Friday, January 21, 2005

More software, this time a mastering limiter...

So I've worked on getting the vocals to sound better and continue to do so. I don't sing on most tracks-- there is only one track with vocals on the first Utenzil CD, but there will be more on the upcoming release.

Next point of refinement that I mentioned, and which was also pointed out by this (very good) fellow CD Baby and Garageband artist, whose CD I bought and which you might enjoy, is that my levels are a little low when compared to "major label" discs in the same genre.

So I fretted about this, because while I could readily crank the volume that could introduce distortion and that is worse-- unwanted harmonic distortion is what causes listener fatigue and general "blech" upon hearing a recording.

What I did was to purchase the Voxengo Elephant mastering limiter. Along with the Voxengo Soniformer, the multiband compressor that I can use this to adjust levels on select frequency bands to allow for innate hearing (in)sensitivity, I can crank the levels but "squash" peaks before clipping kicks in (hence the name, I guess, a nice strong but articulate Elephant foot on your levels). I worked with it just a bit, it does seem transparent and is not extremely expensive for the problem it solves for me.

There are some very expensive mastering software packages, I will not go there.

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