the most transparent limiter plugin you can find.

Mastering to me, as I would describe is like delicate surgery so I would recommend a FFT EQ or similiar where you can tune into specific problematic frequciencies unless you require drastic adjustments which then you may proceed with you usual favorite EQ.

Soniformer is excellent as well, as dynamic EQ'ing ("EQ'ing" via multiband compression/expansion) is preferable than using EQ itself (unless you're using a linear phase EQ :) )and when done correctly the end result will be a very transparent mix.

However I do not understand why did you still go thru Hyrdatone since you already got Sonicformer? I can understand that why you used the SV-517 as it really adds warmenss into a track due to it's analog modelling. You might as well just use the SV-517 to do your LP and the cuts at 700kHz and 5kHz (actually the area around 4kHz to 5kHz) or just use Soniformer for the 2 cuts instead for more transparency.

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UrielKael wrote: However I do not understand why did you still go thru Hyrdatone since you already got Sonicformer? I can understand that why you used the SV-517 as it really adds warmenss into a track due to it's analog modelling. You might as well just use the SV-517 to do your LP and the cuts at 700kHz and 5kHz (actually the area around 4kHz to 5kHz) or just use Soniformer for the 2 cuts instead for more transparency.
I did use the Sonalksis EQ to do the Lowpass filtering as it's lowpass is very nice. However, for general equalising, (cut and boost) Hydratone is far superior quality, which is why I used it to cut the mids and 5khz area.
Soniformer is actually not as transparent as one would think. It does still compress thuss messing with the transients and it's a multichannel device which can lead to some problems. I mainly use it for the stereo enhancement, sometimes to tune problematic frequencies. An equaliser was preferable in this situation, hence hydratone.

Cheers!
bManic

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