Help with using Compression (etc!) to create bigger-sounding waveforms?

[ulrichburke]

Dear Anyone!

Getting a BIT better at mixing but have a really STOOPID pair of questions to ask. Wish I could attach screenshots but I can't find any way to do it here, anyway.

When I complete a piece of music, its waveform's approximately half a centimeter tall It sounds more or less mixed - I'm not good at mixing, just a bit better than I WAS! - but it's skinnier than Usein Bolt. It's synthy New Age.

Then I see a Karunesh - or one of many others' - waveforms and it's a blue brick. Seriously. That thing's totally filling up Audacity! It LOOKS like it should be clipping like a hairdresser on overdrive but it's not, it's just a sleek, fat, richness of sound. I could take all the EQ off my sounds and the waveform - I don't say the SOUNDS, cos I agree he's probably spent my bank balance on his! - wouldn't be anywhere near that size. How's he doing it? That's Question One.

Here's the qualifying second question. I know people'll say 'Compression!' But the whole point of compression - and I've looked this up loads - is to SQUASH a wave form - hence the name! - and therefore make it THINNER - you can't squash something and make it FATTER, can you? And everything I've read about compression says it makes things QUIETER, that it's GAIN that makes things louder. Here's the actual question.

What are they using to get such a rich, HEWGE waveform, why isn't it (quite!) clipping despite its size and how do I emulate it? I've got Nightshine, Blockfish, O.T. T., MDEX and 5orcery (five-band) compressors. Is there a set of 'always do this to get a fat rich waveform' rules? (I've got Aspergers, us Aspies LOVE rules to work by, think of me as Data in StarTrek!)

Hope someone answers.

Yours respectfully

Chris.

[RichardT]

Hi Chris, you need to use a combination of compression and gain to get that result. Or you can use a limiter.

If you use compression, it will bring down the loudest sounds but leave the quieter ones as they were. Then, if you increase the gain to bring the peaks back to where they were, the effect will be that the quieter sounds are now louder. result!

You can do this with a limiter instead. This is probably how it was done on the commercial tracks you are comparing to. A limiter applies very powerful compression and gain at the same time. It’s normally done on the master bus as the last plugin. I don’t know if you have access to a limiter, but most modern DAWs have one.

In fact, the commercial tracks probably apply both these techniques - compression/gain first then limiting.

[The Elf]

...and clipping. Lots of clipping in commercial dance tracks.

[Drew Stephenson]

I think it's time for some decent reading material, I recommend Mike Senior's books: Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, and the companion Recording Secrets.

[RichardT]

I think it's time for some decent reading material, I recommend Mike Senior's books: Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, and the companion Recording Secrets.

Yes, good idea. Very systematic and well organised, which should suit the OP.

[ulrichburke]

Dear Everyone.

Thanks for all your answers, here's the thing.

I mix so it sounds nice to me as far as it goes. Then I read what you're supposed to do next, unless you've got tons of money for a real recording studio, is to put the .WAV into Audacity and use the compressor in Audacity to mesh the tracks together.

When the track comes out of QSE, it's just a stereo track. So I read that you just could use the compressor in Audacity as it is and it would be OK most times. So I didn't REALLY understand when to use/change the settings - I tried but nothing was helping - so I just pressed YES and prayed a bit and for the first few tracks it worked. Or seemed to, till I thought about the situation.

I realised I was making the sounds quieter and quieter in the mix to allow for the effect of the compressor in Audacity. So I started REALLY reading up about compression and EQ and mixing in general and got a TON of information, all of it contradictory. Always use high-pass on everything. No that's wrong, never use high-pass, it takes out the 'good' low end. No that's wrong, use it SOMETIMES. No, there's no rules, use your ears. And so on.

So I was ending up with a ton of tracks that didn't sound as full and rich as the comparison tracks. I looked up why and discovered it was back to good old compression. I started putting compression on everything and despite trying loads of settings it was all SOUNDING squashed. The elephant was in the room and sitting on top of all the tracks!

Then I wrote another track - the one I'm trying to get right, right now - and it was sounding OK till I hit this same old problem. Finished the track and the initial mix - reverb, EQ, sound balancing - sounded good. So I chucked it into Audacity, tried a bit of compression and got the same old problems - some instruments immediately became massively too loud, which made others sound too faint in comparison. So I listened to which ones sounded too loud and went back to the original piece and was starting to turn them down when I realised I'd been here before, a few thousand times quite literally. I was killing the mix for the sake of the compressor.

I've got books on mixing and they all tell you to buy vastly expensive hardware, spend thousands on making the room sound right, more on huge physical synths. They tell you what everything DOES, but not when to use it, they say 'that depends on the track'. So I've ended up knowing what every control DOES but not when it's the right thing to use. Like a track's too quiet. Compression and make up gain would make it louder. So would turning up the volume. When would you do the first and when would you do the second? Rhetorical question but that's the kind of thing I'm hitting all the time. And I try both and sometimes one sounds better than the other but usually neither sound RIGHT. And that goes for all other options. Like EQ's getting rid of frequencies. If I moved the chord down an octave that would also remove the clashing frequencies! So I try both and sometimes one works better than the other but usually neither sound RIGHT. It's as though there's a middle path I'm simply not seeing.

So OK, I got Asperger's. Doesn't mean I can't learn. How DO you know when to use which possibility where? What tells you when to use EQ and when to just move the chord down an octave, for instance? Or just turn the sound down? How do you get a track ready to be compressed without having to make all the sounds stupidly quiet? If you've got the sounds sounding nice together in the original MIDI, how DO you add richness to the track either in Audacity or in anything else? Everything I read says 'that's compression, brings the tops and bottoms of the sounds together so you can hear the nuances' but it DOESN'T tell you that some sounds will react more than others to it, so you end up with those sticking out like sore thumbs! I know I can turn those down and re-Audacity the thing - I don't know what other finisher to use, that's why I use Audacity, it's not just because it's freeware - but in the original MIDI you end up with everything sounding 'off', what had been a nice-sounding piece sounds awful just because you're trying to allow for the finisher.

I do know what compression, EQ, spatialization and most of the rest of it does, it's when to use what where and why. I know what every control in the cockpit of a fighter plane does too but doesn't mean I can fly one!

I've just read you shouldn't slap a limiter on the 'out' of your piece. And that you should. And that software emulations are no match for hardware. And that they're better than hardware.......!!!

If only these websites could make their minds up, I might actually GET SOMEWHERE with all of this!

Sorry for the length of the above but it's totally from the heart, all of that is, and I just dunno where to go or what to try next so I guess it's over to you. When I've got £45 I'll get the book, sure, but I bet it just tells me what everything does, not when to use it, same as the other books I've got. Could any of you give me any ideas to keep me going so I can actually make ONE piece worth listening to as a mix?

Yours hopefully - sorry again for the length of this but there's a LOT of feelings there!!

Chris.

[muzines]

The thing that you're discovering is that you want an easy recipe to always apply without having to think about it, to save yourself the effort of understanding how to listen, to understand what needs doing, and the skill use the right tools to achieve that. Basically, you're hoping to sidestep the skill & experience part and just hit a "make sound pro" button.

The thing is, in the creative arts, there are no real recipes. People do what they like to make their art.

The answer to your question of "how do you know what to use and when to use it and how to use it" is - you develop *skill*. You do that by making music, striving to get better, reading around, understanding the fundamentals, trying stuff out, finding what works and what doesn't work for you, listening, analysing what's different about the way your music sounds compared to the music you like, and over time, your experience grows, and your skill grows. After a while, you *do* start to understand what you are hearing, and known what you want to change, and how to do it.

But there aren't a lot of shortcuts to this (other than plugin presets I guess) and one of the real problems these days is that everyone starts with *all* the tools at their disposal, unlike back in the day when we had little and had to maximise what we had.

I've been learning the guitar for ages. There is no "make fingers sound good now" button. I *have* to just play, and learn, and tolerate that it will sound bad until one day, it doesn't sound quite as bad - and eventually, it starts to sound Ok. It's a journey that takes time and effort, and therefore you have to enjoy it to endure it.

If you want some concrete help, you can always put up your mix with a specific query like "it's too quiet what can I do" and get some suggestions here from people who can hear your music and make appropriate suggestions for you to try, and experiment with (and hopefully gain a better understanding of what you're doing for this one specific problem).

[RichardT]

All good questions - but my answer is : you have to learn by doing. If you’re not sure what approach to try, try each of them and choose the one that works best. I don’t think there’s any way to shortcut this process.

Books can help enormously by telling what options you have, and you can develop the skills that will tell you a) what needs doing to your mix and b) what are the best options for fixing it.

[Sam Spoons]

Just to mitigate slightly the comments above, the fact that you can tell that, in your opinion, it doesn't sound 'right' means you are already part way down this road.

WRT compression and the size of your waveforms, the latter doesn't matter, just turn it up.

WRT making the mix sound worse just to be able to use compression? Don't! Just make the mix as good as you can without master buss compression (or any other processing) then stick it on soundcloud or similar (as a private track) and post a link onto here.*

BTW, how are you creating your tracks/what midi recording software are you using?

* the forum doesn't host tracks or images so you need to host them elsewhere and post links on here. The 'img' button above will display a remote hosted image as a pic in the post if the link is of the correct type.

[James Perrett]

I mix so it sounds nice to me as far as it goes. Then I read what you're supposed to do next, unless you've got tons of money for a real recording studio, is to put the .WAV into Audacity and use the compressor in Audacity to mesh the tracks together.

I may sound a bit snobbish here but I'd be wary of any site suggesting you use Audacity for what, in effect, is mastering. I'm not saying you can't do things in Audacity but most people using Audacity are using it because it is free so there are a huge number of inexperienced people posting their thoughts on Audacity and many of those posts will lead you in the wrong direction.

If your mixes sound good to you then they're probably good mixes. If they are just for your own enjoyment ignore the loudness wars and enjoy them. If you want to push the levels up then take a look at some of the articles here at SOS on mastering. Mastering isn't just about pushing the levels up but it is about setting a level appropriate for whatever you are mastering for.

[ulrichburke]

Dear James.

This might sound nutzo coming from a disabled guy but I want to release my own CD and have the mixes good enough to do that - thing IS, I've not exactly been a Lottery winner in my life, so I can't pay someone else to do the mixing for me. I did ONCE - and they stuck dance beats all over a bunch of New Age pieces. And the pieces, even taking that into consideration - were not good to listen to from their hands.

So I wanted to to do the finishing off myself. And I've been trying out loads of advice from loads of places and discovering it all works - SOMETIMES. When it works, you feel like you've learned something. Then you do a new piece and it doesn't work the second time, and you've no idea why.

So I sorta thought there has to be templates going here. Why? Imagine you've written a piano'n'strings piece and mixed it absolutely perfectly (I wish!) If you changed every note in that piece, surely to the DAW it would just be an 'edit' albeit a rather large one, and therefore the mix should still sound perfect because all you've done is change all the notes. The instruments are the same, same relationship to eachother, everything's the same, just the notes are different. That STILL sounds logical to me. And if it works with that, then surely there must be templates for other kinds of mixes. To be honest, I've SEEN templates for mixes but they tend to be for dance tracks, not for New Age, which is what I write.

In lieu of those, I do sit trying out things for days on end. They just never work. Probably it's because I've misunderstood the problem. or Plugin 1's right but totally negated by Plugin 2 being incorrect and I've not realised that. Or something along those lines. So I read up loads online and it's all contradictory - the Audacity for mastering thing was a YouTube video I saw, that's why I started doing it. I've also seen another video saying you can master with ordinary plugins, completely negated by yet another one who says you have to buy highly expensive plugins by Wave to master.

So I don't know what I'm doing or how to do it because everyone contradicts everybody else. And all the info. SORT of works SOMETIMES. So when none of it's working, like now, I've no idea w hat to do. And everyone's telling me what NOT to do - like 'don't use Audacity for mastering', which is fair enough, but nobody's telling me what I should do instead. So I've just got one less thing I can do and don't know what I CAN/SHOULD do.

And this is where I've been stuck for literally years. I've written thousands of pieces, believe it or not, even sold them sometimes when by a miracle a mix works (doesn't help you learn how to do the next one, like winning the Lottery once doesn't tell you how to do it again!) so I know the pieces must be passable (or some of them!)

So OK. I mustn't use Audacity for mastering, fair enough. If I finish off this current piece as well as I can - I've been fighting the thing for 2 days - can I put it up for you to tell me what I SHOULD do to it next? Maybe I'll actually learn something then! (First time for everything....!)

Yours hopefully

Chris.

P.S. It's New Age written entirely from scratch in notation, not using loops in Ableton Live. I don't do loops!

[RichardT]

So I wanted to to do the finishing off myself. And I've been trying out loads of advice from loads of places and discovering it all works - SOMETIMES. When it works, you feel like you've learned something. Then you do a new piece and it doesn't work the second time, and you've no idea why.

I think this is a very common experience!

In lieu of those, I do sit trying out things for days on end. They just never work. Probably it's because I've misunderstood the problem. or Plugin 1's right but totally negated by Plugin 2 being incorrect and I've not realised that. Or something along those lines. So I read up loads online and it's all contradictory - the Audacity for mastering thing was a YouTube video I saw, that's why I started doing it. I've also seen another video saying you can master with ordinary plugins, completely negated by yet another one who says you have to buy highly expensive plugins by Wave to master.

So I don't know what I'm doing or how to do it because everyone contradicts everybody else. And all the info. SORT of works SOMETIMES. So when none of it's working, like now, I've no idea w hat to do. And everyone's telling me what NOT to do - like 'don't use Audacity for mastering', which is fair enough, but nobody's telling me what I should do instead. So I've just got one less thing I can do and don't know what I CAN/SHOULD do.

Yes, there’s a lot of information out there, and a lot of it’s contradictory. Do you use a DAW or do you use a notation package? If it’s a notation package, can you use plugins in it?

[ulrichburke]

Dear Richard T.

It's Quick Score Elite Level 2, far better than things like Musescore. It's really designed for multitimbral VSTs, the idea being each VST sits on a top track - stave - and has 15 sub-staves for all of its sounds, so think Sampletank, or the Korg Legacy Collection or similar. You can have one M1 on a top stave and 8 sub-staves, each with a separate M1 sound or combi on. That way you get 127 staves. If the VSTs aren't multitimbral, of course you only get 8.

You can have 4 plug-ins per stave. So for example, EQ, Reverb, Compression and something else! It DOES do SENDS but I've always hit this prob. with sends - they only work if all the plug-ins use CC changes the same way. And they do NOT! I've got some that don't accept any CC changes at all (but have lovely sounds so I use EQ to tame 'em and velocity - if they've got that - in place of volume. Sometimes they don't even have velocity which makes them virtually unusable.) But you can have one plug-in that's got volume control with Average Hearing Level set at about 60-70, which is fine. And another one which is WAAAY too loud unless the volume level is about 10. Which is stoopid, but the sound's nice so you put up with that. Thing IS - try feeding things with such disparate setting levels into a SEND. I could never make it work so I just chuck the effects on the channels. Which leads me to my next point.

QSE has an incredibly tiny computer footprint. It can have 8 instances of Edirol Orchestral on, all 32 tracks going, 4 effects on each track and the CPU doesn't even wake up much. I had Sonar and that would munch the entire computer with TWO instances of Edirol in it, that's why I dumped Sonar. Couldn't build a PC big enough for it. As long as things accept CC changes, it's got the best automation system out there, Logic included. No more lines and nodes - it does everything with little upright bars. You want a sound curve? Put the start and finish bars in and it draws a perfect curve between them for you. And because the curve's using bars, you can tweak individual bars, or pairs, triples..... to duck whenever you want to, so no need for sidechaining! Why? If it's ducking on the beat, you just draw it in once and copy/paste it the length of the track. Or of course if it's ducking anywhere else. And it uses those little bars for EVERYTHING CC change wise. Thing IS - not everything comes WITH CC Changes and I've never known how to control the stuff that doesn't have any. I just use Bluecat Gain as a plug-in and that's got CC changes, but it DOES take up a plug-in space of course.

I can 'import' waves via my Cakewalk SF2 player but I don't do loops, I write everything entirely by mouse and notation. My sounds are mainly freebies because I don't know which package to go for. I've got 50 gigs of Omnisphere 1 on a backup drive because I never got the hang of it. It was a HEWGE and very expensive disappointment to me, thought I'd find lovely instruments but I got African villages, burning pianos (for real!) guitars sounding like aeroplane propellors.... Who invented that thing, Harrison Birtwistle!?! It's more of a waste of space than I am! Anyway.

QSE can read most XP2 plugins. I stick to presets because I've watched a bazillion videos on programming synths, they get gorgeous sounds, I get dog farts and lovesick seals. So I use loads of soundfonts, freebie downloads (there's some great ones out there) and do the best I can with them.

It's just I can hear a lot of my tracks - mixwise, not calling myself Mozart here! - COULD be contenders if only I knew what I was doing wrong! Please - yes I DO have Cubase and Sonar still - somewhere, not installed - but Cubase is a flippin' nightmare, Sonar munches computers for snacks, can we stick to QSE for the moment? Mainly because I actually UNDERSTAND it fully so I know what I'm doing with the software, just not with the plug-ins!

Yours respectfully - ask what you want -

Chris.

[Drew Stephenson]

The only thing that is consistent is the process of listen > analyse > is it ok? > If yes, move on, if no, make a correction > listen (toggling your last change on and off to make sure you know it's actually better) > analyse > is it ok? > If yes, move on, if no, make a correction > repeat...

Templates can be useful starting places, but can rarely stand up in the face of reality.
Take a simple recording of a piano. In a perfect world, you'd have a perfect piano, in a perfect room, with perfectly positioned microphones, with a perfect response etc etc etc.
But a real piano will have its own resonances, the room will have resonances, the microphone positioning may be compromised, the microphones themselves have compromises...
Which means that you could take an identical piece of music, transpose it a tone or two, and all the resonances of the piano, the room and everything else change - so whatever settings worked initially will no longer work.

Hence we start with our best assumptions based on the material and each time work from there. The more experience we gain* the better our assumptions become and the quicker we can analyse any problems and what their possible solutions are.

I know you don't have a lot of faith in books, but there is such a lot to take in with audio engineering it can really help to have a manual to refer back to as you go. For me, that's Mike Senior's books. And he doesn't try and sell you anything.**

* I assume, I don't have much...
** Though he does recommend sorting some acoustic treatment for your room - but headphones are your friend here anyway.

[James Perrett]

So I sorta thought there has to be templates going here.

There really are no templates that will apply to your work unless you've created some yourself. Your playing style, composition style and preferences are going to be completely different to everyone else's so what works for one person almost certainly won't work for someone else.

I start from scratch with just about every mix that I do. My CD mastering template has a metering plug-in and a bypassed limiter on the main bus, a few preference tweaks and a marker at exactly 2 seconds - that's it. The limiter is there because I know I'll probably need it at some point but I don't want to use it while I'm working on the initial sounds. Everything else is decided after I've heard the material.

Possibly the most productive thing you could do is to post an example of your work and let us have a listen to it - we can almost certainly suggest better ways to achieve the sound you are looking for if we know where you are starting from.

[The Elf]

Cubase is a flippin' nightmare...

Why so? If you have specific questions I can probably answer them?

[ulrichburke]

Dear Everyone.

Thanks for all your help and excellent suggestions! Here's an example of one of mine....

https://soundcloud.com/ulrichburke/new-one-for-laura

And here's the comparison track....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Xvsdu2jm8&t=19s

I'm not trying to COPY the comparison track, just make mine sound like it could be on the same CD as the other one. The DIZI (slightly sour fluty thing!) and the Oriental-twangy-thingy (it's name's in Oriental characters so I've never known what it's called but I love the sound!) are both freebies from Chinee Winds which is a professional Oriental sounds site but as they're the freebie versions (Chinese know how to charge for their stuff!) they're not the full-on, all-settings-blazing versions. But the thing IS - I've kinda got a gut certainty I could improve the overall sound far more if I knew/understood when to use more of the tricks of the trade, as it were. And I see loads of YouTube vids., but they're all about dance/How to make Screaming Leads and my stuff's not really about that.

Anyway, hope you have a good laugh at the effort!

Yours respectfully, and with thanks,

Chris.

[RichardT]

Dear Everyone.

Thanks for all your help and excellent suggestions! Here's an example of one of mine....

https://soundcloud.com/ulrichburke/new-one-for-laura

And here's the comparison track....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Xvsdu2jm8&t=19s

I'm not trying to COPY the comparison track, just make mine sound like it could be on the same CD as the other one. The DIZI (slightly sour fluty thing!) and the Oriental-twangy-thingy (it's name's in Oriental characters so I've never known what it's called but I love the sound!) are both freebies from Chinee Winds which is a professional Oriental sounds site but as they're the freebie versions (Chinese know how to charge for their stuff!) they're not the full-on, all-settings-blazing versions. But the thing IS - I've kinda got a gut certainty I could improve the overall sound far more if I knew/understood when to use more of the tricks of the trade, as it were. And I see loads of YouTube vids., but they're all about dance/How to make Screaming Leads and my stuff's not really about that.

Anyway, hope you have a good laugh at the effort!

Yours respectfully, and with thanks,

Chris.

I enjoyed that! The sounds are good. With this kind of music, you’re looking at very gentle treatment in mixing and mastering. You don’t need lots of processing.

[RichardT]

Dear Everyone.

Thanks for all your help and excellent suggestions! Here's an example of one of mine....

https://soundcloud.com/ulrichburke/new-one-for-laura

And here's the comparison track....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Xvsdu2jm8&t=19s

I'm not trying to COPY the comparison track, just make mine sound like it could be on the same CD as the other one. The DIZI (slightly sour fluty thing!) and the Oriental-twangy-thingy (it's name's in Oriental characters so I've never known what it's called but I love the sound!) are both freebies from Chinee Winds which is a professional Oriental sounds site but as they're the freebie versions (Chinese know how to charge for their stuff!) they're not the full-on, all-settings-blazing versions. But the thing IS - I've kinda got a gut certainty I could improve the overall sound far more if I knew/understood when to use more of the tricks of the trade, as it were. And I see loads of YouTube vids., but they're all about dance/How to make Screaming Leads and my stuff's not really about that.

Anyway, hope you have a good laugh at the effort!

Yours respectfully, and with thanks,

Chris.

I enjoyed that! The sounds are good. With this kind of music, you’re looking at very gentle treatment in mixing and mastering. You don’t need lots of processing.

What is the peak level on the audio file for that track? Do you know what the loudness value is?

[ulrichburke]

Dear Richard T.

Checked it in Audacity and it gets to -9 in the climax bit.

Any ideas on making it sound more like the comparison track in mix quality? This isn't how I WANT it to finish up sounding, it's just as far as I can GET it without being told what to do next!!

I've got a lot like this, if I get told what to do to this, maybe I can use the info. on other tracks too.

yours hopefully

Chris.

[RichardT]

Dear Richard T.

Checked it in Audacity and it gets to -9 in the climax bit.

Any ideas on making it sound more like the comparison track in mix quality? This isn't how I WANT it to finish up sounding, it's just as far as I can GET it without being told what to do next!!

I've got a lot like this, if I get told what to do to this, maybe I can use the info. on other tracks too.

yours hopefully

Chris.

I don't think you're too far away. The main difference I hear is that reference track has more reverb. I suspect it has some 'glue' compression on too but that's a bit of a guess.

You need to raise the peak level to be closer to 0dB. What level you should target depends on what you're going to do with the track. James, being a mastering engineer among other things, can probably advise better than I, but I generally target -1 dB because I send my tracks to streaming services and some of them process the master into lossy data formats, where you need a bit of 'headroom'.

If you can't add sends then the reverb is a bit of an issue. You could add reverb as an insert on each track and set the 'wet/dry' level on the reverb to give you the effect that you need.

Glue compression is normally added as an insert effect to the complete signal (master bus). Do you have a master bus in your software and can you add insert effects to it?

[James Perrett]

Dear Everyone.

Thanks for all your help and excellent suggestions! Here's an example of one of mine....

https://soundcloud.com/ulrichburke/new-one-for-laura

And here's the comparison track....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Xvsdu2jm8&t=19s

I thought yours sounded pretty good. The main difference with the comparison is that the lead instruments on yours stand out a bit more from the pad which is more in the background. The comparison track also had either a very long delay effect or a quiet response part on the lead instrument which gives a sense of space. I also felt that the trills on your piece sounded a bit mechanical - you could do with using different samples for the down and up pick and possibly a very slight amount of randomisation in timing. This is probably something that is harder to do in a score editor than in a typical sequencer which will often offer a humanise function.

I didn't notice much difference in volume - I don't know if Soundcloud normalises things automatically.

It is always the case that your own material never sounds as polished or as good as other people's. That's probably down to your familiarity with every detail of the sound. Even top engineers have this problem when listening to their own material. That's a big reason to involve other people who you can trust in the final mastering stage.

[ulrichburke]

Dear James and Richard T.

James first. Yes, QSE does indeed have a master buss - it's the 'out' for want of a better word and you can put 4 effects on it just the same as any other bus. I've got O.T. T., Blockfish, 5orcery (that's how they spell it, it's a 5-band compressor) Nightshine, the one in the Korg MDEX, Maxwell Smart, Leveller and Luftikus compressors. Putting 4 presets on each bus is NOT an issue in QSE, it's got a TINY processor footprint, smaller than any other DAW I've seen. I think it's easier to work with them that way TBH, you can set the settings individually instead of 'one size fits all'. My 2 reverbs are the MDEX reverb - if you don't know the MDEX, it's a real Swiss army knife, it's got just about everything there is in it somewheres! and Ambience. I've never fully UNDERSTOOD Ambience - it's got dampers and different wavelengths settings in there and I've never worked out when to use them. Or how...

Dear Richard.

Thanks for thinking I'm not so far off! God this question's going to sound stooopid to you but bear with it - I kept the level to -9 because I thought you had to leave loads of room for mastering, but Richard's saying I have to get it to zero? And its waveform's TINY - I've always had this worry about my waveforms, they're always tiny even compared to unfinished-not-properly-mixed tracks I've downloaded. Last stoopid question (for this one, sorry!) I've always used QSE because I've never understood Cubase. I know Cubase has got notation, which I love, but the difference is in Cubase you don't hear the note till AFTER you put it in. In QSE you hear the note AS you put it in. That makes all the difference - in Cubase I was playing back all the time, of course everything was discords and it was killing my thought flow! Of course I could load in the MIDI file for finishing off but laziness, I guess, was easier to work in something I totally understood rather than something I didn't REALLY understand that was winning all the battles! Felt like I was in a war with Hal 2000!

I'll leave it at that. If one of you would tell me which compressor to use and would it be OK to show you the glued version and then use what you tell me on another piece? I mean I nearly got a CD released not so long ago (honest!) but I had to do the mixing, it was a tiny company that only accepted ready-mixed stuff, and I couldn't get it right for them.

Also - would any of you know a source of background pad sounds? The cotton-wool, pin-yer-instruments-here, Karunesh, New Age pad sounds that hums in the gaps of LOADS of New Age tracks? As that's all they're needed for, a cheap source would be awesome (or another sound I could high/low pass into sounding right...)

Sorry for all of this. Thankyou very, very much for reading.

Yours respectfully

Chris.

[RichardT]

Thanks for thinking I'm not so far off! God this question's going to sound stooopid to you but bear with it - I kept the level to -9 because I thought you had to leave loads of room for mastering, but Richard's saying I have to get it to zero? And its waveform's TINY - I've always had this worry about my waveforms, they're always tiny even compared to unfinished-not-properly-mixed tracks I've downloaded. Last stoopid question (for this one, sorry!) I've always used QSE because I've never understood Cubase. I know Cubase has got notation, which I love, but the difference is in Cubase you don't hear the note till AFTER you put it in. In QSE you hear the note AS you put it in. That makes all the difference - in Cubase I was playing back all the time, of course everything was discords and it was killing my thought flow! Of course I could load in the MIDI file for finishing off but laziness, I guess, was easier to work in something I totally understood rather than something I didn't REALLY understand that was winning all the battles! Felt like I was in a war with Hal 2000!

Hi Chris,

I was assuming you were going to master it yourself and I was talking about the end result of mastering. Sorry if I confused you! It’s ok to begin mastering with peaks of -9dB. If you can put plugins on the master bus then you have a choice: master in QSE, or export audio and master somewhere else, such as Cubase. The benefit of Cubase is that you will have access to a limiter, loudness metering, the ability to control the gaps at start and end of the tracks - the downside is that it’s a complex package that so far you haven’t got on with. Mastering is a different discipline to mixing but there’s no reason why you can’t learn about it. But get the mix as good as you can before doing the mastering, it cannot fix mix problems. Like many people, I get my tracks mastered by someone else and there are many advantages to that - but self-mastering is also not uncommon.

[James Perrett]

One other thing I'd suggest is to consider booking a one to one session with an experienced engineer like the Elf on here. I think you are at the stage where having someone go through their thought processes with your material and then showing you how to correct things is going to pay big dividends. We could be writing reams of material on here which won't do half as much good as an hour or two working with someone who knows what they are doing.