Radio playlist opportunity dashed due to production issue

[Super 8]

Thanks Flash, appreciate the advice and PC sell but you're not really getting my point here I don't want to go back to making music with computers - it feels too much like being at work (where I'm surrounded by them day-in/day-out. I'd really like to try and get by without them to be honest as I find they hinder rather than help me and very much get in the way of my musical creativity. Up until relatively recently I had a top Mac Pro running Logic X loaded with about two squillion shekels of music software! The thing is, I never actually finished anything (option paralysis!) I have got more music done in the last year going back to my old BR1600 than I ever did trying to make music with a computer ... and, personally, I much prefer using a standalone recorder (the reason I've been a member of this site for years back when it was just exclusively Roland/Boss! Yeah, I KNOW, "Move with the times Grandad!" Thing is, there's no reason I feel why I shouldn't be able to make broadcast-friendly recordings with my Boss unit is there? I'm just obviously doing SOMETHING wrong so that's the reason why I've come on here to ask this question particular to my machine .... I don't really want to get another set up - I would much prefer to just make do with what I've got if poss!)   

[64Guitars]

In case it's not obvious, I'd like to point out that you should always strive for the highest fidelity on the best playback system you have available for your final mix. Think of this mix as your master mix. Don't try to compress and equalise while mixing in order to make it suitable for radio, or the car stereo, or your mp3 player, or whatever. Instead, make copies of your master mix, then process those copies to sound better in specific environments. It's a lot easier to process a finished stereo mix than it is to process the many individual tracks that made it. Although you can use a DAW for this processing, you don't have to.

There is software available that's made specifically for processing a stereo mix. One that comes to mind is JAMin, though it's only available for Linux. I'm not familiar with the mastering software that's available in the Windows and Mac worlds, but I've heard a lot of good things about the various products from iZotope. Though it's not cheap, their Ozone product sounds like a very powerful mastering tool. The short description on the main page of their site says "Get that full, rich, radio-ready master you've been chasing with Ozone." There's also a less-expensive version called Ozone Elements. Ozone looks very powerful and has lots of features. But it also comes with lots of presets, so you can just experiment with those if you don't want to get into all the details.

Another option is to try one of the online mastering services such as LANDR or, if you can justify the cost, Abbey Road Studios.

[Johnny Robbo]

Check out Glenn Fricker's YouTube tutorials on mixing. You'll find him at Spectre Media Group on YouTube. You may want to look at your mixing environment... something he often mentions is getting some proper acoustic treatment for your studio space, something which needn't cost a lot. The room you're mixing in can massively affect the sound you hear coming out of your speakers, so that may be a place to start if your mixes sound OK to you, but not so good when played elsewhere.

Also, I cannot recommend LANDR highly enough... you get two free mixes a month & it's £1.99 a track after that. Here's the difference it makes. The first clip is "raw" no mastering & the 2nd one has been through their service & just sounds warmer, fuller & better defined to my ears.

Hope this helps!

(I'm using Firefox & the site player plays the same file for both examples, but if I use the "browser" player I get the different files for comparison)

[Super 8]

Thanks everyone! Yes, I'm aware that the 'proper' mastering of music is very much 'an art' in itself (and becoming an 'AI art' too it seems nowadays - I can't imagine those 'human professionals' out there being too happy about LANDR and the like!) I'm also aware that one should strive for the very best stereo mixdown they can and not just presume that everything can be 'fixed at the mastering stage' .... and this is very much what I do - using the equipment I have landed myself with (basically a BOSS BR1600 and some half-decent guitars!) I do very much strive to make my mixes sound as good as they can be. I take my music making very seriously and, in my home studio, as well as having a fairly decent pair of playback monitors I have bass traps in the corners and acoustic panels on the walls. I try to make my mixes sound as good as they possibly can on numerous playback systems and, up until this radio play fiasco, I ws actually pretty happy with the sound I was getting! 

NB: I purposefully don't try to make my final stereo 'mixdown' track my 'master'! I always try to leave about 6dB of headroom for mastering purposes. I don't profess to being able to master AT ALL (Like I say, I feel that's 'a different art' altogether! I neither have the equipment nor the skillset to be able to use it properly if I did and yes, I've tried!) Taking music to 'mixdown stage' is very much my goal and after years of practice, up until this radio outing, mixing is something I actually 'thought' I was good at ... hmm! I'm not so sure now and feel I may need to go back to the drawing board. When I play my unmastered mixes back (on numerous playback systems) the only thing that I feel is lacking is volume but that's calculated. Because I mix as though -6dB is 0dB 'unity gain' then obviously my mixes are naturally going to be considerably quieter than most other modern day 'slammed' releases. Personally I've got used to just turning the volume dial up but I'm aware I can't submit 'raw' unmastered mixes to radio stations and the like where they will have to 'compete' with other finalised 'industry standard' commercial music ('cause louder is always better right?? Again, "Hmm?!!")

So yeah, once I have my final mix (that I'm happy with and have checked on numerous playback systems) in the past I have paid for mastering but, due to financial circumstances (ie: lack of!), I can no longer afford to avail of external mastering services SO .... I recently tried LANDR (although you seem to be getting a much better deal than me Robbo - I paid £8.99 per track with none of the freebies you mention!) Anyway, it is these LANDR'd mixes that I submitted to the radio station that ... got rejected! To be honest, of all my productions I've had mastered, I still think given the choice, that I actually prefer my original 'raw' mixes (as these are the ones I've laboured over and have tried to perfect - I'm really familiar with them) but, like I say, on whatever playback device I listen to them on I always have to remember to turn that volume dial UP (and of course DOWN when I'm done!)

So .... here's what I'm thinking (by way of trying to answer my own original question post here!) I think what I'll try for my next song project is this: As mentioned previously, I have certain 'go to' BR1600 effects preset chains that I tend to use however I notice that, for example, the built-in vocal presets [P001; P002; etc.] don't have a 'LO-CUT' option in the chain. Going back to my earlier post, having analysed my musical submissions, the engineer at the radio station said there was too much 'broadband energy' in my tracks and I'm finally beginning to understand what he actually means by this (I think!)

If I've recorded a triangle part say, that'll only be taking up a small window of the EQ spectrum but, in my recordings to date, I haven't filtered out all that extranneous 'dead space' per recorded track. The same with BASS, there's all that extra broadband energy above (and below, right?) the actual bass frequency range that, again, on my recordings to date with the BR1600, I've just left in the mix and .... after much head scratching this end, I think that's what's causing the problem ie: an accumulative build up of un-needed 'dead' frequencies within every track layer that I add to my multi-tracked musical soup!

When I used to mix (in Logic) on a computer I had a bunch of behind the scenes presets that I had set up for every input source (one VERY boring afternoon!) where, using my ears whilst looking at the waveform, I had removed all the unwanted frequencies from each input source. The thing is: I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS ON THE BOSS .... and never have! Because of this, on all my recordings made with the Boss to date, all these 'unwanted freqs' have been left in and ... I THINK HEREIN LIES THE PROBLEM! Because I haven't been removing all the unwanted/non-required freqencies from my mixes (or cutting them out at the time of input recording? Again, how do you do this on the BR1600?) I've been left with a build up of 'sonic mud' I guess (or 'too much energy' in my tracks as the radio tech guy described it!)

Taking just one regular, go to source instrument that I would tend to lay down for every song project, say, BASS for example. Would the following procedure be a way to go? So I plug my bass into the dedicated Hi-Z 'INPUT 1' socket, Ordinarily I would choose a preset (say: P101 'Motown Lwdn') but this doesn't have a 'LO-CUT' block in the effects preset chain and the only place I can see one is when you input via the 'MULTITRACK' input so ... what if I were to choose that for input (to avail of the 'LO-CUT' option remember!) then, once I have my 'LO CUT' bass part down & recorded, were I to want to use one of my goto presets, would I be right in thinking that I'd have to then (again in 'real time'!) bounce this newly recorded 'LO CUT' processed bass track to another track in order to print the preset I would normally just use when DI'ng straight in and printing the effect to the input? Seems like a bit of a faff (especially if I'd have to do this for every track I put down) but, if it removes the mud from my mixes, then it's worth a try. Again, I'm very open to any further practical solutions any readers/users may have in this area! CHEERS!                                 

[Super 8]

BUMP! OK, I admit I got 'too wordy' in my last post! Bottom line: I'm aware that every source sound one records (be it BASS GUITAR, TAMBOURINE, NOSE FLUTE!) has it's own frequency range so, taking BASS GUITAR as an example, there won't be that much sonic information from the mid to high range up (sorry, don't know 'the science bit' figures here!) BUT you still record all the dead frequency stuff, right? The recorder doesn't know what you're recording and what to leave in or out - it records EVERYTHING right and all these extraneous/unwanted freqs they all build up track by track accumulatively potentially making your final mix muddy and with too much of this unwanted energy? (Which is what has happened with my mixes I guess.) SO how do you just keep the stuff you need for each track and disregard the rest then? (I feel a Paul Simon song coming on!) With my BR1600, how do I cut out all these build-up frequencies that do nothing but muddy a final MIX - the stuff you don't want/need? (NB: I'm not talking about MASTERING here but rogue, unwanted frequencies per track within a song's MIX.)

[T.C. Elliott]

Okay, so this is what I got out of the thread. You don't want to use a computer for anything, but while your mix wasn't bad, it had too much bass for the radio station to play. Without having the tracks in front of me, I'm guessing, you had the bass frequencies boosted up quite a bit (in comparison to the higher range of the eq) and it caused some problems.

So you want a solution. Only, the best solution is not optimal for you. Which would be to record in your Box and mix in a DAW. But that requires a learning curve which is a bummer of a tedious task in and of itself. So I'm going to suggest you try something and I have no idea if it'll work for you or not, but it's worth a shot.

What I would do, if I were you, is to use use reference tracks. Import a stereo WAV file onto your 1600 of a song that has a similar arrangement to the one you are mixing. If you're doing a rock guitar track, for instance, I'd use some Nickleback tracks. (First off, they don't suck nearly as much as people say they do. It's just the popular thing to say. And secondly, that doesn't mean their mixes are bad. In fact, they have a lot of damn good sounding mixes and masters.)  You'll have to google or just pick things you like in your own library.

Once you've identified a song that has the sound you would like to emulate then you import it into your 1600 and reference it. That would be listen to your mix. Then listen to the reference track. You are trying to hear the balance of the tracks (ie, how loud the vocal is or the drums are etc.,) as well as the balance of the frequency (if you like the bass level and sound of your reference track then yours shouldn't be obviously louder or quieter unless you're doing it for a reason.)

Now, you're gonna wanna use your EQ. And it's been a while since I had a 1600 and I was never proficient at it, but if I remember correctly you can use your eq on a specific frequency range. The first thing you should do is cut all the bass freqencies (say anywhere between 60hz and oh 180 hz depending on the track) of your vocal and even your guitars. The way I do it (in a DAW so it's easier) is to start the cut at around 60 and move it up until I hear a definite change. Then I listen to that change and decide if I like it or not. If not, then I back it off a hair.  Heck, I even high pass (or low cut) the bass guitar sometimes.

Then I'll often cut the highs on the bass and kick drum. Not a huge amount, but a bit from 2k up (or even lower sometimes.) Maybe 3db and then adjust to taste?

In the DAW, I'll use a steep curve with a narrow band and pass it through the entire spectrum for a specific track and find the nasally or woolly sounding frequencies and then cut those individually. Sometimes I get lucky and I don't hear (m)any. Sometimes the whole track sounds like that and I just have to pick the worst.

After all that, You've eq'd your tracks, youv'e balanced the levels compared to your reference track to get it close (not exact) and are happy with the way it sounds. Then you're gonna bounce down a stereo mix with around 6db of headroom. And you're gonna reference it again. Making only small adjustments to balance it one more time. Then when you master it, you're still gonna leave like up to 1 db of headroom. A light touch of a compressor can do wonders. I actually use a limiter when bouncing sometimes, but I don't recommend it unless you're just cutting off the stray spike. (It's easy to screw this step up.)

In short, everyone loves bass. But you are probably boosting the bass more than you need to because of masking (all the bass frequencies on all the tracks are making it harder to hear the bass guitar or the kick.)  So instead of making your high range louder, you should try to cut as much of the bass frequencies as  you can, especially on the non-bass tracks. Then judiciously do it even on the bass and kick, if you can. Then re level the bass and kick. You should find that the levels can go down a bit and still be as clear or clearer than before. 

After all that, see if your radio guy can take the track and test it for you. If it still isn't good then I've just wasted your time. *apologizes in advance*

It goes without saying that all those moves are much easier in a DAW. But I, too, record in a Boss box. I just mix in Reaper.

[T.C. Elliott]

So I listened to your tracks on the OP. And yeah, the track sounds good, but the bass is a bit heavy. It sounds, to my hears, like it's light on the high range. But what that really means is you need to cut the bass a bit (possibly using the techniques outlined above) so that's more balanced before mastering it. Maybe. It seriously doesn't sound terrible.. in fact I liked the way you did the song and the sound of it is is definitely better than some I've heard.

That pumping you are hearing is the compressor over compressing the bass. It's actually the effect they use in dance music for the clubs (on purpose, I mean.)

[Super 8]

Hey T.C! That was one Top Cat informative reply and exactly what I needed to hear right now as, since hearing my song production on the radio, I have been struggling with the whole concept of exactly why it sounded how it sounded! (To the extent that, recently I have been contemplating selling my current unit and buying another (standalone) recorder that can record at 24 bit .... I'm now very much beginning to feel that the problem is not with the machine itself but more 'user error' this end!) SO .... I shall now endeavour to put your info to good use!

I think my overriding recording problem is this ... a fear of EQ! I don't know what I'm doing in this respect and, as such, to date I NEVER use it! When recording 'on mic' I have set positions I use on my sound sources. I totally rely on mic placement to capture my sounds. As for 'the plug in' stuff (eg: electric guitar not forgetting that bass guitar in question!) again, to date, I don't use external amps it's all 'in the box' with me. I just go DI straight into the Hi-Z input on the front of the BR1600 and, from there, there's a select number of 'go to' presets I tend to use in my productions (for example: 'P001' for clean electric guitar and 'P101' for the bass). At no point have I gone anywhere near the EQ section because ... well, to be totally honest here, I've ALWAYS been REALLY crap at Maths and I just don't understand all the numbers involved (like: cut 3dB @ 60Hz! I have no idea what that actually means nor how to do that!) Like I say, with my recording production to date, I've just stuck with the those presets built in to the unit. I'm now beginning to feel that this method has perhaps been my downfall?!! I'm now beginning to feel I may need to go back to recording skool methinks! Again, thanks so much for your detailed replies folk.

PS: Other than MY 'fear of equalisation' (LOL!) I'm actually really familiar with the rest of the functions on the BR1600 and find it a very user-friendly machine that enables me to get stuff down quickly. It now very much looks like I need to go take a crash course in EQ (and re-read the manual - it's been a while!) in order to get the very best out of this machine.

PSS: One last question (!) I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread about the 'MULTITRACK' input having a 'LO CUT' block at the beginning of each input chain. Would I be best to cut say my bass signal actually coming into the machine (ie: at the time of recording?) do you think or try to filter out any unwanted frequencies post-recording? THANKS AGAIN!