The Null Device Blog

Mastering on “A Million Different Moments” has begun.

I’m trying to avoid the “compress everything until it sounds louder than anything else out there” trend. Yes, I’m applying compression, no I’m not using high thresholds and high ratios. Yes, it’s getting limited, no I’m not using an ultramaximizer threshold of -20db.

This could get interesting.

My Waves Native Pack arrived today. It’s awesome. I like it a lot, and have already started mastering the hell out of things. My ears are very tired.

However, bastards that they are, they included demos of their otehr products. Including the official “Waves mastering edition” and some other plugs.

The mastering edition is cool mainly for L2. The mutliband is nice but…it seems to be lacking something for me a bit.

The demo of C4 multiband Compressor/Expander/EQ blew me away and me wantee. However, I can’t seem to find out if it’s sold separately anywhere other than waves.com, and ther MSRP is insane. I can buy a whole other bundle for even more exorbitant prices and with it I’d get…a lot of stuff I don’t really care about. I don’t need a doppler-shifting pluign, thanks.

C4 lives up to the hype, though. It’s a really amazing multiband, and has a fairly intuitive interface. I opened it up and immediately knew what to do.

The masteres bundle didn’t color the mix as much, admittedly, but frankly I think the fine-granularity is lost on productions of my caliber – sure, if I had been doing recordings at The Strongroom or something, I’d have something that coudl take advantage of the linear phase stuff, but I’m still just a guy in the basement.

I’m coming to the conclusion though that my mixdowns are starting to show that I know what I’m doing. I’m having to apply significantly less EQ to the overall mix, and I don’t need to compress things nearly as much to get some sound out, so I can be more subtle in the mastering phase. This is a good sign.

Now I just need to get C4…it’s almost be worth it to pay Waves’ stupid singleton price – which I might add would be more than I paid for the whole damned bundle…

There’s an entry for Null Device and one for Sublimation at allmusic.com. Now, getting an entry isn’t that difficult, since you pretty much have to just send something in but…still, it makes me feel sort of validated.

Well, we’re in the back stretch. I recorded the final vocal take for “Prevailing Winds” on friday, and spent the majority of the eveing doing things like adjusting snare-drum volumes on “Walk in London”, tweaking deff velocities for “Sevgilim”, checking vocal levels on two or three tracks, making sure I had enough headroom on “Travelogue”, etc etc.

Also spent some time figuring out some techniques that I intend to use on Album #3. And discovering why Logic wasn’t cooperating with my automation curves – seems there’s somethng called the “automation folder” which I didn’t know existed. There’s something uniquely awful about the manuals for audio software.

We’re getting there. I dunno if there’ll be an october release or not but hopefully…

My copy of BitshiftAudio’s Phatmatik Pro arrived yesterday.

I was planning to get some rest yesterday evening, just chill for a while. This did not happen.

Okay, yeah one annoying bug – the file browser choked on my desktop folders, but once I worked aorund that…holy [expletive deleted] is this [expletive deleted] [obscene gerund] cool!

It’s like…okay, imagine ReCycle as a plug-in with realtime manipulation. And filters. And MIDI control. And multitimbrality. And multiple outs. And modulation.

Oh baby.

It is as if the heavens opened up and gave me the loop-manipulation tool I’ve wished for. Yeah, I like drumloops, but rarely do I want to sue them in their original form. I want to use the sounds, or maybe the rhythm, or maybe just want to take a few notes and lock the quantize on it. But it’s just cool – in about 10 minutes I had turned a slow hip-hop beat into a really twitchy drum-n-bass break with weird Squarepushery effects. It was awesome.

And so far their tech support has been really helpful. They gave me tips when I was playing with the demo. Excellent. Oh, and it’s also a fully OSX native Audiounit.

Sweeeeeeeet.