FinalMix compared to?

[chance11]

LOL

[Kingston]

Hehe,

it certainly has been a fun thread this far. I'm surprised no one has mentioned virus, tarnce or (*gasp*) 303 since things are so heated up.

craftism, overly simply put ... the concept that faffing around over technical aspects of a given work of art (whether it be music / visual / literary / whatever) has a value greater than worrying about the ideas or emotional content therein ...

I think we've pretty much covered worrying about ideas and dealt with emotional content by now.

[bmanic]

Well, even though I was half-joking, the truth is that I've never gotten "Chug Cock" to sound good coming through friends' home stereos. And since it gets requested at parties a LOT, it'd be cool to have a mix that stands at least reasonable OK alongside the rest of the music from commercial CD's.

I've finally got some time on my hands would love to try my hands at 'mastering' that song on my humble setup at home. I always find these kind of projects extremely informative and I enjoy it very much too! Just make sure it's a proper format, that is, .ape .flac .wav in atleast 44,1khz at 16bits.

Also, it would be good to get some information about how you want the thing to sound? What do you want the mood to be. Hard, punchy, soft, melancolic etc.. these are all things that can be brought forward in the mastering stage and thuss enhance the song in more than just a technical way. Of course, if you do not provide any information the mastering engineer just has to use his/her own artistic judgement and taste, which can sometimes go totally wrong (see the Thruth about Xarcs thread in the UAD forum).

Now, the files themselves ARE home-recorded using poor equipment, so that's a real challenge to overcome in the best of situations. So the next question is: How raw do you want it? I can go all the way back to totally unprocessed tracks, or I can simply give you my current stereo mix minus any "fake mastering" treatment it's gotten.

The former would produce a better end result, which is probably only in MY best interest, and the latter would be more true to the spirit of the 'competition' in that you're just trying to fix a bad stereo mix, not do a complete mixdown job. I'm leaning toward the latter as being more fair and true to the spirit of it all, but I don't mind going back to earlier edits and raw files, either.

It will most definately have to be that current final stereo mixdown without any 'mastering plugins' on the output (except dithering if you are in a 32bit environment which is almost certainly the case, unless you plan to provide a 32bit audio file which would be rather large..). This whole thread is about the single program/plugin(?) finalmix which is/was marketed as a 'complete final mastering solution' plugin, wasn't it? So it's only fair to compare it with it was truly meant for. Any plugin can always be abused and in that way make it 'nice' in the context (for example,I use Voxengo Elephant quite often as a drumbus compressor and sometimes even on single sources).

Like I've said before, I also consider FinalMix to be a rather poor 'total mastering solution'. A combination of carefully selected plugins/outboard can do a much better job. This would give me a chance to put my mouth where the money is.. or how was that saying again?

Cheers!
bManic

[Kingston]

ahh, at least now we'll get some excellent mastering examples. if I'm perfectionist and a bitch about these fine phase issues, now you'll hear someone who is totally manic about it.. in a good way.

[bmanic]

who me? Surely not..

[bmanic]

how were they unfair?

Your initial stance *was* asking for retaliation. Your whole premise is that free software included with a budget priced sequencer sucks because it doesn't stand up to the awesomeness of the expensive alternatives that you have access to. Bravo! Does it sound as good as the stuff bundled with most other sequencers? In general, I'd say yes it does.

Umm.. Kingston has AFAIK always been a devoted fan of Voxengo. He even mentioned Soniformer 2 in this thread. Expensive plugins indeed.. especially considering that Final Mix used to sell for $$$ of dollars and no, it didn't sound any special at the time it was first released, several years ago.

- bManic

[jmh]

Lunch Money Spot on - on most accounts. I guess my stance on the issue is the typical, at least I participated on some level at an earlier stage, but witnessing what goes on, plus one of my pet peeves, the jump-in-the-middle posters, made my trigger finger itchy (as sadly the post quite clearly shows how little attention was spent on the thread and all aspects of the ongoing discussion and instead showed signs of "I disagree on some subject and have to respond even though I'm aware and making it obvious I'm not even following this properly" )

'The teach' refers to our beloved Rob though - I might be missing the humor behind that comment about not pulling a link in this context if the original author of the work clearly denies it, but heck, 13 hours with Freehand, this is what happens (as does trying to hit Freehand shortcuts in the browser )

Indeed, there's been useful bits spread all over... but the pissing contest which evolved, was reaching absurdity - or rather, managed to crash on planet Absurdia but we quickly distracted everybody with nutjob posts like mine

And hi bManic, we were waiting for you! =)
Regards,

JMH

[pHz]

no humour intended this time actually ...

slainte rob

[Lunch Money]

I never thought so many people would want to re-master "Chug Cock". <laff>

Let me get it sorted out (there's an annoying bit where my dog is barking in the background that I always wanted to fix because it's not as charming-sounding as it sounds) and I'll PM a link to the appropriate parties (no public link of the high-rez mix because my bandwidth on my humble webspace would be devoured quickly) and we'll see what everyone comes up with. <chuckle>

The vibe is very very easy to identify. The entire song is modeled after 2 80's hair rock songs: "Cum On Feel The Noize" by Quiet Riot and "Rock You" by Helix.

Greg

[IIRs]

I never thought so many people would want to re-master "Chug Cock". <laff>

With a name like that it must be good!

[Lunch Money]

It's fairly fookin' brilliant. Every 80's metal cliche is there except for 'screamed' vocals because none of us are vocalists. Frankly, the vocals are god-awfully atrocious.

Greg

[bmanic]

There's one risk with this thing though. If your recording contains already a lot of un-intended noise and generally only a mediocre mixing/production, the problems with Final Mix versus selected separate processes might not be as dramatic as on a high quality mix. The better the original mix the more care a mastering enginer has to take with the choise of tools.

- bManic

[headquest]

Having tried manfully to keep up with the higher level arguements going on in this thread, there is one thing that continues to puzzle me...

Given the expensive tools and obvious expertise that are available at the higher end of the professional mastering food chain, how come so many commercial releases sound so godaweful?

[e.g. that new Kate Bush single sounds like somebody compressed seven shades of shit out of the dynamic range ]

[jmh]

The short answer might be 'loudness wars'... the longer answer might be something like 'as the consumers generally don't care about the quality and prefer to listen to music in less than ideal situations, music that is targeted and processed accordingly generally is more viable to gain commerciall success'.

Not to mention it's the record companies who pay the high salaries the top names want, these top names providing what the record companies want - a constant square wave stream with little or no dynamics that sticks out or at least sounds similar to everything else getting broadcasted - a constant square wave stream with little or no dynamics...

Regards,

JMH

[pHz]

Having tried manfully to keep up with the higher level arguements going on in this thread, there is one thing that continues to puzzle me...
Given the expensive tools and obvious expertise that are available at the higher end of the professional mastering food chain, how come so many commercial releases sound so godaweful?
[e.g. that new Kate Bush single sounds like somebody compressed seven shades of shit out of the dynamic range ]

market pressure and the radio / TV loudness race ...

slainte rob