RE: I Finished My First Album
July 9, 2017 at 6:01 am
(This post was last modified: July 9, 2017 at 6:03 am by Edwardo Piet.)
@Homeless Nutter... thank you so very much for this simple but effective and essential piece of advice. I'm very new to the whole mastering thing and despite making music for almost 14 years this is the first time I've ever used an EQ... and I've been listening to my music at a quieter volume but as soon as I turn up the volume to a normal or loud volume the distortion you mentioned becomes extremely noticable.
And the essential thing is oh my god... the default master volume for my music program is 75% and so it seems that is what the program is designed for. I had it turned up to 100%. I turned it back down to 75% and instead of having 6 sets of EQs with 2-4 EQs per instrument... I've now got 6 sets of EQs with just 1 EQ per instrument... tuned for each one. That plus the 75% master volume instead of 100% and it just sounds so much cleaner. Already remastered the first two tracks that way and it sounds so so much nicer.
Thanks for the advice. It took me a while to notice what you meant at first. I thought you meant my distorted effects like distorted kicksdrums and bass lines and stuff which I love... I thought you meant that was leading to overly high decibels. I don't mind that but I realize you were talking about my mix as a whole not any specific instruments. Although the occasional instrument was overly loud. That was due to some instruments having more EQs than others... like the bells in SENT UPWARDS had the maximum 4 tuned EQs... and they must have all been turned up high (you can use EQs on my program to actually make things quieter too, I dunno if that's the standard, but the middle part of the EQ is the default volume... anything lower than that makes that specific pitch level quieter than normal, anything above makes it louder. Which is nice that I have the option to go quieter with the EQ because I swear I've seen some EQs before where turning the EQ right down is default volume and the only way to alter it is to turn up the pitches and there is no option to turn them down. It's another reason I avoided using EQs for so many years because not all of them seemed as helpful as the ones I'm using now).
Sounds so much better. Thanks so much Homeless Nutter... as always I'll keep the originals stored on my PC and Dropbox but once I've remastered all these they're going to replace the others on my Soundcloud. And you can haz seeing the difference
And the essential thing is oh my god... the default master volume for my music program is 75% and so it seems that is what the program is designed for. I had it turned up to 100%. I turned it back down to 75% and instead of having 6 sets of EQs with 2-4 EQs per instrument... I've now got 6 sets of EQs with just 1 EQ per instrument... tuned for each one. That plus the 75% master volume instead of 100% and it just sounds so much cleaner. Already remastered the first two tracks that way and it sounds so so much nicer.
Thanks for the advice. It took me a while to notice what you meant at first. I thought you meant my distorted effects like distorted kicksdrums and bass lines and stuff which I love... I thought you meant that was leading to overly high decibels. I don't mind that but I realize you were talking about my mix as a whole not any specific instruments. Although the occasional instrument was overly loud. That was due to some instruments having more EQs than others... like the bells in SENT UPWARDS had the maximum 4 tuned EQs... and they must have all been turned up high (you can use EQs on my program to actually make things quieter too, I dunno if that's the standard, but the middle part of the EQ is the default volume... anything lower than that makes that specific pitch level quieter than normal, anything above makes it louder. Which is nice that I have the option to go quieter with the EQ because I swear I've seen some EQs before where turning the EQ right down is default volume and the only way to alter it is to turn up the pitches and there is no option to turn them down. It's another reason I avoided using EQs for so many years because not all of them seemed as helpful as the ones I'm using now).
Sounds so much better. Thanks so much Homeless Nutter... as always I'll keep the originals stored on my PC and Dropbox but once I've remastered all these they're going to replace the others on my Soundcloud. And you can haz seeing the difference
