song "Get Loud" mastered before and after...listen

[jazzy655]

Sup fellas,
I posted this a while back in the mix forum and a couple guys were
helping me out with the mix. By the end of it everyone was happy where
the mix had gone, although most of them said they aren't really hiphop
guys.

So, this track is mastered now (by Rodney Mills), and I know how a lot
of guys like to hear the before and after so here it goes, check it
out!! Holler

[jazzy655]

wait! looks like i've got the files reversed. the first one is the mastered version. the second is the original mix.

[jazzy655]

is it sounding a little boomy to anyone on the lowend? the kick might need some subs cut out i'm thinking??

[Bigg_T]

I think the master mix sounds great, not only is it obviously louder, but even when level matched the mastered version has much more sparkle and punch to it. I guess thats what proper mastering will do,, Good Job!


P.s. I don't understand the typical gearslut mentality, 64 downloads and not a single comment? You would think that if one takes the time to download the files why not offer a word or two?

[illynoise]

Originally Posted by jazzy655

is it sounding a little boomy to anyone on the lowend? the kick might need some subs cut out i'm thinking??

Doesn't sound boomy to me. Then again, it's Base Jase!

BaseJase
Illynoise

[Anonyme]

thanks a lot.

do you think there is there much done than making it louder? sure, lows are filtered but you could consider it as a part of that process. i think the kick was too dominant before mastering, but i find it too quiet now. it might be my little monitors, though...


by the way, i think i am getting a little disenchanted with mastering. my uncle just finished his album and had it mastered at a quite renowned studio. he could not even use the master cause it sucked so much...

then again, perhaps the engineer wasn't comfortable with the music style ( french chansons ) but that's no excuse for the shit he delivered...

[illacov]

mastered feel, that one would expect for a master you pay for.

Did the person who mastered your song do anything particular like run stems thru a board or use some outboard gear you cant afford? Im not saying that level matched they dont sound way different but what Im referring to besides the eq and the boost in volume (thru compression or limiting) is it doesnt sound mastered to me.

I think what is apparent is YOUR signal chain for vocals, which sounds pretty damn good here. Its pretty much a job to get an emcee with a higher pitched voice to still come across with some gusto and every mic every pre is not gonna suit him. So I congratcha on that aspect cuz it sounds good in that department. The beat is fine, somewhat a little repetitive but thats producer talk, I have to constantly remind my music peers that they try to dick me over on what they think but fail to realize that the song they say nobody will like is already raved over on the internet before its less that 24 hours old. HOWEVER and this is me being as objective as possible.

The Hook....This is my only gripe with this track and as a layman, which is the hardest hat to put on when you're really a musician. :) It sounds eerily similar to Touch It. Not that you have that chopped up euro babble thing going but the chopped up vocal sample with slightly imperfect lengths and truncation just hits me as too soon on the heels of another song thats pretty much a smash hit so everybody knows it. I feel people might interpret this as a bite. And to be perfectly honest the song you have could have ANY hook, cuz its just a banger its not meant to make sense all that much in the first place.

Getting back to the mastering. IF you paid this dude to master your song, as one jerk who masters peoples stuff but who also has tried the pay a cat route, I would kindly inquire of sir if he really thinks that he squeezed enough bass out of the mastered version? Yes you used certain kicks in your version, but has he used all of his tricks to get some mo bass that you couldnt possibly accomplish in your studio in his?

Your master is loud and clean. BRAVO, we talkin hip hop, it needs to be BASSY loud and clean. Otherwise we'd more than gladly buy our own gear and take our chances. Im not talkin about you jazzy Im just sitting here with raised eyebrows wondering where the mastering went?

Just for example.

If you sent the same unmastered version to DiscoD for 150 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever he supposedly is gonna either do a multiple pass of stems or a pass thru of your 2 track mixdown thru a fatso, some neve stuff and god knows what else.

Your mastered track will come back sounding DIFFERENT in a good way from your mixdown, not just louder with some eqing. If thats what people think mastering is then fine. Im looking at how if I need loud, Ill get out Timeworks Mastering Compressor and crush a mix thats already in good shape, with some eq tweaks here and there without a problem. But if i want a whole different animal thats still my mix but also been metamorphisized into a rogue beast, then Im reaching for a good few pieces of gear or a mastering engineers phone number whos got access to shit I cant reach.

But Ill be damned if I pay some cat to touch my track with UAD plug ins and say pay me. I want something done with shit I definately wont be able to get any time soon, like fatsos, distressors, GML EQs Aurora Converters SSL board for hip hop hmmm etc....this is how I view it.

Like I said though the track sounds good, but more bass please and consider that hook man. I think the rest of the song structure wise is great, I think the hooks the weakest point.

Believe me Im not the great almighty hook writer here, you can go on my bands myspace pages and talk this and that about me, but if you want an opinion you got one the hook is my biggest problem. In fact if the hook was better i wouldnt give a shit what the engineer did to master your song i would just be nodding my head for 3 or 4 minutes without a pause. You feel me?

Edit: I just checked Mr. Mills gearlist and now Im blown away that all we hear is really a loudness difference. This guy has some nice pieces of gear, BUT Im not hearing that on this master. I wish I had money to buy what I wanted without a limit for my studio, first piece is a fatso, second piece is a 2 Auroras and 3rd is a Midas Venice or a Neotek board. But for now, Im getting the JoeMeek TwinQ and this summer Im grabbing a fatso if Im not too busying playing out! Peace.

Peace,
Illumination

[mars]

Originally Posted by illacov

Edit: I just checked Mr. Mills gearlist and now Im blown away that all we hear is really a loudness difference. This guy has some nice pieces of gear, BUT Im not hearing that on this master.

That's how you know a mastering engineer is on point. It takes a great deal of skill to make something louder without destroying the vibe of the mix. Also, knowing when to leave well enough alone. I find that cats who master their own stuff tend to do WAY too much processing rather than getting the track banging at the mix stage.

[Anonyme]

Originally Posted by mars

That's how you know a mastering engineer is on point. It takes a great deal of skill to make something louder without destroying the vibe of the mix. Also, knowing when to leave well enough alone.

i think you are generally right.


am i the only one who thinks that there's a lack of low end in the master?

[youngkain]

yo Anonyme . Isnt that what illacov just said??

illacov, i agree

[jazzy655]

Bigg_T
-----------------------------------------

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I don't get it either. nearly 200 listens at this point...3 replies.
at least nobody is calling the track complete crap.

thanks for the kind words homie!



illynoise
-----------------------------------------
Thanks for the reply man.



Anonyme
-----------------------------------------
Here's what I felt like the mastering did for the song. Obviosly it's a lot louder.
I think there is a glue in the mastered version that my original mix didn't have.
There is a high end lift that sounds really nice, yet doesn't cause any crazy sibilance
in the lead vox.

On the negative, I felt like the snare got somehwhat buried. The vocals sound like they
need to be bigger ( this is a mix issue, i've made changes to the mix and have sent it back
to Rodney for a remaster, at no charge btw, great guys that guarantee all of their work!)
I also felt like the kick had too much subs(mix issue) and that it was actually taking away
from the apparent "bigness" of the low end.

On the topic of why it may sound like the track is simply louder, I think that is a reflection
of the quality of the original mix. (Not saying i'm some world class mixer, cause i'm really a brand
newbie who practices a lot.)

From what i've read and heard from mastering engineers, they say the best stuff is when you get
a mix to master and it needs very little. I've been learning the hardway by sending bad mixes to
mastering engineers expecting them to come back as great sounding mixes, and thats just impossible.
The old saying still stands, "You can polish a turd, but it's still just a polished turd."

Thanks for taking the time to listen, it's much appreciated. Take it easy buddy!


illacov
----------------------------------------
what's up man, thanks for listening and commenting.

As far as the hook thing goes, I hear you. It's all subjective and i'm the last person to try and
convince someone to like what I write and how I rap, at the end of the day, it's all about what
it feels like to you. I respect people's opinions who respect mine and that's enough, so thanks
for the respect!

On to the mastering. I think it goes back to my reply to Anonyme. I think that the mix was decent,
and any little issues in it would need to be fixed in the mix and not the mastering. I think
the reason you may think that it's not bassy enough is because in my mix the kick is a little less
undefined than it could be, and that is taking away from the apparent bump of the track. I felt
if I rolled off the super subs on it a tiny bit it would tighten everything up and actually sound
MORE bassy. At the very least it would free up some headroom for the mastering engineer to make it
more bassy.

Thanks for the comments on the vocals. It's an area I constantly am struggling with and working on.
Just trying to be a more proficient mixer and recordist in general. I wish I had a great room and outboard to
mix in but I don't so I work with what i've got.


All
------------------------------------------
I've made some changes to the mix to address the things I thought were lacking. It's been sent back to
mastering and I'll repost when I get them back in the next couple days. Thanks for the comments, I think
this is a great discussion with valid points of opinion. this is why i come to this place!!

[Zacchino]

I love it, The instrumental is thick, and really original. There's not much "melody" in it, but it's bouncing for sure !

Keep on the great work !!!

[The Beatsmith]

I think there's a lack of low end too

If you look at the original file in a sample editor you'll see it isn't actually even normalised so an increase in pure volume isn't too mad. It sounds like the mastered version is just L2's to death to get the volume, and it has lost some low end - the kick is pretty weak to me, and there's no real bass.... but there was no real bass in the original either (but at least there was kick, even if the kick was was a bit thin sounding)

I don't know, i'm no mastering engineer, but it's not my idea of the level of increase of quality i'd want to get from a track after it's been to the ME

[illacov]

I took the liberty of trying out a little technique I picked up reading on gearslutz about loss of mono presence in stereo mixdowns from DAWs so heres the idea:

I took your "unmastered" version of Get loud and applied some plug ins to it, basically 2 x of Timeworks Mastering Comp and Waves L2 on really gentle settings, but got it in the ball park of the mastered versions volume. Also I put RBass on this to add back some bump.

Then I made a mono version of your unmastered mp3 and passed thru LinMB with some frequencies cancelled so that only the low and hi mids were left.

Then I put these 2 tracks into my sample editor Cool Edit 2 and blended them to taste. After the settings were adjusted to taste, I passed the mix out of Cool Edit into my trusty dbx DDP which was set to about 2 db of GR with a 700 hz hipass filter in the sidechain and the tape saturation set to Bright. This was sent back into my Emu 0404 thru coax digital and recorded back into Cool Edit as a wav. I eqed it a little more with Cool Edit's parametric EQ and then compressed it 1/2 a db with Timeworks Master Comp again and then some more EQ at 7 khz and another 1/2 db of compression. What you hear is the final result, I actually prefer the version I did to the one the other guy did but of course thats me ego trippin!

Edit: I also noticed that theres some stereo processing on your "mastered" version, something I neglected to do on mine, but to achieve this all you need to do is slap some waves shuffler on this if you want!
Check it out for yourself!!

Peace
Illumination.

PS Im not going to distribute this or anything like that so feel free to know this is just for kicks and giggles!

[illynoise]

The original master has more sparkle, and sounds like less distorted in the kik drum.

BUT this is just listening only in my computer speakers.

BaseJase
Illynoise

[illacov]

Yeah...I may have some issues with levels and all that but I also didnt charge for these results and this took me the better part of perhaps 15 minutes to accomplish!

He could have done what I did himself to be honest, but yeah I hear the sparkle, in the mastered version that didnt quite make it to mine, but there is also a difference in the vocal presence as well as the drums that didnt make it to the mastered version.

Listen to the version I did on a regular system with or without a subwoofer and then give it a whirl.
See if what I did translates, just curious to see.
This will help me out when I get back to mixing my own stuff haha
Peace
Illumination

[jazzy655]

cool man, i'll check it out. always good to experiment. i'll be at the studio in a couple hours and i'll holler back

[musiq]

thanks for posting . really enjoy listening to this kinda stuff.
illacov good job on you remix master. sounds really good on my computer speakers

[djui5]

I think the mastering engineer did a great job. It sounds fine to me, bass is right, highs are open but not brittle, etc.

I think some comments have been made about the vox, but everything else is good IMO.

[(DC)]

The differences are minimal in the "Mastered" one and the one that another GS ran thru the L2....

but sometimes the subtle differents make a huge difference.

[mars]

Finally took a listen - I think the mastered version is very good. He opened up the mids and high end nicely. The low end is a little too compressed for my taste - I would've preferred to keep a little more of the vibe of the mix with the kick out front. However, that's a matter of taste and his version should translate very well on a variety of systems. I also like how he got it loud and pumping without squeezing the life out of it - I doubt an L2 was anywhere near this master.

illacov's version is OK - but a bit harsh in the mids - trying to master from an MP3 definitely did not help...

You should link this in the mastering forum.

[666]

the master really opens up the sound! Rad song, man! You don't mind if I throw it on my iPod do you? ;)

[jazzy655]

Originally Posted by 666

the master really opens up the sound! Rad song, man! You don't mind if I throw it on my iPod do you? ;)

Naw man go for it. Thanks for the love, god knows we can use all the help we can get at this point.

Sorry I haven't gotten back to ths thread for the last couple days, i've been writing music like crazy so thats taken most of my time. I'll get back at y'all after I listen to that master homeboy did with the L2 in my studio.

******GREAT NEWS!!******

Ascap has taken quite a liking to us it seems. The senior vice president of the rhythm and soul part of ascap had a meeting with our agent in LA about a week ago. She and her whole team agree "we wanna help push these guys."!

They have invited us to the ascap awards in LA this month. What's even better is that the vice president wants to play our songs AND formally introduce us to the room at the cocktail party for all the big wigs before the show!!

time for a new suit

[666]

congrats, man! Hope it all goes well for you!

[jazzy655]

Originally Posted by 666

congrats, man! Hope it all goes well for you!

thanks man. i appreciate it. it's this upcoming monday so i've got my pimp suit ready!
never worn a suit in my 22 years of life