Tube Compressors - Pre-mastering question:

[martino]

When doing the final mix to send to the plant or whatever, I've realized that I need to get me a serious Tube Compressor to run the mix thru. (esp.now that i'm bouncing everything that was midi or live into logic).
This means renting a unit each time for now.
I've used the avalon, but wasn't that impressed.
Any suggestions?

[O'love]

you mean you want to do your own mastering?
this is very dangerous territory....because you need experience, very good ears, good listening environment and monitors..... experience is the most difficult part of it ;)

personally i force myself to get my mix good....mastering is not the place to fix a bad mix....so if your mix isn't good sounding fix it in the mix........ mastering to me is to bring the song up to the loudness of other commercial releases, without loosing to much dynamics, and in extreme cases add some touches of EQ to problematic areas which weren't fixed in the mix...

i don't believe in tube gear to much, a good transistor-based design can sound as good or better....it's all in the design...

personally i love voxengo curveEQ to do some minor EQ touches, and waves L2 or voxengo elephant to do the limiting...

i've also had good experiences with the focusrite mixmaster...

but i think the best solution right now to do home-mastering is the purchase of an UAD1 dsp-board.....

Olaf

[JamesNelson]

hey martino.. the avalon is one of the best..
dont use it for final mixdown, if you plan on sending to a mastering facility.. its best when tracking.. and use it on drum and bass...fast attack slow release.. Ive used different settings on almost every instrument.. if recording to digital like 20 bit adat, it really warms things up, and the final mix almost sound perfect.

[GrantB]

Originally posted by martino:
When doing the final mix to send to the plant or whatever, I've realized that I need to get me a serious Tube Compressor to run the mix thru. (esp.now that i'm bouncing everything that was midi or live into logic).
This means renting a unit each time for now.
I've used the avalon, but wasn't that impressed.
Any suggestions? Serious = http://www.anthonydemarialabs.com/products.html#ADL670

Price is a little steep icon_rofl.gif graemlins/mecry.gif but hey, it's cheaper than a real one.

[GrantB]

Originally posted by O'love:
you mean you want to do your own mastering?
this is very dangerous territory....because you need experience, very good ears, good listening environment and monitors..... experience is the most difficult part of it ;)

personally i force myself to get my mix good....mastering is not the place to fix a bad mix....so if your mix isn't good sounding fix it in the mix........ mastering to me is to bring the song up to the loudness of other commercial releases, without loosing to much dynamics, and in extreme cases add some touches of EQ to problematic areas which weren't fixed in the mix...

i don't believe in tube gear to much, a good transistor-based design can sound as good or better....it's all in the design...

personally i love voxengo curveEQ to do some minor EQ touches, and waves L2 or voxengo elephant to do the limiting...

i've also had good experiences with the focusrite mixmaster...

but i think the best solution right now to do home-mastering is the purchase of an UAD1 dsp-board.....

Olaf The compression of the 2 mix is it's own sound and is totally valid if you want to go there.

There are also valid reasons for doing this at mixdown, mostly related to creative control. Martino probably knows what sound he is looking for better than most mastering engineers, and wants the time to sit and dial that in. Perhaps he has a decent room and monitoring setup.

If you want to put fade outs in yourself, you have to compress the 2 mix before the master fader, otherwise the levels drop below the threshold as you fade and it all falls apart. There are workarounds for this. In Martinos case, he would probably want to record back into his computer with no fade and apply it digitally, or if the output control on his compressor goes to 0, possibly use that.

In an ideal world, we would take our raw mix, sans fades and compression, to the mastering engineer and sit in on the session. I've heard of people doing this a couple times until they find the right engineer and educate them about what they are looking for.

[O'love]

true...... that's why right now we do our own mastering....using the UAD1 plugins mostly and waves L2 for limiting....sometimes the focusrite mixmaster multibandcompressor to get bad mixes in control again, if we cannot fix it in the mix... imho you really have to spend loads of money to get a better quality than some of the good software plugins like Waves, Voxengo and UAD can offer.....that's why we opt for UAD...

what's the exact definition of pre-mastering btw? is it for demo's or to create a reference-track for mastering engineers to use for the un-pre-mastered track??

Olaf

[martino]

Good responses, keep them coming!
Pre-mastering for me means: just adding a few touches to the stereo mix-down. Like letting it run through a tube compressor haha. Or just adding a very small amount of reverb or something (which can be dangerous).
Though, pre-mastering when it comes to CD manufacture is kinda confusing if i understand it right: pre-mastering pretty much means mastering. As the plant will do what they call "mastering" of their own. Where the plant will create a glass-master to make the reproduction copies with.
So in otherwords, you take your album to a mastering studio, they master it (but really pre-master it), and they send it to the plant where a master is made which is slightly larger than your standard CD. graemlins/alc.gif

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[Nege]

Originally posted by martino:
Good responses, keep them coming!
Pre-mastering for me means: just adding a few touches to the stereo mix-down. Like letting it run through a tube compressor haha. Or just adding a very small amount of reverb or something (which can be dangerous).
Though, pre-mastering when it comes to CD manufacture is kinda confusing if i understand it right: pre-mastering pretty much means mastering. As the plant will do what they call "mastering" of their own. Where the plant will create a glass-master to make the reproduction copies with.
So in otherwords, you take your album to a mastering studio, they master it (but really pre-master it), and they send it to the plant where a master is made which is slightly larger than your standard CD. graemlins/alc.gif yeah they usually master it for you before they cut the lacquer, they have an idea of how much to put or take out in order for it to be playable on vinyl...or cd....ie.the "lacquer channel" on lesmill rd used to do our stuff for us...but that was after we Pre mastered it....do not know if they are still in buisness...

[MadR]

just do a masteringmix as reference .. but also send the original (not compressed) .. the reference mix is just an idea for the masterguy how you want is to sound .. thing is that he can do thing better than you most of the times .. but you have to know if he does good mastering ..

also i'm not a BIG fan of tubes .. but i have heard what a good masteringplant can do ..

getting a good relationship with the mastering plant is very welcome .. like grantB says .. just go there and sit in .. that's the best ...

[juju]

hello martino,
try this, if u can get your hands on it:
summit dcl-200 (http://www.summitaudio.com/dcl-200-compressor-limiter.htm)

i had it for a while and run few mixes thru it ,and was very happy .warm and musical device.