mastering audio by Bob Katz

[eugene]

hey all,

im about half way through Mastering Audio by Bob Katz and i gotta tell ya... its a good read. lots of history and fundamentally important stuff to help you make your mixes better.

if anyone out there knows of any good mastering (and mixing sites) web sites, pass them along. thanks in advance.

[IIRs]

Yeah. Bob Katz is my hero!

Essential reading for everyone IMO..

[xander]

hey all,

im about half way through Mastering Audio by Bob Katz and i gotta tell ya... its a good read. lots of history and fundamentally important stuff to help you make your mixes better.

if anyone out there knows of any good mastering (and mixing sites) web sites, pass them along. thanks in advance.

I reckon Golden Ears is a great ear training course if you have the gear to then use what you've learned. I'll probably buy it when I upgrade my system.

[Mr. Tunes]

yeah something like Golden Ears would be essential since so much of mixing and mastering is a listening art just as much as it is technical which you would get with bob katz.

i'll be honest though i think that a lot of mixing is so complicated to me that i prefer to continue my old way of doing things the dumb way and just hearing stuff out on my own. granted it has helped learning the fundementals of EQs and compressors etc. but every style of music is so different that it's hard to tell people what settings are "good" and bad. the best thing ever would be able to watch a great mixing engineer go at it for a month straight. follow him/her into work everyday and just watch them - or better yet get to watch them mix YOUR music for a month. fantasy world.

now i wonder if anyone has made a basic sort of Golden Ears series at a low price?

[xander]

yeah something like Golden Ears would be essential since so much of mixing and mastering is a listening art just as much as it is technical which you would get with bob katz.

i'll be honest though i think that a lot of mixing is so complicated to me that i prefer to continue my old way of doing things the dumb way and just hearing stuff out on my own. granted it has helped learning the fundementals of EQs and compressors etc. but every style of music is so different that it's hard to tell people what settings are "good" and bad. the best thing ever would be able to watch a great mixing engineer go at it for a month straight. follow him/her into work everyday and just watch them - or better yet get to watch them mix YOUR music for a month. fantasy world.

now i wonder if anyone has made a basic sort of Golden Ears series at a low price?

Yeah -- kinda pricey

Well, I enjoy the whole 'art' so much I guess I love all the paraphernalia, courses, tutorials, CBTs, etc., with the plus that there is usually a little bit of solid wisdom wisdom in all of them. So I guess, as an 'afficionado', Katz's book is a must have (along with E.J.'s chart - so cool )for your fire-side collection.

[Mr. Tunes]

well from what i know, that bob katz book is up there with only a few other publications as being "must read", and of course i didnt read yet so there are a lot of bad things about my mixes!
what is E.J.'s chart?

[xander]

well from what i know, that bob katz book is up there with only a few other publications as being "must read", and of course i didnt read yet so there are a lot of bad things about my mixes!
what is E.J.'s chart?

It's a "chart made by EJ Quinby at Carnegie Hall in 1941, showing the relation between musical pitch and notation, frequency, and the ranges of all the instruments of the orchestra, singing voices, piano and organ." (excerpt from Bob Katz's site)

It really is a cool chart that basically displays all the tweak-to-ear freqs of the major note & pitch producing sounds. Pretty handy actually!

[LBN]

I suggest checking out John Vestman's site so you can pick up great advice like mastering to a firewire drive because it sounds warmer than an internal drive.

[meroveus]

I suggest checking out John Vestman's site so you can pick up great advice like mastering to a firewire drive because it sounds warmer than an internal drive.

Hey thanks for that site - what a fcuking classic!
Here's a quote which jumped out and hit me in the eye :
"Toslink/fiber optic cable doesn't sound as good as AES/EBU or BNC"

[M'Snah]

Yeah. Bob Katz is my hero!

Essential reading for everyone IMO..

How come you never mentioned that before? except in every thread about mixing / mastering where you post

I recently bought and received it too, because of your recommendation earlier. It's a wonderful book, but hard to read more than one chapter at a time, there's too much information to digest

I suggest checking out John Vestman's site so you can pick up great advice like mastering to a firewire drive because it sounds warmer than an internal drive.

I heard a rumour that Vestman taught Katz everything he knows...

[Mr. Tunes]

Here's a quote which jumped out and hit me in the eye :
"Toslink/fiber optic cable doesn't sound as good as AES/EBU or BNC"

yeah it's really insane stuff, hard to believe. i dont know if any human ear can hear these differences. Vestman is clearly superhuman he might've been crossbreeded with a dog to get such sensitive hearing.

[LBN]

yeah it's really insane stuff, hard to believe. i dont know if any human ear can hear these differences. Vestman is clearly superhuman he might've been crossbreeded with a dog to get such sensitive hearing.

So you're saying he's a son of a bitch?

[hoffy]

Bobs site digido.com is good

and so is charles dye's harddisklife.com

don't mind planetoftunes.com either

probably my links are wrong but ask google for confimation

[maxhodges1]

Isn't Katz book pretty much totally outdated if your recording digitally? Correct me if I'm wrong, but his K system and talk about headroom doesn't really apply to digital recordings. Don't clip in digital (stay below 0) and your fine.

[beej]

Isn't Katz book pretty much totally outdated if your recording digitally? Correct me if I'm wrong, but his K system and talk about headroom doesn't really apply to digital recordings. Don't clip in digital (stay below 0) and your fine.

The K system and headroom is *every bit* as important with digital systems. In fact, the K system was really designed with digital in mind, seeing as it's always tricky using lower levels on tape because of noise concerns.

The old myths, such as trying to track close to 0dBFS to ensure you get hot levels, or "if I turn stuff down I lose resolution and aren't I degrading my audio?" are outdated, incorrect and bad practice.

Record at 24-bit, track and mix at medium levels with plenty of headroom, and leave the limit-to-0dBFS process until you are mastering your tracks, and your music will sound the better for it.

And even the "don't clip in digital" is incorrect. You should never clip or even approach 0dBFS on your main output, which will distort, either directly or on the reconstruction waveform at your convertors. But most decent DAWs you can go way over 0dB in the mixer without problems as they have *lots* of headroom (typically around 1500dB or headroom in a optimum 32bit floating point mixer.

The one caveat to that is some plugins don't work in 32f, and instead use maybe 24bit fixed, so in thes you do need to watch your input levels, as their fixed point implementation means you can clip the inputs of those and cause unwanted distortion.