notesdontmatter

Audio Arts – Week 12 – “Mastering Pt 2"

After another round with the MC4, I believe I’ve managed to gain comparable loudness to the Martin Pullan example of ‘Smoke on the Water’ live. The differences seem to be in my preference for the ‘smiley face’ EQ sound which drops out the midrange somewhat, giving a crisper separation between bottom and top end. I’m relatively satisfied with my kick drum sound, but the snare lacks something in comparison to Martin’s effort.

In attacking the various frequencies with substantially more gain than last week, I suspect there is a little peaking going on here and there. This is often hard to decipher with heavy rock music, as there is desirable distortion incorporated as a deliberate part of the sound. I utilised the MC4’s ability to isolate frequencies to focus on narrowing the Q a little more than last week. To get that authentic David J Dowling edge, I ended up stacking two Joe Meequalisers at the insert stage with (I only realised this when I was doctoring the images) exactly the same settings. It feels as if it somehow detracts from my ingenuity, to have just added another plug-in, rather than fighting what I had for the right sound, but if it’s there, use it I guess.

At the end of the day, I think my result sounds like it has my personal staple (whether it’s particularly unique or desirable to anyone but me, I don’t know), and Martin’s sounds like it’s supposed to, based on my cultural conditioning to what commercial music is meant to achieve sonically.


Click here to link to online folder containing the Martin Pullan example and My example.


Reference:

Grice, David. “Audio Arts – Week 12 – Mastering Pt 2.” Tutorial presented at Studio 1, level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 29th May, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 3:41 PM