My “Mastering Chain 9-24” template that I’m currently (literally right now as I type this) using for the next album release looks like this:
I’ve mentioned TB Equalizer Pro before. It’s become my go-to equalizer, and it’s getting more use than I ever had for all my EQs combined thanks to its Transient/Sustained, Direct/Ambience and various dynamic options, as well as a very effective brickwall highpass filter. So it’s no surprise I prefer it for mastering as well as on individual tracks. That said, so far it’s had very little to do because everything’s already in pretty great shape.
Just released yesterday, Waves Curve Equator is a dynamic auto-EQ tool in the same neighborhood as Gullfoss, Soothe, TEOTE, Wavefactory Equalizer and others. Despite the marketing speak, none of the tools in this category is as effective at fixing truly obnoxious resonances as manually setting up EQ is. But many of them successfully add a bit of polish and clarity. You may or may not be able to consciously notice a difference between the “before” and “after” but things just sound 5-10% nicer. Equator, so far, has been doing a great job at this (offering a bit more sculpting than many and some handy additional options.
DDMF MagicDeathEye is an official emulation of the coveted Magic Death Eye tube-based compressor. I like it because it’s basically foolproof, or “respectful of the source material” as they say. Unless you just crank it up too loudly and it distorts in something further down the chain, you can’t make it sound bad. Sometimes, like with Equator, stuff just sounds better after having run through it. The goal though is to get a bit louder. In my recording process I tend to record at safe levels, quiet-but-not-too-quiet, and normalize to -3dBFS true peak as a starting point. Having done that, I can typically just use some default settings on the compressor and it’ll be good.
SideMinder Max makes sure the stereo image isn’t too wide anywhere (phase correlation issues) while letting me enhance or restrict the width if I want to across four different frequency ranges. My goal is a good stereo image in headphones. Usually by this point though, I have already taken care of any real issues so this is just a last safety measure.
Elephant is my limiter. A chance for a small bit more volume boost perhaps, and more importantly, a guarantee that the peaks of my signal stay below -1dB to make sure whatever compression algorithms Bandcamp uses don’t glitch out.
Span, Correlometer and Youlean Loudness Meter are visual tools for analyzing the results, making sure levels are right and I don’t have anything weird happening. These are no substitute for using one’s ears of course, but still helpful.
Not shown here: OVC128. More often than not I run the output of Bitwig’s mastering pass through this one in Sound Forge. It oversamples 128 times, boosts the signal, clips the peaks and then re-cuts — all of this lets me increase the overall volume some more without introducing anything nasty.
Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy here in terms of getting levels and EQ right. But this is a process that works well for me, and most of the time I can do it on autopilot with my saved template settings. With the music I make I am very much not looking for “pure” sound — I don’t worry about converters, EQing too many times, noise floor etc. but I am picky about certain things, and this setup lets me get it right.
I do have a name for the album — I realized there was a certain theme to some of the titles and sounds, connected by an obscure quote from another musician, and a general vibe. The cover art is really not my mental “picture” of the scene I associate with all of this, but I think it works.
What does not work is the Kickstarter for Aodyo Loom, the ribbon-style MPE controller I was so looking forward to. They have spent all the money, they have found that manufacturing costs are out of their reach, and they’re very likely to just go bankrupt and be unable to refund their backers, unless an investor swoops in to bail them out, which seems unlikely.
This is a known risk for Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc. and in my experience, things do usually work out pretty well. (I’m a little more leery of backing indie game developers this way because I’d rather have a playable demo to know I’m going to enjoy the game, but still, a good majority of them do release something.) So I’m not super upset about losing the money this time — it wasn’t that much — just disappointed in not being able to have this seemingly ideal controller.
What I want in a controller is:
- not hideously expensive (this eliminates several “Serious Instrument” options)
- compact, preferably in the 12 inch wide range.
- full support for pressure control; I usually want to use pressure rather than gated envelopes to control levels/filters/etc.
- allows smooth pitch glides.
- reliable.
I guess my hopes are now on the Erae II, which was running under its own Kickstarter and is supposed to be released Any Day Now. There have been public demos and several YouTubers actually playing them, so unless they’ve reached the same manufacturing wall that Aodyo ran face-first into, the outlook seems to be pretty good. This is fancier, and at the non-Kickstarter price, more than I would have liked to pay (but maybe I could snag a used one) but seems worthy from what I’ve seen so far. I might decide that I just don’t need it though… we’ll see.