Audio: Learning Mastering

I've decided that it would be worth my while learning how to master music. So I thought I'd share my experiences on here as it happens. I'm not really following any guides. Maybe the odd pointer here or there, but mainly just working from my own experience and instinctually feeling my way through the process. Given that it is said of the process said "the better the source material, the better then end product" I thought I'd have a bash at some of the worst (audio quality wise) source material I've ever recorded!

Last week I tried my hand at re-mastering a piece of music I recorded with my 'band' at Uni.

The piece was painstakingly arranged in an entire day after my friend, and guitarist, James, walked the length of the corridor and said "I've just come up with this awesome acoustic thing... We have to work out how to make a song around it!" or something to that effect. So I called my friend Chaz, also a guitarist, who owned a bass and told him to come over for a jam. It's pretty heavily influenced by a couple of Coldplay tracks which were into at the time. (I still stand by my opinion that the Blue Room EP is pretty magical)



Once we'd figured out who was going to play what and when, we decided to set up to record.

Our set up:

Fender strat dirty clean into GK 250ML
Acoustic guitar into Marshall 100w combo (AVT?)
dodgy looking "Metal Bass" into a Marshall 30W (guitar) practice amp

Those were all recorded live, at the same time into a £5 mono microphone designed for talking over Skype, which came bundled with Chaz's old Dell... In my bedroom, using a trial version of Sony Sound Forge 7!

The original WAV seems to have been lost to the ether, but the derived stereo mp3 does live on, and it's all I'll have to work with. Here it is in all it's youthful exuberance:

http://soundcloud.com/churst/wasted-take-2-original

The main hurdle I face is going to be generating any bass response from the file. But that is going to be a problem I'll leave until much later. Firstly, I can hear that the playing is not really in time with anything. Not really out of time with each other, but the tempo is inconsistent. There's also not much "room" in the sound which is probably positive, considering the room we were in... Also, the stereo image is made up of one mono signal copied over to the other side, so I'll have to make something happen with that. I should also decide whether or not I should try to program a drum part... probably something that would overwhelm me a little at this stage, given my lack of experience arranging drum patterns.

So, this is my first attempt at making something out of nothing:

http://soundcloud.com/churst/wasted-take-2-re-master

I first went through the entire song and re-timed it to a beat as we were pretty loose, not so much with each other but we weren't playing to a tempo. I've also EQ'd it and used a few trick effects to make it sound wider, but I'm not sure that it's actually a better sound overall. Still feels like there's something missing. (I made a start at some drum parts, but I'm only happy with one very short passage).

The set where these attempts will be collected is here

I've just got a bunch of new plugins to play with: SSL Duende Native (Free trial) and also Line6 POD Farm 2.0, so I'm gonna have a proper play with those tomorrow and see what comes out.