Production Thread

[polar_action]

I have a friend who's using Live 4 for djing and has "dumped his turntables" "
(c) LCD Soundsystem

Mixes of his stuff can be found at www.drum-aberdeen.co.uk and there's huge discussion about all Live setps at the ableton forums http://www.ableton.com/index.php?main=forum.

There's even a wee bit about Darren Price and Underworld who's using Live

[Leon]

Originally Posted by undarrenworld

What equipment do u use for the Mastering the tracks? Could u reccommend me some?

Well it's actually really easy and cheap you know:

EARPHONES!

I only have software to produce music, so I stick the earphones (note: not HEADphones) in my computer and you immediately pick up too much bass or cracks or whatever it is that's making your song sound ugly.

My god, never thought I'd ever be ''advising'' people things about music production

[Professor]

undarrenworld: there isn't any real magic software for mastering. i have the waves bundle plugs--multiband compression, really good eq, maximizer etc. a good multiband compressor is key. lots of people swear by a maximizer--it will get your sound nice and loud, but it's your ears that really need to be spot on. a maximizer alone, without knowing what to listen for, can really just boost everything--even the shit that shouldn't be there. harmonics and phase are really tricky to me. apparantly reason has added some way of mastering--i have my tracks mastered by someone who knows what they are doing. it makes a difference.

[Forgotten Sanity]

I can't wait to upgrade to Reason 3. I'm still on 2.5 but I was at Sam Ash the other day playing around with R3 on a G5 and I'm thoroughly convinced that Propellerhead's really made a quantum leap with the combinator.Not only is it a way to generate sounds, it's an effective way to set up an effects chain and easily save it for later.

[polar_action]

The Reason 3 new stuff does make it worth it. The Mastering options seem comprehensive to me (but i'm just doing this as a hobby). Being able to store combined instruments saves plenty of setup time too.

Using rewire with Ableton Live really brings mixing to life.

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Leon

Well it's actually really easy and cheap you know:

EARPHONES!

I only have software to produce music, so I stick the earphones (note: not HEADphones) in my computer and you immediately pick up too much bass or cracks or whatever it is that's making your song sound ugly.

My god, never thought I'd ever be ''advising'' people things about music production

not to rain on your parade leon but headphones, let alone earphones are NOT suitable or accurate for mastering or mixing purposes. Unless you have perhaps specialised (read: rather expensive) headphones you'll always want to mix and master on decent speakers. I'd say it's pretty obvious tiny earphones don't tell you anything about too much bass, since these things do not produce any (real) bass at all.
Of course we all have to get by with what we can afford. I only recently got a pair of monitor's and their pretty much the cheapest around, but they are already definitely a step up from my old hifi speakers. Also, even if you have quite crappy speakers you can still mix on them if you know what their weaknesses are so you can compensate.
As for mastering itself, mostly you'd want to let the real mastering be done by something who know's what he's doing, and has the gear to do it. Again, for most of us hobbyists this simply isn't practical (or affordable) so again we have to make do with the stuff we have. A bit of compression, a bit of eq and that's about as far as mastering goes under these circumstances. There are a lot of mastering plugins that can either make your track sound great, or make it sound like crap if you don't know what you're doing. If you have a good mix you won't have to do much mastering, or you could even ruin it by applying too much compression for example. A good mastering engineer can make a good mix sound even better, but he can't make a crap mix sound good.

[Forgotten Sanity]

Well, I decided to splurge and bought me Reason 3 this weekend. GAWD, that Combinator is really cool. It seems to be significantly harder on the CPU, and there is a definate change in the latency on my Oxygen 8 keyboard.

The mastering suite is incredible, and I've been having fun just building frankenstein'ed instruments in Combinator. It's made for some real fun, real noise and most importantly, some real epiphanies. Whereas I used to be sorely disappointed with the synths in Reason, the combinator allows you to just slap a config together yourself to get whatever you're looking for. That's real cool.

I think my next project is going to be Reaktor 4 -- I've heard tons of good stuff about, time to see what the hype is about...