Ding-dong ding-dong! It's part 4 of 5 today, le Mastering Stage! -ragequits-
- Idea Stage
- Composing and Arranging Stage
- Recording Stage
- Mastering Stage
- Final Product
As always, please visit this project's intro blog.
A funny story here was that me and my neighbour Chu-Gen were supposed to learn the software together over his summer break. I provided him with the MIDI devices, like my Korg MicroKey and my Novation Launchpad Pro, in exchange for him teaching me how to use the program. It goes without saying that, that deal fell through with both of our busy schedules.
I started referencing online tutorials, blogs and the software manual itself (which is pretty darn good at explaining everything with cringe-worthy jokes inside) before I tried it out on a wedding dedication song before this blog started.
Back to the song at hand, I rigged up the MIDI direct into the arrangement page as you can see below
Here's my settings for the instrument chain:
As you can see here, I tweaked the macro reverb level to get that pearly pearly Steinway sound (though I don't think its anywhere comparable to the real thing). To get deep into the settings, I expanded the reverb chain and tweaked the decay time, reflect and diffuse to get the sound I wanted.
Then I threw in a stock preset EQ8 for piano by Ableton called Piano EQ2 which boosts the lows and highs. Since I did the reverb settings on the Instrument itself, I turned off the Master Reverb settings but I put a Limiter under the Master as shown below:
Mastering
After obtaining the MIDI data from my Clavinova in the previous post, I transfered it to my DAW (digital audio workstation) of choice, Ableton Live. Honestly, I've been learning and using Ableton for the past few months in earnest, though I had the program a year back.A funny story here was that me and my neighbour Chu-Gen were supposed to learn the software together over his summer break. I provided him with the MIDI devices, like my Korg MicroKey and my Novation Launchpad Pro, in exchange for him teaching me how to use the program. It goes without saying that, that deal fell through with both of our busy schedules.
I started referencing online tutorials, blogs and the software manual itself (which is pretty darn good at explaining everything with cringe-worthy jokes inside) before I tried it out on a wedding dedication song before this blog started.
Back to the song at hand, I rigged up the MIDI direct into the arrangement page as you can see below
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| Arrangement View |
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| Devices settings |
Then I threw in a stock preset EQ8 for piano by Ableton called Piano EQ2 which boosts the lows and highs. Since I did the reverb settings on the Instrument itself, I turned off the Master Reverb settings but I put a Limiter under the Master as shown below:
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| Limiter in the Master |
A Limiter helps prevent the listener from having sudden loud audio blast their ears to the moon, but also helps set the target listening level - which I set to 3.50dB (since the source MIDI is rather soft).
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| The song in Audacity |
In the above picture, I've imported the song into a freeware audio editing program called Audacity. Here's a secret, somewhere in that audio waveform I've added an extra something. Can you spot it?
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| Spectrogram form |
I've given you some help here. This hidden extra can only be seen in Spectrogram form. Still cannot see it? All right, I'll zoom in the end of the song for you guys n girls!
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| Hidden message! |
There you go! My proposal at the end of every song from now on! The only problem with adding these kind of stuffs to the song is that you can actually hear it if you listen carefully.
If you're interested in adding hidden stuffs in your audio, I've written a post on it here.
More info!
Paul Cantrell has a great resource on mastering the real piano recording itself, you can check his blog here> https://innig.net/music/recordings/method/mastering.html
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