Mastering your track.

[Woah]

Hey guys, I have some problems with mastering/mixdown...
Or my monitor's are failing or I'm failing.. I dunno. I finished my track, sounds awesome on my krk's but when I play it on the speakers on my TV (which aren't great AT ALL) it just doesn't sound good.

The high's are way too high and the bass doesn't come through. The kick sounds muddled, the *boom* doesn't have any attack it seems and is delayed by a few ms which really ruins the sound. So why is this? Why does it turn into an entirely different track on other speakers and what is the best way to go about this? Any advice would be appreciated..

[alchemy]

play it in as many different systems you can, scribble down notes about how it sounds, then slightly correct your mix (little goes a long way). repeat until you find a balance where it sounds good in the most amount of systems

[crakbot]

Your best tool will be speakers/headphones you are most familiar with to use as a reference. Those may be your TV speakers if you listen to those a lot. For me it's my earbuds, I listen to those all day every day, so I know exactly how they sound with literally thousands of songs, TV shows, movies, etc. If I mix with those my stuff is closer to finished than if I use my studio monitors.

But overall, during the whole process you need to bounce the track out and listen to it on a bunch of different speakers.

Studio monitors are useless for the most part. I've never had a mix that sounded good on my monitors that ended up being perfect when I bounced it out. They always need tweaking, so based on that I figure I could master/mix on any decent sounding speakers and get the same result.

But what you are saying is normal. Generally your first time bouncing out a full track and hearing it on new speakers will uncover things you need to fix. Do it a few times and eventually you mix/master will sound good all around.

Also, mastering is a skill all by itself. Anything you hear on the radio or on a real label was mastered by someone who just masters for a living, it was not done by the artists. Very few artists could commercially master their own stuff, and you are actually not suppose to master your own stuff if you can avoid it, since you will hear what you want, not what is actually there.

But any amateur producer probably listens to their studio monitors less than any other speaker they own, so they are actually the worst for mastering. Monitors are only good if you use them for listening to everything so that you know exactly how they sound compared to other sources.

[EddyMass]

and you are actually not suppose to master your own stuff if you can avoid it, since you will hear what you want, not what is actually there.

Absolutely 100% agree.

The "why?" of you hearing your tracks this way can be because of various reasons. It can be the speakers it's not the same making something on KRK's 5" vs. Genelecs 8040's, the room (most difficult problem to solve), the kind of kick you use (it took me a couple of months to get the 3 kicks I use all the time now... and 2 of them are 2 stacked kicks)...

As crackbot said, mastering should not be done by yourself... Mastering is a really really technical craft and you need a proper room, with proper gear and most importantly proper ears! Someone that has not heard your track before will listen to things you are not aware of.
And if you really want to make things "sound" as if they were mastered then... for ex here's how I do it:
•Mid-Side EQ
•Compression
•Limiter

And that, even though it seems like mastering is not mastering at all...

BTW upload the track so we can help you better

[Woah]

Hey guys, alchemy I did what you said and took some notes and yeah I spend a few more hours EQing out everything from -200hz that shouldn't be there and it turned out that was interfering with the sub, also replaced the kick, added a bit more attack and that did the job! Ofcourse it's not as good as a proffesionally mastered track, but it did the job... Thanks for the advice!

[Tarekith]

Maybe these will help too:

http://tarekith.com/assets/pdfs/Mastering.pdf

http://tarekith.com/jump-around/

[TCMuc]

Hey guys, alchemy I did what you said and took some notes and yeah I spend a few more hours EQing out everything from -200hz that shouldn't be there and it turned out that was interfering with the sub, also replaced the kick, added a bit more attack and that did the job! Ofcourse it's not as good as a proffesionally mastered track, but it did the job... Thanks for the advice!

The problems you describe and the solution you found are more part of the mixing than the mastering process.

Of yourse a mastering engineer could fix some of that issues, but not all of them and not as good as a producers who can work on the acutal mixdown (and knows, what he's doing )

As the others said before, checking your track on as many systems as possible is very important. What's equally important here is to know how to judge the different systems.

Just an example from my personal experience:

My studio monitors are Adam 3X, an have rather small woofers. Which means I can't hear exactly what's going on in the low frequencies and tend do mix the kick and bass too loud.

As a correctional instance for that I have my girlfriends hifi-system. The speakers are located on the floor and kind of in the corners so they overemphsize the bass. If the bass is too loud/boomy on those speakers and need to go back to the mixdown and lower it.

Also, my monitors as well as my studio headphones both have a pretty good "resolution" (for the lack of a better word), so all the sounds are really distinct and you can clearly localize the in the stereo-field and room. But not all speakers can actually do that...

My cure for this problem is also to be found in my girlfriends place (hope she won't think I'm just using her...): her micro-laptop speakers she uses for listening in the kitchen.. If a track doesn't sound too dull or narrow on those speakers, the panning and depth should be fine.


The more you listen to your music on other speakers, the more you will know how to judge what comes out of you monitors. Just reference how the track sounds on your monitors after you've tweaked it to sound good on the other systems.

Or you can always load a track that is similar in style into an empty audio track of your DAW to refernce it in the mixing process.

[Woah]

Yeah I was kind of confused between mixdown and mastering hehe :/. That's some great advice though, I've never given this that much thought, I swear I learn 3 new things about producing every day lol...

[SafeandSound]

Whilst one of the goals of mastering is to attain a good spectral balance so it translates, a bad tv speaker is exactly that and you cannot adapt your self finalizing on the basis of that specific speaker. So we come back to what mastering is again.. namely adjustments to a track based on a known quantity. That being a very linear, full frequency response and neutral monitoring system that a mastering engineer knows intimately. With this setting the engineer can ensure your master is optimally tweaked for hitting the middle spot where it works best across most systems.

At home you can play it on a variety of systems and check other reference tracks.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
Mastering online

[luxi]

There is also tools like eq snapshots that can help u... i use Ozone's eq for that but i m sure others have that option too. What u wanna do is get an eq snapshot of some of ur favorite tracks (make sure they r good quality, preferably loseless) and the compare it to the eq snapshot of ur song and see where they dont match... then go back to ur individual tracks and address the frequencies in question.