First World Problems

2013-04-05 11:39:01

#4551

Jay: Bork! Bork! Bork!; +2,006|5377|London, England

Read it on a kindle.

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat

2013-04-05 11:47:52

#4552

Macbeth: Banned; +2,444|5604

Don't own a kindle. Not a fan of ebooks so I would only use it for PDFs. Waste of money.

2013-04-05 11:48:39

#4553

KEN-JENNINGS: I am all that is MOD!; +2,973|6650|949

I want to play golf but its raining

2013-04-05 11:50:58

#4554

Jay: Bork! Bork! Bork!; +2,006|5377|London, England

Macbeth wrote:
Don't own a kindle. Not a fan of ebooks so I would only use it for PDFs. Waste of money.

l2piratebooks.

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat

2013-04-05 11:53:39

#4555

Macbeth: Banned; +2,444|5604

I looked at pirate sites and they have nothing I like to read. All sci fi and fantasy. Besides I like to own books. Some books are unreadable in e readers anyway.

2013-04-05 11:56:34

#4556

Jay: Bork! Bork! Bork!; +2,006|5377|London, England

Books with a lot of footnotes or pictures, yeah, but everything else works well. Just convert all pdf's to .mobi and you're good to go.

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat

2013-04-05 12:20:59

#4557

Jaekus: I'm the matchstick that you'll never lose; +957|5197|Sydney

Learning how to use some mastering RTAS plugins for Pro Tools and it very nearly crashed my computer when I duplicated it from the master fader to the bus that's sending to the stereo audio track that's bouncing out internally within PT. Everything locked up for about ten minutes.

2013-04-05 12:22:26

#4558

KEN-JENNINGS: I am all that is MOD!; +2,973|6650|949

Macbeth wrote:
I looked at pirate sites and they have nothing I like to read. All sci fi and fantasy. Besides I like to own books. Some books are unreadable in e readers anyway.

project gutenberg

2013-04-05 12:26:12

#4559

Macbeth: Banned; +2,444|5604

Those are all old books

2013-04-05 12:27:11

#4560

Uzique The Lesser: Banned; +382|4273

Jaekus wrote:
Learning how to use some mastering RTAS plugins for Pro Tools and it very nearly crashed my computer when I duplicated it from the master fader to the bus that's sending to the stereo audio track that's bouncing out internally within PT. Everything locked up for about ten minutes.

you're teaching yourself mastering? what about mixing? pretty neat. haven't used pro tools but looks really nice for sequencing and arranging.

i'm just trying to learn ableton. i could probably create a first world problems thread in-itself with all the woes this sort of hardcore software gives me.

2013-04-05 12:27:53

#4561

Uzique The Lesser: Banned; +382|4273

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
Macbeth wrote:
I looked at pirate sites and they have nothing I like to read. All sci fi and fantasy. Besides I like to own books. Some books are unreadable in e readers anyway.
project gutenberg

you won't find anything on there that's still in author's copyright, i.e. 75-125 years.

2013-04-05 12:34:13

#4562

Jaekus: I'm the matchstick that you'll never lose; +957|5197|Sydney

Yeah just learning how to do it to make some decent demos. It's sounding pretty good from where it was but I'm sure anyone who does it professionally would notice about a hundred glaring flaws. Still, it's fun and I'm learning a lot, and developing my ear. This is a five track demo of some cover songs to get some gigs. Each song is about one verse and chorus, just so potential venues can get a taste of what we sound like as a duo. It's only acoustic guitar and female vocals so it's pretty simple as far as the mixing side goes.

I'm using a plugin called Ozone 5 by Izotope, and found someone who did a tutorial on it over six videos on YouTube. Here's the first vid:

Note: he did a vid using Ozone 4 but I think he botched the mastering. This one he does a pretty good job. He also has Ableton tutorials as well. One day I'd like to give it a go as I understand it's good for writing electronic music?

Today I added some drums using Addictive Drums (using the piano roll as midi input) and played some bass to a track my girlfriend wrote (she's got dozens of songs). It's still rough and that track is not mixed nor has any vocals; it's just to flesh out the song a bit before my girlfriend sings on it (she wrote the song sans chords and I added chords and feel to it).

Last edited by Jaekus (2013-04-05 12:39:28)

2013-04-05 12:35:32

#4563

KEN-JENNINGS: I am all that is MOD!; +2,973|6650|949

Uzique The Lesser wrote:
KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
Macbeth wrote:
I looked at pirate sites and they have nothing I like to read. All sci fi and fantasy. Besides I like to own books. Some books are unreadable in e readers anyway.
project gutenberg
you won't find anything on there that's still in author's copyright, i.e. 75-125 years.

yeah i know. macbeth seems (kind of) interested in classics, which project gutenberg has in abundance.

2013-04-05 12:46:52

#4564

Uzique The Lesser: Banned; +382|4273

yeah i've heard of ozone. sounds pretty good. i'm staying clear of much compression or mastering plug-ins for a while. seems like a whole other side of it to learn.

2013-04-05 13:01:39

#4565

Jaekus: I'm the matchstick that you'll never lose; +957|5197|Sydney

Compression is a very useful tool but it needs to be subtle or you will crush the dynamics, removing punch and energy if taken to extremes. If done well though it can actually add punch and energy.

Basically I try to get a good source sound for recording, make any edits afterwards (neaten up a strum or whatever here or there providing the rest of the take is good). I'll usually get two - three takes of each instrument so I've got enough to cut up into one really solid take and from there I will send the guitar takes to a guitar bus where I can then add effects to all the guitar takes simultaneously, and do the same for vocals etc.

Once that's done and the levels are tweaked I will then send all the buses to a master bus that then sends to a stereo audio track so I can bounce it out internally. Once the bounce is complete I will then export the audio to a folder on my PC, create a new Pro Tools session and import the audio there to make final edits (add pre and post fades and to save CPU power by closing all the other tracks down).

From there I will use the mastering software to enhance the sound by adding subtle EQ, compression, reverb, harmonic enhancement, widen the stereo field and perhaps some post EQ tweaks. The final part is to add final compression (more a limiter really) that just caps off the peak of the track to -0.1 dB so it will not clip. If I recorded it in 24 bit and want to burn it to a CD I can add dither at this stage to reduce it to 16 bit (I learned dither is there to add subtle noise to the audio that compensates for the lost of bits, and there are more options to customise all this).

The beauty about Ozone is it allows you to not only do all the mastering in one plugin, it's very comprehensive. I can not only add compression but actually choose and adjust the frequency bands I want to compress, the ratios and levels, etc. Same goes for the stereo field and reverb. Pretty neat. So rather than adding reverb to the whole track I can keep it out of the bottom end and only add a bit to the high mids and a bit extra to the highs, so they give the impression of space. It goes on and on from there.

tl;dr, it's a pretty involved process and I'm only scratching the surface.

Last edited by Jaekus (2013-04-05 19:26:37)

2013-04-05 14:26:47

#4566

Uzique The Lesser: Banned; +382|4273

compression is used loads in dance/electronic music. particularly side-chaining with the kick drum. but then again a perfect balance and audio fidelity is seldom the point in dance music... more like just achieving a serious thomp and heft. with guitar-work and vocals you definitely have to know your stuff, and how to mix-down and EQ properly. with dance music you can more kinda play with the EQ and compression and really create some more 'out there' stuff. so long as it sounds good on monitors, it'll probably sound reasonably good in the club.

with that said, the latest generation of dance producers in the underground are really creating music that is insanely well produced/mixed/mastered. stuff that you can almost ONLY listen to on high-end club systems. so the 'DIY roughshod' approach is just one of many.

2013-04-05 19:32:05

#4567

Jaekus: I'm the matchstick that you'll never lose; +957|5197|Sydney

Yeah compression is used quite heavily in dance, hip hop and top 40 commercial pop. The reasons are similar: to get the most volume out of the track. For dance and hip hop this is to give it tight bass and really sound like it's pushing a big system in a club. For top 40 it's more so it is as loud or louder than other songs that come on your radio. Radio by default heavily compresses everything so songs that go to radio don't need a large dynamic range.

2013-04-07 08:35:58