Song#2 All on this farm - Mastering Stage

Let's get down to business with part 4 of 5 today, the Mastering Stage.

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

As always, please visit this project's intro blog. 

Mastering

I divided the tracks into groups for easy editing. The groups are:

• Instrument
• Animals sound
• Vocal

 For the instrument part, each instrument has its own track, as described in the previous post. Additional processing was added for some instruments like the bass - EQ was added. An overall
chain-linked compressor was added to limit music volume during the intro and outro parts, where the animal & farmer entry scene was occuring. In the same device chain, a glue compressor was added. The harmonica recording was processed with a gate, Amp boost and reverb device chain for the desired sound.

The next group Animals also had some processing. For those recording live with my girlfriend's toy sheep, an autofilter was added, to cut out the lower frequencies and rumble from the background noise. The other animal sample recordings from freesound.org were reasonably well with minimum background noise hiss and required no additional processing. The overall group was also processed with a compressor -glue compressor device chain as well.

Lastly, the Vocal group was split into several tracks like:

• Main vocal
• Vocal thickening
• Harmony 1
• Harmony 2
• Extra

The vocal thickening track was a trick learned from master Warren Huart's video, where I chained up to 8 pairs of vocals with different pannings and tuning with the grain delay device and finished with a limiter. This track was then made softer by -35dB against the Main vocal track to give that final thickening sound.

Harmonies 1 & 2 were solely for the chorus purposes and were individually recorded and processed through Melodyne. The device chain for them included gate, compressor and EQ8 with different EQ frequency high-pass & low-pass envelopes. The Extra track was mainly for those exclaimations of "Hey!" and other minor sound snippets.

Overall, the Vocal group was processed through another chain of EQ8, glue compressor, Amp Clean and a Abletunes Easy Deesser devices.

Finally, for the Master channel another glue compressor and limiter was added to the chain.

Aaaand that's all folks! A simple setup for a simple song (disclaimer - this was mastered before I watched Wicklemedia's awesome mastering tutorial on Youtube, a big recommend!)


Stay tuned for the final Part V of  V for this song!