hey everyone its mojo expecting the deejay city UK up for the third episode
of mixtape masters we're heading into the post-production face so I we've got
a great sounding mix that we've recorded now we're gonna take into software we're
gonna work with it tweak it until it sounds really clean and really
consistent throughout the whole mix that proper professional seller we're looking
for that's get to it there were tons of options out there when it comes to
actually choosing which software you can use for mastering the very high end
you've got stuff like izotope ozone this is a phenomenal be a software they sent
it to me to try out and it's so powerful so many modules ways of working with and
tweaking you sound but it's probably overkill for what we're doing here you
know you can use it for mastering adj mixes but it's very expensive so lets
you are seeking to use it in the studio from mastering trapped in general it's
probably gonna be a bit too much I've always been a big fan of Adobe Audition
it's in the Adobe Creative Suite so it fits into my workload and it reminds me
very much of cool edit pro from back in the day which was also there is also
sony sound forge a lot of people are still fans of that and that's a great
business software to this cheaper options like repose well you can use
able to live as well although it is really just a DIW you can actually get
their total snapping turn off warping and you can use their tools like the
glue compressor to tighten up the mix and make it much cleaner and he got the
envelopes in there as well so I do like using able to life for some aspects of
this to now in this video were gonna be dealing entirely with audacity it's free
it's open source so all credit to the people behind it to actually put such a
powerful software out there for free it doesn't quite fit my workflow cuz I'm
just not used to it you know he works in a different way to audition and so on
parts it's really powerful and it's free so we're going to use that for this one
let's get to it ok with this mix on just starting from scratch of loaded into a
tacit agreement keep it nice and simple for this one so I can resume in on the
intro first of all because we're not topped and tailed this thing is going to
click through to use Audacity under this robe go back to the very start
just want to chop off the very beginning so wanna go right up to the edge of my
resume in a bit
maybe they've got half a second or something before the very first sound
they going to leave that out soon if we go back to the full view we can see very
quickly the beginning is going to be up and then we get to the end we gonna do
the same sort of thing over the end as well on this week off a doubt so I
chopped off the end to begin with
on this or what we do with the faith in this we do with em followed so we've
actually got up to here we click into this blue bar to make him the low point
but one they're just bring that one down smooth fate of the end to nothing says
that back now
let's go back and get an overall view of this thing once again so as we can see
now this is a mixture of just assembled in Ableton Live I didn't spend more time
on it do it very quickly and the levels are kind of all over the place now we've
got a deal with this basically cuz we got the big picture of what these big
peaks over here and I'll be here this whole section in the middle seems to be
quieter and then we got louder again at the end with a big peak so there's a few
ways we can deal with that the first thing you might want to do is just find
it the point where it kind of changes goes to a quite a bit from it so this
whole section is quarter so we might just want to do a gentle fade again with
that envelope to around about here somewhere so let's go back into the
envelope zoom in a little bit actually first to that iconic point we want
everything before this to be a bit more quiet and everything after it to be
kinda leave it as it is so we can go into that envelope to put some points on
their this breakdown and she's a good opportunity to make that change without
people noticing too much just get back up to we want it to be kind of gradual
so I'm gonna move back just a bit about 10 seconds back in the track down just a
touch of a good thing with Audacity I must say that does give you this visual
instant feedback on what you doing with the level so we can see now that's
looking pretty good let's go let's go usually is it not just the opposite each
other we're looking at the VU meters up there but I'm listening
a big week there
fairly consistent document bring that down a bit further still and may be
dragged out that just a bit more about my 65 in there were peaking about my
situation here
picture so now that tried this section over here is looking more consistent
with the middle section we are getting a bit loud again at the interest do a
similar thing over here
and then it gets louder again so let's just put the envelope mode so getting
used that mix where it gets really loud and any use that as an opportunity to
bring my level down and it will sound smooth on a transition zones can bring
it down a bit
whole thing just gonna do them one towards the end I don't forget we did
upgrade already the end so I need to zoom in there at the end but I met my
faith I really did bring down the level and each time you are probably assume in
to make sure that you're not messing with your actual fade as you want those
votes to be smoothie don't wanna have dramatic shift in the volume again just
curious listen back in the section
very big peaks were gonna deal with those with a minute
dynamics write this down in terms of volume of my world do it again you know
this is pretty extreme example you know really don't want to be fixing more than
kind of one or two things are wrong with it now that's looking fairly consistent
across the board had a great lower still over on the right hand side let's do
that its combination of using high and he is at 10 peeking around about six
there with pretty much everything but I'll do the job so let's go back and
look at the whole picture again ok that's all very much now the kitties
view working with a lossless files which of course you gonna be recorded in that
you've recorded in WoW of something like that then you can just keep exploiting
this back and forth and take a look at your work so I'm just going to exploit
that out
file ok so we've now got a file into audacity and it's looking a lot more
consistent in terms of levels it's not perfect but it'll do the job we have
still got the big peaks that we need to worry about now what we gonna do these
normalize it first of all now it's very important this is one thing that I
picked up from a Google multiplier he does great Ableton Live tutorials on
Youtube check them out basically he he talked about why you should always
master to minus 1.5 GB when you are dealing with mp3 secure exporting to mp3
any point you should master to minus 1.5 GB emigrated why but I've checked it out
following having seen his video and it definitely seems pretty accurate to me
so normally I have modest 1.5 they're gonna go 20 GB
and let's bring it up to a good just all this does the normalized brings up the
actual peak levels 20 TV so that's boosted the volume of over all of the
mix now what we gonna do now is take advantage of that minus 1.5 depleting
I'm actually gonna use a limiter on here he's a hard limit don't use the
clippings that tends to distort here and I'm basing just gonna bring it down to
minus 1.5
anything above minus 1.5 now is gonna get just compressed down and we've only
got a few pics to do with this shouldn't take too much different let's have a
look and see what we end up with after a while you never want to use compressed
super hard you know if you stop compressing the entire mix then you
gonna get this real pumping sound it's not gonna sound good refer back to my
video about levels when you DJing at the same thing applies here
view here really hard to press across the whole nixon everything is getting
squashed down your breakdowns and so on will sound really loud and all the
actual impact of you drop since oil will be lost you know everything's gonna be
fighting to get through that brick wall so you need to try and keep the
compression to an absolute minimum you want it to sound clean don't forget
we're dealing with false already compressed here so I you know this is a
compression limited mastered material that we're mixing so we're just trying
to put an extra little she noted keep it a bit more chopped off a fair bit no I
would probably in this case I'm going to do the same thing against I'm going to
go back in I'm going to affect them with a normal eyes 20 against us going to
bring up these peaks 20 is always done you'll see the body of the truck here to
read all of the actual mix is looking the same apart from these big peaks
which I want to get rid of there we go now I think that's actually gonna if I
do minus 1.5 it's probably gonna start chopping off a bit too much but let's
have a look here again and I think that's gonna take off two minutes just
check out these levels here so I'm playing through now
I wouldn't want to come down very big big snow
damage themselves
helping it stayed pretty consistent so yeah they will ask about EQ and so on I
would say unless you've got a real problem with the sound don't reach for
dq at all if you go for some advanced mastery stuff you already multiband
compression in a different frequency bands then that's one thing but if
you're just dealing with this trail master of a deejay mix I would say don't
really mess with Eq
because overall it's going to sound pretty constant anyway any curing doing
you should do during the actual mixing process so as you can see I like to keep
it fairly simple in Audacity you know in in any post production software with a
mix we are dealing with pre made you know premarket music we don't want to go
into mess with it too much you start messing with EQ and compression and so
on
far too much you will end up with a mix that actually sounds worse than what it
was when he recorded it a try and keep any tweaking to an absolute minimum
topic entitled very nicely and make sure everything is normalized to that minus
1.5 GB if you're going to convert to mp3 if you not converting to mp3 I would
suggest maybe just stick to put it up normalizing actually 2-4 point to or
something like that just below the threshold you don't want to hear
anything actually peaking and actually clipping over the top but she just going
to stick with a lot less appealing to CD or something like that then you just
keep it 2-2 allowed itself possible for you out there of course there's a lot
more you can do in terms of post-production week ago in samples and
drops and all kinds of things like that you could do 5.1 or walk on demand if
you could get into will be looking at some of that with able to live at a bit
later in the series but right now you just got your basic mix recorded you
want to moscow is nice and clean then they should do the job for you very
nicely don't go too hard don't go too far with it just keep it simple keep it
straight forward there we go then a few tips on marcia mixes for this move
professional consistent sound to share with your listeners next time on mixtape
Marcos we're talking about something completely different
talking about making a mix from scratch in able to life I'm gonna tell you some
good reasons why you might want to do that
and some cool stuff that you can achieve by doing so as well so thank you very
much for watching today we should strive for our future tips tricks and product
reviews RCC