Master Meister

[FuzzFace]

I have 2 problems:

(1)  When I master a song, and play it back, the volume levels of the tracks do not seem to be balanced as they were before mastering.  Am I crazy?

(2)  Whilst working on my magnum opus, I bounced intrumental tracks (T1-V1, T2-V1, T3-V1, T4-V1) to (T1-V2, T2-V2).  Then I added vocals to T3-V2, and some other sounds to T4-V2.  Then I mastered.  Beautiful.  The next day I wanted to change the words, so I attempted to simply do a retake on T3-V3, with the intention of overwriting it to T3-V2.  However, the vocals from T3-V2 were audible in (T1-V2, T2-V2), even if I deleted the entire vocal track.  I ended up deleting all the V2's and rebouncing.  However there must be a more practical way.  And why did this occur to begin with?  It's not what I was expecting.

Other than this everything is fine.

[FuzzFace]

Oh and now when I try to adjust the volume level on the vocal track, it stays steady... the volume won't change even if I lower the level to zero.

Who nominated me mayor of Funky Town?

[cuthbert]

Hey Trevor,

(1) Check your mastering effect before recording it - the MBR applies one automatically (that's a feature I don't always like, although I do like switching amongst them and tweaking while listening).

(2) Did you switch your playback v-track so that T3-V3 was the one playing back? That's the way to hear it after recording. I find it easier to think of the four 'tracks' on the MBR as four channels, each with eight tracks. Helps with bouncing and such.

For the new problem - have you bounced the vocal to another track?

[FuzzFace]

I don't know I think my BR wants a break.

I'll have to get a second BR.

Does that make me a polygamist?

[FuzzFace]

Now I have scrapped all my V2's.

I'm back with four V1's.

But when I change the Reverb levels, there is no perceptible difference between 0 and 100, i.e. minimum and maximum.

I think the Universe is trying to tell me something.

[FuzzFace]

I need sleep.

[FuzzFace]

Ok folks.

For anyone actually following my stream of thought...

I just had an epiphone:

The Track Levels, Reverb, and Panning settings stay constant for each Track, regardless of what virtual track you are on.  So I needed to adjust them accordingly.  (Of course, I guess?)

I think I've got it.

As you were.

[cuthbert]

The Track Levels, Reverb, and Panning settings stay constant for each Track, regardless of what virtual track you are on.  So I needed to adjust them accordingly.  (Of course, I guess?)

You've got it - levels, panning, and reverb level are all adjusted at the 'channel' level - the virtual tracks you record can then be selected to play in the channel, but level, pan, and reverb levels don't change when you choose a new v-track for playback.

[AndyR]

I'm glad you got that sorted... I started reading it thinking 1) might be a problem I can shed light on... but then my head got well and truly scrambled trying to figure out what you were doing

At risk of doing your head in... the thing I thought I was going to add was this:

(If you haven't started messing with the mastering settings yet, and tend to choose one of the presets at the moment, just ignore this for now... It's when you start thinking "I wonder what this does?", that you'll probably "over do it" a bit like I did/do )

I have sometimes found that mastering can apparently "screw-up" a mix - suddenly a favourite guitar part seems to disappear, or maybe some badly played part that you thought you'd masked comes jumping to the front. I've heard quite surprising things happening and I thought I was going crazy.

I eventually learnt that it's the wonderful multi-band compressor and stuff in the mastering algorithm. All I had to do was turn the mastering effect off to discover the mix was still ok, but not when "mastered".

The master tools are superb and do wonders - unbelievably so for the size of box they're in. But when you use them on a final mix, especially if the mix hasn't had its various bits compressed before the bounce, you can get some effects you weren't expecting. Although you haven't deliberately turned down the part you wanted, for example, it turns out that you have, sort of... This is because the multi-band compressor thing lets you dive into different frequencies and mess with them. So while you might be concentrating on getting xyz out of the vocal, perhaps, you're actually affecting other instruments that use those frequencies as well.

When/if this happens, the answer is probably to stop trying to "master" the bounce to fix something wrong in that bounce. Go back and fix whatever's wrong and create a new bounce to master in a slightly more "restrained" fashion... it sometimes represents hours of backtracking though... 

[FuzzFace]

This answers the portion of my question that I had written off as unanswerable.

What you are suggesting is what I ended up doing, which is rebouncing.

It's feels nice to be validated.