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Robert Wiley
Went over CH 19 today at my mentors place and it was about mastering. When I got there we quickly went into the main studio because Donnie actually had something he had to master plus the studio was booked at 2. So Donnie opened up the project, it was a song for a movie where the girl sings and there was a little rap melody in the middle and back to the girl. Donnie talked about Waveburner - how its the premiere software used when mastering. First off the general idea of mastering is to make the recording bigger, louder and fatter. With Waveburner it allows you to embed data onto your disc almost like an ISRC code which tracks everything. Donnie told me first you look for clipping then you go about normalizing it. He then opened up a plug in he has that's a multi band compressor which broke down into the low-lows,low mids, high mids, and the high highs. He showed me how he could manipulate certain parts by moving it vertical but also moving horizontal as well. After punching up the vocals and lowering the voice in the rap a little we checked it again by normalizing it. We had fatten the sound, it was fuller, richer and it did not sound like the girl was singing in a box. So after normalizing the last process is "Dithering" - and that's when alittle noise is added the the mix to cover up any random noises that might have been introduced in the studio. After that the process was done, he bounced it to a WAV file and saved it on his desk top so he could send it out later. The whole process took maybe 30-40mins.
Donnie told me this same process is used in post production as well. You would bounce to 2 channels and use your compressor+limiter to make it louder. The main focus is to enhance your mix....
After I asked Donnie about how he approaches his mix's. He said he usually uses Time Based Effects on delays and reverb. He uses parallel compression on kicks and snares and with vocals he starts with eq and then compression. Everything is soo subjective he told me, in the beginning you compare it to commercials you hear. Of course later on after you 'you've done a few of these you have your own reference - thats what Donnie has. Its not rap and it was not pop or Rock...it was in the middle....different. So we left it at that, I made an appointment next week and I'll take my final there and he mentioned that he ordered the new console and went ahead and ordered a new patch bay and some other stuff that should be arriving starting next week. I told Donnie that if some of the stuff is here, I'll help him take out and install stuff which should be cool.
