Mastering

Home of the blues & blues infected music

Posted by Sue on March 30, 2008 at 11:24pm in Recording: Discuss what makes a great recording

I recently learned of a mastering technique that greatly improves a recordings clarity and quality. It is called Seperation Mastering (you can Google it).

One of the first songs I recorded for Beatnik Country was a song called 'Life'. But I had my music computer die and the only file I had was a 56kbs mono file online I downloaded. I was already to re-record the song when I heard about Seperation Mastering, so I gave it a shot. You can hear the result on my profile. That started out as that 56kbs file. I think you'll agree it has great quality.

Another great use for Seperation Mastering is for Live recording. All the Live songs on my profile were mono recordings, mic'd from the PA speaker. And I think you'll admit the quality is very good for a live recording.

So what is Seperation Mastering. Basically you start with a stereo master. Then you use EQ to seperate the parts of the song. Lets say Vocals, or Guitar, or Bass. Those are saved as seperate stereo files. When your done seperating the parts you put all of them plus the original file you started with into a new file. Then you can move the individual parts so that they have their own spatial space. The added clarity is suprising.

Other benifits are you can add an effect to lets say the vocals without affecting the rest of the song - which you can't do with a normal stereo file. You can change the tone of the guitar without affecting the vocal tone. It basically gives you far more control over the final mix.

Mind you this isn't mixing. This is after everything is already mixed down to a stereo song file. It's more of a tweaking. And it gets your music very close if not equal to the best major lable masters.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Blind Rat on March 31, 2008 at 5:34am: This is interesing I will have a listen.

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Permalink Reply by Sue on May 12, 2008 at 12:14pm: Just had an interesting week. I went to register Beatnik Country on CD Baby and found out I had pending orders on a CD I considered out of print. Well as long as I am sending a box of the new CD's to them I might as well fill the remaining space in the box with Stripped Bare CD's to cover those sales.

So I dug out the master and actually listened to it for the first time in maybe 3 years. It Sucked!!! It was the first solo CD I did and to be honest I knew very little about producing a CD then. All the years in studios I really hadn't paid much attention other than what made my tracks better. Since that time I have gotten at least decent at mixing and mastering. And as I was listening to Stripped Bare I realised if any CD needed some seperation mastering, this one did.

As the title suggests it was a bare bones, guitar/vocal recording. But it was mixed as almost mono. It was muddy. Nothing stood out. So it's a good canidate to further explain exactly what seperation mastering is all about. And the steps taken.

1. Each song was converted over to a stereo wav file and given it's own folder.
2. The main wav file is opened up in my studio and using a 31 band graphic EQ and a parametric EQ I emphasised the vocal part. I then saved it as a vocal track and put it in that songs folder.
3. Reopening the main wav file again I did the same thing. But this time I emphasised the guitar part. And saved it as guitar track and put it in the same folder.
4. I reopened the main wav file. Then I imported the vocal file and finally imported the guitar file as well. I now had 3 stereo files to work with. All three had exactly the same information, but two were biased towards either the guitar or vocal. Now I could place the vocals and guitar where they had seperation and each could be heard much more clearly. There was more stereo seperation. Basically it opened up the whole song.
5. When I was happy I saved it as the original song in a master folder. One song down twelve more to go. And so it went till all thirteen songs were done.

I hadn't changed or added anthing to the original songs as far as content. All I did was filter certain parts so that I could seperate them - I could punch up the tones. On one song I had wished I'd added a bit of faint echo (which I could now do). But the original files remained intact. That touch of echo only affected the vocal. The guitar wasn't affected - something you can't do under normal mastering. And all this was done with the original stereo file.

So now I have a CD I feel much better about. And maybe sell a few more copies of.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Stefan Z on June 18, 2008 at 11:01am: This does sound interesting...I will have a listen after work. I love when accidents turn into new ways of doing things...especially with sound.; ▶ Reply to This