Getting in touch with your audio editing side

You know your way around a DAW right? You can bash out a reasonable piece of music in terms of using loops, your fingers, or even your friends. You can even produce a reasonable MP3.

But your music doesn’t sound, well, totally pro. Your tracks don’t sound as good or as loud as do commercial tracks that, at least at some stage, have graced a physical CD.

What do you think of yourself as? A musician? A songwriter? An arranger? Producer? Well, there’s another career path you might not have factored in yet but one that can be as crucial as any of the aforementioned, and that’s a mastering engineer.

Do you know why tracks you hear on radio always sound ‘finished’ compared to mixes of yours you play at home? Two reasons, actually, though both related. Radio compresses the heck out of music, which has the effect of making it sound ‘louder’ and more consistent (same reason as why a boom-box recording with its merciless ALC can sound so irritatingly good). Secondly, most tracks you hear on radio have been mastered properly.

‘Properly.’ Now there’s a word. Any one can master a piece of music in terms of squeezing it in an out of A.N. Other Finalizing Plug-in. There again, anyone can pick over a folder-full of loops in Acid and produce original music, right? Right.

Indeed, there’s a world of difference between simply doing something and actually knowing what you’re doing.

Mastering as a ‘dark art’ first came to my attention when as a twenty-something keyboardist and co-producer of an English rock band I went through my first mastering session and ‘cut,’ having spent the previous six months in a top London studio (Trident, since you ask) making – and mixing – a record.

Even in those pre-digital days when we used to roar with laughter at slip-up phrases people would come out with like ‘Let’s just erase it for now,’ the magic that seemed to be available at these post recording sessions was bewildering. Using no more than EQ and compression, albeit massively powerful exponents thereof, the engineer could almost remix the tracks. Vocals would push out or sink back, annoying percussion would finally sit, bass finally sound tight; the track finally start to gel and ’sound like a record.’

Fast forward a couple of decades and many of the million dollar tools once wielded exclusively by these Jedi Knights of Audio are now available to Derek on his Dell for pennies on the dollar.

Available, maybe. But many Dereks (and Dianas) either don’t realize how much can / needs to be done in post, or simply don’t have the skills to use the tools that are now available.

There is also the problem, forgive the grossness, of turd-polishing. No matter how sharp the tool and skilled the user, there’s only so much mastering can do about a dubiously-constructed song, indifferent playing, and a cluttered arrangement.

Making a track sound ‘loud,’ which is still the Holy Grail for 90% of us (and even this has its price) simply by compression or limiting is to miss the point of a well written, played, and arranged piece of music. As with white space on a website, less in audio is often more.

The first thing, then, is to give a dispassionate look at your source material and make this as lean and clean as it can be. The better the original song, arrangement, and initial mix, the more opportunities you’re going to have later on to ‘enhance’ as opposed to ‘rescue.’

Setting levels between tracks, noise reduction, compression, EQ… are all vital parts of the music-making process. If you are serious about your music enough to spend hours noodling with a filter or a loop or a lyric, you owe it to yourself to get serious about audio editing and mastering.

Here on SteinbergUsers we are embarking on a whole series of articles and tutorials to compliment WaveLab and its multifarious uses and applications. WaveLab is an ingenious program that encompasses a suite of tools that would have been unthinkable to offer under one roof, let alone at this price, twenty years ago.

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