Do you MASTER audio yourself, and what do you use if so?

[deanmass]

Per Anderton's article in EQ. I am curious what the users on here choose to do, what they have used, and what their experiences have been...

[WFTurner]

I always careful how I refer to mastering when I'm refering to my stuff. I'm a songwriter making demos and while I work hard to get the tone and levels as strong as I need in the mix I usually find I need to tweak and squeeze to get my stuff to a level of loudness I think my material needs and still have some sense of dynamics. Thats somewhere in a -14.5db to -15.5db average RMS area with peaks that stay away from 0.0db and hang around the -1db area. In no way do I consider this mastering, just some light limiting and subtle EQing. I've done a lot of this with Wavelab with good luck. Every once in awhile I might thru a mix in Sound Forge and use the dynamic compression in it. Lately since I moved from the AMD586 to this new machine where I can work with everything in one window I've been throwing a plugin I like alot, AIPL Warm Tone in the master channel and using it's tape simulation as a simple limiter and making any EQ changes, that become necessary as I push the signal a bit, right in the mix. I usually only need a couple db of gain to make me happy but even a small gain like that can really make the low end and that harsh high midrange stuff a problem. Somehow making those changes in the mix rather than a print of the mix, feel and sound better. If I was truly trying to make artist quality release cuts, I wouldn't do anything that resembled mastering. I'm too tired and closed minded about the piece come that time. [ 02-14-2002: Message edited by: WFTurner ]

[Mr Darling]

I always 'master' our tracks before letting A&R guys listen to it. I always let a pro master our tracks before they reach a CD.. I use to 'master' using only my TC gold channel. Now that I got my new powercore I'll probably use that one... I always keep a DRY version and compare a lot before sending the finished tracks... I always send the dry version for mastering

[Duhduh]

I use Sound Forge with Waves Ultramaximizer and Waves 10 band eq. Then I mormalize if it needs it. Ive been using less normalizing lately to try to keep the dynamics of the music. It sound so much better that way. Sometimes if I REALLY want to keep the dynamics, I'll just use volume increase to bring the levels up.