Yamaha AW2816 Tutorial - Page 25

Mastering Mastering Once you have completed the mixdown, you will perform mastering before writing the song to a CD-R disc. Mastering is the process of making overall adjustments to the song mixed to a stereo track. It may seem as though the song itself is essentially complete when you finish the mixdown. However, this does not guarantee that it will sound right when played back on a CD player. For example, it may be that the overall volume is low, so that you will have to turn up the volume further than when listening to other songs on CD, or the overall tone may be muffled, or there may be too much low-range sound so that the speaker distorts when you turn the volume up a bit. Instead of simply writing the mix to CD-R, you perform the mastering process to adjust the overall balance so that the song will be more "listenable." Although this is sometimes thought of as consisting of "fine adjustments," it is actually a very important step that determines the overall quality of the sound. Normally, EQ and compressor are used to adjust the sound during mastering. Professional engineers sometimes add a tiny amount of reverb to the overall sound to create more depth, or pass the digitally-recorded sound through an analog device to give it the warmth characteristic of analog processing. When multiple songs are recorded on one CD, significant differences in volume and tonal character between songs can make it unpleasant to listen to the CD. Thus, the mastering process also includes adjustments to the volume of each song, and determines the spacing between songs. In this section we are going to explain the process from making mastering settings through writing the song to a CD-R disc to make a CD that can be played back on a conventional CD player. s Accurate monitoring is essential! Although this can also be said for the mixing process, a good monitoring environment is essential for mastering. This is because not only the amp and speakers, but also the room and everything in it will affect the sound. If we wanted to be more particular, a great deal more could be said about this. If you use different equipment and a different room for monitoring, there will obviously be differences in the sound you that hear. For example in your private home studio, you might feel that the bass is weak, and boost the low range, but may be surprised to find that you hear nothing but bass when you play the song back at someone else's home. The ideal mastering environment is one with as little reverberation as possible, and in which the recorded sound and effects are reproduced as faithfully as possible (the technical term is "with a flat frequency response"). However in reality, only real professionals are probably able to do their mastering in a large recording studio. So how can you create the best sound during mastering? Through their experience in mixing down and mastering at a particular studio, professional engineers have gained a sense of how the music heard in that studio will sound on an average stereo system or "boom box." In other words, the best mastering is that which results in a song that sounds good when played back on any system. You should make an effort to listen to your song in a wide variety of locations. Listen to it on expensive stereo systems, cheap cassette players, portable audio devices, on a car stereo, ...and you will begin to see where your mastering is excessive and where it is lacking. Setting master EQ and dynamics It is not necessarily a rule that you must use EQ and compression when mastering. In this example, we will apply only a compressor to adjust the sound, and will not apply EQ. Press the STEREO channel [SEL] key, and use the MIXER section [DYN] key to access the dynamics parameters. On the AW2816, you can adjust the master EQ and dynamics settings while listening to their effect on the overall sound. While you are mastering you may feel like returning to the mixdown and changing something. For normal recording it is not possible to redo the mixdown once you are in the mastering process, but on the AW2816 you can recall scene memories and automix settings to go back and forth between the mixdown and mastering processes whenever you like. In general, mastering is a matter of "fine adjustments," as mentioned earlier, so if your mixdown has been brought to a high level of completion, you will have less to do during mastering. If mastering causes an abrupt change in the sound, you may want to reconsider the mixdown. s Equalizer (EQ) Mastering EQ is used sparingly, in cases where you want to adjust the overall outline of the sound after it has been mixed, or if the low range just doesn't sound quite sufficient. Conversely, you might cut the appropriate frequency range a bit to make the sound cleaner if the low range was excessive, or if too much sound ended up in the mid-range. In this example we will not be applying EQ to the demo song, but we recommend that you adjust the parameters while the song plays back, and notice how the sound changes when adjust each frequency region. 24 Tutorial