Son of the King

Last time in Part 1 we covered Recording audio and now were gonna go with masterizing the resulting tracks.

Best is if you have recorded everything in individual tracks, especially if your using adobe audition or audacity, so you can set the track volume and pan and apply virtual effects to the track without affecting the files.

Arrange all your tracks so it results in a decent, continuing song, meaning not having abrupt changes, but also not long fade-out’s between different parts. This part basically relies on your ears and what you see when you zoom in.

Next, export the whole session to a wav file and open it in a separate editing session. Now you can compare what needs to be changed in the main session. You want the whole thing not only to be audibly appealing, but also visually. So if you see that the chorus has a whole different volume than the rest of the song, you have to adjust the volume settings on the tracks in the session until it’s pretty, with as little intensity variation as possible between the different sections of the song.

So let’s assume that you have done that and are happy with the overall volume. Now, listen to the individual voice tracks to see if it’s Ok like it is or if something is still missing. If it sounds distant, apply a compressor effect, with an attack rate of 2:1 and adjusting the other setting until it sounds good. You can do this with any track, even instruments, if that makes it sound better.

Next apply a Filter, specifically a frequency equalizer where you have a bunch of sliders to set the intensity of frequencies between 20khz and 20hz. You can apply this to different individual tracks, especially on the bass to give it a fuller sound, though not overdoing it as your song will probably get played full blast on stereo systems and might be over-saturated with bass if you mess up here.

Now you can export it again as wav and edit it. Here you want to apply that same filter, raising the higher frequencies to give more shine to the song, not to much though and ajust the rest of the frequencies to get the best possible sound. Generally the middle freq. are Ok by default.

Applying a compressor to the whole mixdown might improve the overall quality, play around with that. Use it to adjust the overall volume, so that it’s mostly under 0db, but allow for some fluctuations into higher levels. This is very important, especially if you have multiple songs, that you have them all with the same volume level, so that when you listening to them later, one after another, you won’t have to be adjusting your volume all the time.

These are the essential basics, applying different effects and stuff is important, but can vary so much across different music genres that it’s impossible to give suggestions.

Have fun!