Weird title but I didn’t know how else to phrase it. So, here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have six tracks that I want to remaster and achieve consistency across the board. Each track is mixed individually and bounced to a stereo WAV ready for mastering. Is there any difference between having my chain of mastering effects on the track channels rather than the master channel, technically speaking?
My reason for asking is I would like to have each mixed stereo WAV on an audio channel in Ableton Live, do my mastering on each of those channels individually, then be able to quickly compared each one (and a reference track) by soloing them. I will probably put a limiter on the master channel too just to ensure no stray peaks come through.
Does this sound possible? Any reason why it wouldn’t work? Afaik, it should be the same as mastering each one in its own project, right?
This should work and make no difference, as long as you export the audio as usual.
When using freeze/flatten to simultaneously save the results per channel, you get 32 bit wave files. That‘s the only potential difference I‘m aware of.
I don’t use anything like CPU hogging like Ozone so it should be fine. Less is more is my approach nowadays - with great results! I can always freeze/unfreeze a few tracks along the way as I get closer to bouncing each one
Less is defo more. But some of the new stuff is quite intensive.
There’s one other issue that I just remembered. I think all, DAW’s have a built in maximum for DPC Latency and I can’t remember what happens after that. Probably DPC just stops working so it won’t affect you. Mastering stuff tends to have high latency because it makes the code less intensive so they can do more fancy stuff.
So if anything weird does happen, it might be that.
I don’t use Ableton, but as far as I know that should be fine.
What I tend to do though is master the tracks, and take notes about RMS dynamic range, average loudness etc to make sure they’re in the same ballpark. Maybe play them all back inside the same file (sans processing) to make sure they’re close.
It should work, but to me there definately is a difference. Frequencies react differently when summed together. So when you mix your tracks back together your frequencies will sum up and peak in some places. Depending on the processing this could affect the sound.
Can’t say if this is really an issue with nowadays DAWS, but he could export tracks individually. In Live’s export menu is an option to render a specific track only.
Ofc, he could just mute all tracks except the one he wants to export.
we are talking about finshed, final mix stereo stems each to be mastered individually to match in overall sonic appearance and loudness with and to each other to finally fit in one selection/album…right?
You are correct. No summing. This is finished mixes already bounced ready for mastering. So when it comes time to bouncing the master for each one, all other tracks will be turned off. And yes, time stretch off by default. I hate that shit!
That was my thinking. Doing each one in its own project cost me several hours of going back and forth, bouncing, bouncing again, listening, going back to track X, then track Y didn’t hold up so well. You get the picture. Arrgghhhh
Yes, that’s the easiest way to do it when you have multiple tracks to master coherently for a release. Just remember to leave the master channel without plugins.
…yup…if u master on ur own, that’s the common way to do it…
but, u might wanna give a stand alone dedicated mastering suite a try…
in special, the tc finalizer offers all u could ask for, while strictly refusing to work as a plugin in any daw host for good reasons…
I looked at that yesterday on the White Sea Studio YouTube channel. I don’t have 200 bucks right now though. And I want to do relatively subtle mastering nowadays. Also from the same channel, I learned about Loudness Penalties which has essentially ended the ridiculous loudness wars that plagued music from a few years ago
Btw. I rarely use anything besides EQ8 (set to oversampling), Utility and the Ableton Limiter, which is sufficiently transparent for most applications. If you need more to get good results, then I believe it’s better to go back to the mixdown stage and work on that, rather than spending money on tools you don’t need.
You’re speaking my language! This is pretty much what I do, but also very subtle use of Ableton Compressor or Glue Compressor with a ratio of 2 or less and process.audio’s Sugar
