Hello all, I hope your Christmas was at least half as nice as mine.
My little sojourn in the Rockies bought me about 5 hours of reading Bob Katz' Mastering Audio beside the fire, with my notebook at hand on Dec. 24. Bob, was it as good for you as it was for me?
It was also nice to get far enough away from the turds to see the, er, bog? I haven't turned this system on for almost a week and now I'm afraid to hear what I was working on.
I'd like to thank everyone for the additional posts, particularly Bill Mueller and Bob Katz.
Bill, your reference to GM's comments remind me of Ansel Adams very excellent series on photography (one of my greatest treasures). Mr. Adams best tool was his ability to previsualize the print long before he exposed the film. The whole process, after that defining moment, was designed to bring the original (and usually fully developed), concept to the finished print. His discipline to this principle was unwavering and was always evident in the stunning artistic clarity of his finished works -It even shows in the few examples of his commercial work, I've seen.
This makes me wonder how very often tyros like me are tempted to approach the recording part of the process as mere data gathering. It's quite shameful, isn't it? And then we expect to be able to mine this pile of rabble and use a bunch of sexy plugins to extract gold from a slag heap!
More often than not, for my own work, where no invoice is written, it doesn't really start that way. It's often just recording to document the form or concept of a tune, and then something nice happens, which leads to many hours of trying to get a guitar sound that just isn't there because the recording preceded the concept development. The net result is volumes of stuff that's 'almost' there.
So I guess the real turd is the one that's recorded by a client for a price, and the price of rerecording precludes the completion of concept development (by both artist and recordist) and so you get out the files, and the 600 grit paper to produce something that pleases no one.
Bob, if you're keeping an eye on this thread, I do have one question (of many which need to be properly formulated), and I'm not at all sure this is the best place to post it, but here goes:
In implementing the K-system you make several references to calibrating monitors to 83dB, sometimes with pink noise and other times with a 1kHz sine wave. This has left me a bit confused. What I've ended up doing is marking my Firepod interface monitor control with K-20, 14 and 12 positions, and marking my reference amp output controls with Sine and Pink noise positions. I do expect there are non-linearities where the two pieces interact but this does seem to be better than what I was doing before (nothing consistently). My RMS meter is a plugin in the last slot of Cubase's output buss, and my SPL meter is (you guessed it), Radio Shack.
From simply looking at the knobs, it seems that the gain structure makes more sense with the amp set at sine (about 75% of the setting scale). For the sine wave calibration the amp is at 100%.
Does this make sense? I'd really appreciate a few words on when to use sine/pink. I'm also just bit suspicious about the quality of pink noise noise generators in general. I've beeen using my Roland VS-2480 for this purpose. The sine wave output seems to be rock solid, as one should expect, but the pink noise seems to have the peak meters jumping around quite a bit, which makes me wonder how well 'integtrated' (?) the pink noise is.
Thanks to everyone,
Keith
