Mastering at Home

http://www.audiocourses.com/article1708.html

The subject of 'mastering at home' causes much debate in the audio
engineering world. More and more people are attempting to master their
work at home but in most cases the results are far from professional.
Read on to discover what steps you can take if you intend to master your
music at home.

First of all it must be stressed that mastering at home is always,
always going to far inferior to having your material mastered
professionally. Aside from all matters relating to equipment and
acoustics, the guys running these mastering houses are vastly
experienced and have 'golden ears'. To be under the assumption that you
will be able to produce similar results at home is foolish.

However, if you are insistent on performing your mastering at home there
are a few steps you can take that could increase the quality of your
efforts. Be warned, they are not cheap...

Acoustics

Firstly, and most importantly, you will need to tame the acoustics in
your listening room. Mastering rooms will have been built from the
ground up with the sole purpose of creating the best acoustical
environment. We will assume that you are using an existing room and that
you do not have the finances to build a new room, or build a room within
a room structure.

Presuming you are in a small room then you will more than likely have
problems with low frequencies due to standing waves and room modes. The
best option is to install a few bass traps into the room to help absorb
any troublesome low frequencies. Smaller rooms often suffer from flutter
echo - if you clap your hands or click your fingers in your room and you
hear a metallic after-effect then you are suffering from flutter echo!
This again requires some acoustic treatment to remedy, and acoustic
tiles are again the best option. You certainly don't need to cover all
the walls in the room with tiles, a few well placed tiles can be very
effective.

If you have a book case/CD rack/shelves etc in your room you can also
turn this into a rudimentary diffusion device by pulling all the
books/CDs/DVD/Videos etc different distances. Although this looks very
untidy it can help nullify some acoustical problems. Again, a purpose
built diffuser will produce better results but if money is very tight
the bookcase method may help a small amount.

There are many companies offering acoustic solutions for the home
studio, some of these offer all-in-one 'room kits' that provide you with
an assortment of acoustical products. The Auralex Complete Room Systems
are one such solution.

It is also important to lower the 'noise floor' in your room as much as
possible. This may mean moving any noisy equipment out of the room, and
working when there are no other noises in the house.

Monitoring

This is another area where you are unlikely to be able to compete with
the professionals. Mastering houses will often use monitors with very
flat frequency responses that can extend down to 15Hz or lower. Most of
the budget monitors on the market are almost completely unsuitable for
mastering purposes due to coloration across the spectrum and
insufficient low frequency response - many of the most popular monitors
on the market are incapable of putting out any real energy below 70Hz or
so leaving over an octave of information inaudible. One solution to this
is to add a subwoofer to the setup to provide the low end that many
monitors are incapable or producing. The Blue Sky Pro Desk is an example
of a budget monitoring setup that incorporates a subwoofer. However care
must be taken when setting up any system with a sub as if set
incorrectly subwoofers can cause more problems than they solve. If
you're on a budget it is probably wise to look at active monitors as
these should provide an optimal marriage of amplifier and speaker.
Companies such as Harbeth and PMC produce high quality monitors that
will give you a good insight during the mastering process.

Equipment

Presuming you already have your audio on your PC/Mac hard drive, you
will need either some good quality outboard equipment or plug-ins to
perform mastering duties, some method of metering levels/phase etc and
an audio editing package. The most common processes you will be applying
to audio are EQ, compression and limiting. Mastering quality outboard is
prohibitively expensive so it likely that you will wind up using
software equivalents. As with hardware, it is better to buy a few high
quality processors rather than an abundance of average processors. This
will force you to learn your equipments parameters and get the most out
of it. There is a veritable smorgasbord of mastering software available
at present, including T-Racks & Ozone, and packages from PSP, Waves,
Universal Audio and TC Electronic. These different solutions all have
their own sonic characteristics so the best bet is to try as many out at
your local music store or check out any downloadable demos from the
manufacturers website. Once you have picked your tools, learn them
inside out!

The Mastering Engineer(!)

This is where your ears and brain come in. Read books on the subject -
Bob Katzs Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science is probably the
definitive tome on the subject and most engineers, whether mastering or
recording, should make space on their bookshelves for this book. If
there is a mastering house in your area it may be worth paying for a
couple of your tracks to be mastered there just so you can see exactly
what the pros are doing. You can learn more in an afternoon spent
watching a pro than you can in years muddling about on your own. It's
also useful to compare your work with commercial recordings that you
like the sound of - there are some software applications available that
allow you to 'cheat' by stealing the audio footprint of one recording
and applying it to your own. Despite seeming like a short cut, this can
actually be very useful in showing you the problems in your own
mastering and as long as you don't use this kind of software as a crutch
it can be a great learning aid. Har-Bal is one of the more popular
examples of this type of application.