These services don’t only increase the mix volume and check for clipping: they do a whole range of things to your mix, including applying compression, EQ, limiter, and improving stereo imaging. Nowadays, there are online services that can take your smoothed-out mix and do all this “final sheen” stuff for you. Path B uses a new development, just made available to DJs in recent years. Good job, right? 3b …use an online mastering service Now, output your mix, and compare it to the original. This second method is the best way – but if you’re not comfortable with it, normalising is still a good option. Apply a limiter on the whole mix, so that any clipping this process causes on other tracks is dealt with – the limiter built-in to Audacity is fine.Increase the volume of the entire mix until the loudest part of the quietest track is just below the level that clipping (digital distortion) starts.You may have heard people talking about “normalising” mixes, and while that will work, you’ll get a louder result by doing this instead: Now we’ve fixed the volume so it is smooth throughout, if we are going down path A – the DIY route – we want to make our mix loud and punchy. Now, at this stage, you have two choices. You can also use effects in Audacity or other wave editors to alter the EQ, for instance, so now is the time to make these kinds of changes, too. Want to learn how to produce world-class mixtapes? Get our Pro Mixtape Formula course. This means you fix tracks that you mixed in too quietly or too loudly, after the event. What we want is it to be overall the same volume. Using Audacity (free, all operating systems) it is simple to increase or decrease the volume of parts of your mix. Next, use a wave editor to correct individual track volumes. Too many DJs skip this step – but it is a crucial one if the finished result is to sound professional. Edit to make the volume even throughout Fixing the volume of a quiet section of our mix, in the free tool Audacity. This is digital, no need to worry about tape hiss like in the old days!Ī quiet digital recording is exactly what we want to start with here, as mastering can do its thing much better if you give it “room” to. That means, basically, making a quiet recording. Record you mix with lots of headroomįirstly, record your mix with plenty of “headroom”. So let’s look at the process: How To Master Your DJ Mix 1. And as we’ve already seen, DJs absolutely can benefit from using it on their mixes. Normalising (getting the mix as loud as possible without causing clipping) is only a small part of what mastering can do for you, as we’ll see. Interesting aside: SoundCloud has an online mastering tool, and they actually forbid DJs from using it! (“And anyway,” they say, “It’s normalisation you need, not mastering.”) SoundCloud in full-on “let’s patronise DJs” mode. It can give your mix a radio broadcast-style “sheen” (because it is similar to what radio stations apply to their output, which of course also incorporates pre-recorded music).It can correct times when you overloaded certain frequencies, usually with two tracks playing mid-transition.It helps eliminate accidental clipping, getting your mix louder than you could manage otherwise.Yes, but there are many reasons why it’s a good idea to master your finished DJ mix nonetheless. But aren’t all the tracks in a DJ mix already mastered? Your mix comes back louder, fuller, and just overall better sounding. There are still professional mastering engineers, but there are also services that will let you upload a finished track or DJ mix, and they’ll do it for you, using AI. Mastering still happens nowadays, and you’ll maybe have heard producers talking about it. Vinyl is still mastered on machines similar to this today. A Neumann VMS66 vinyl cutting lathe, owned by Elysian Masters. Their job would be to make all the final tweaks to the EQ and other variables to make sure that the actual vinyl sounded as loud and sweet as possible. A studio would deliver, say, a finished 12″ single or album to be pressed, and a mastering engineer was the last person to hear that music before it was physically turned into grooves on the vinyl. “Mastering” comes from the old days of vinyl. (If you’re interested in having us actually show you how to do this, we talk you through doing it using Audacity, Ableton and online mastering services in one of the modules in our Pro Mixtape Formula course.) What is mastering? And it’s not hard to do! In this article, I’ll explain how. It makes it sound more coherent, and more professional. Put simply, mastering your mix gives it a final “sheen” that is hard to do any other way. That’s where mastering your mix comes in. So you’ve finished a DJ mix, and you want to make sure it sounds as loud and punchy as possible before sharing it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |