Intention: Add body to the low-end and bring out the bass and kick a bit. Add bit of ambience. Make things a bit brighter but also warmer. Increase width a touch.
I tried working at 88.2Khz but PSP MasterComp used 73% CPU on my dual Opteron DAW.
No other plugin uses even a 1/4 of this!
New trick: After reading through the Ted Jensen thread at Gearslutz I decided to see if I could detect the frequency peaks by ear. I couldn't.
So after setting up the first MasterQ and the MaterComp I played the whole track with Voxengo SPAN set to infinite peak hold (16K blocks) and just read off the absolute frequency peaks and added another MasterQ and notched them out a bit. (Then I added a bit more high-end which was a mistake)
Track loaded in Sonar 5. I did some automation on the volume before the mastering chain so that the loudest peaks were a bit tamed. The curves were gentle and the gain change was minimal. -0.7 dB max.
Mastering Chain:
Perfect Space convolution reverbOn a send feeding into the mastering chain
Performance Hall - XY Close
Delay 0.242 s (To put it behind the performance)
Output -33.5 dB
PSP MasterQHiPass: Fc 30Hz, Q 0.71, 24dB/oct
Low Shelf: Fc 149 Hz, Q 0.5, Gain 0.68 dB
Peak: Fc 66 Hz, Q 1.08, Gain 0.92 dB
Peak: 186 Hz, Q 1.27, Gain 0.74 dB
Peak: 6.41 Khz, Q 0.55, Gain 1.25 dB
High Shelf: Fc 15.2 Khz, Q 0.50, Gain 2.05 dB
PSP MasterCompRatio: 2.8
Threshold: -15.91 dB
Attack: 28.5 ms (Auto off)
Release: 100 ms (Auto off)
Link: 0%
Make-up: auto
Mix: 0%
Output: -3.02 dB
FAT on, Soft knee, RMS detect Limiter off
PSP MasterQ (New trick)
Peak: Fc 2.88 Khz, Q 8.16, Gain -2.61 dB
Peak: Fc 738 Hz, Q 8.88, Gain -5.17 dB
Peak: Fc 2.07 Khz, Q 5.71, Gain -3.61 dB
High Shelf: Fc 13.6 Khz, Q 0.50, Gain 1.08 dB (Not new trick)
Voxengo SoniformerM/S Side mode
Gain 1.1 dB up to 3.43 Khz
Gain rising up to 2.2 dB at 20Khz
This was just to add a bit of width but I have now downloaded the free Voxengo MSED plugin so next time I would probably use this. (Obviously less flexible but more than sufficient for this simple task).
Voxengo Warmifier6550 emulation
Param V: -10 dB
Param I: -3.1 dB
Filter and EQ Off
High Quality mode
As Ged says, this plugin sounds really good. I closed my eyes when setting the levels and after opening them I was amazed at the numbers. I nearly pulled them back a bit but decided to trust my ears and not be fooled by numbers. To do this I assigned the two parameter controls to knobs on my Virus. I think I am going to create some templates with assigned knobs. Working with eyes closed is a good thing IMO.
Voxengo ElephantIn: + 3.0 dB
Limit Mode: EL-3
Limit speed: fast
Shape: 0.02
RShape: 2 ms
St linking: off
DC filter: 8Hz, Bessel
Oversampling 4X
Waves IDR ditherNo particular reason to use this dither. I just thought I would give it a try.
That's it.
Alistair