MASTERING CHALLENGE - MastC001 December 2017 - in evaluation

[Mange]

mp3tag! remember that program. it was great... best I found. Will install it again. Thanks for the reminder.

[Mister Fox]

I have to remind you of the rules: your entry is final

[HerbFelho]

Here´s my attempt to master this nice mix, thanks for providing it Mister Fox and Jeff St. Clair!

Two main things I wanted to work on was overall tonality / EQ balancing to make it sound big and open. Second, a bit more punch to use the available 13 dB of dynamic range effectively.

First was done mainly with ProQ2 corrections (see screenshot), pulled out some ringing frequencies here and there, some mid/side corrections, a slight boost in the mid region at around 1k, since I found this a bit underrepresented in the mix, felt a little scooped there. High frequency Enhancement with SKNotes´s HF Enhancer. Then Oeksound´s Soothe plugin was used to dynamically smoothen the spectrum a bit. This was automated to do a bit more in the solo section to remove a little guitar-harshness.

Second (punchiness) was addressed with a tiny bit of ProC2 compression with slow attack in the “clean” setting. Then two plugins to enhance the transients a tiny little bit, SKNote´s Sound Brigade in “Wake Up” Mode, which does kind of upward expansion, but in a spectral dynamic way (can´t describe it better right now), followed by Wave´s Trans-X in multiband mode to focus a bit more on the low end punch.
After that the usual things like making bass mono below 100 and widen the rest a bit (used Boz Digital Mongoose for this), Slate´s VCC console emulation and limiting with Fab´s ProL. Gotta say that the only "coloring"/saturating plugin I used was the VCC, which I like for giving the mix more depth and 3D-quality. All other plugins were chosen to be clean and neutral sounding cause I think the mix is already nicely saturated...

LUFS set to -14 and true peak to -1

Good luck all!


WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Vaqfv ... Z6bRoVobJO
MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CCi90 ... 7riYmbrF9E

EDIT: direct image links now (hopefully) working:

[Jorgeelalto]

Edit: not sure if the images (google drive url) can be seen here (I can´t), maybe I could try a different method, what´s best for putting screenshots in here?

I cannot see them, I used Imgur and I used the direct links to the images with the image feature of the forum. It may be that the URL is not directly pointing to a .jpg, .png or similar.

EDIT: Sending you a PM to keep the topic

[HerbFelho]

I cannot see them, I used Imgur and I used the direct links to the images with the image feature of the forum. It may be that the URL is not directly pointing to a .jpg, .png or similar.

Thanks Jorge, but that´s strange, I pasted the direct links to the png files on google drive between the image backets here. The links definitely work. For now I edited the post and put in the links directly (without the image embedding option)

EDIT: Problem solved, thx to Jorge´s kind help via PM. I´ll update the images in my post soon...

[davemcisaac]

I hate to say it, but I think some of us may have a problem...
I posted my entries on PCloud yesterday, but I can't open the PCloud web page today. I know I'm not the only one that posted there. I hope they are simply having a temporary issue. If not, I think we might be screwed

[Mister Fox]

It is the 15th December 2017, 0:35am GMT+1/CET - the first Mastering Challenge has officially ended

If I didn't miscount, we have 13 participants this month! Great start so far.
There has been been 0 submission after the deadline. I've given 1 warning to adhere to the rules.



I now open the field for everyone to give each other feedback (if you feel like doing so). This will be independent to the client feedback however.


Please watch this spot for the client feedback (done by me) and the Winners Podium announcement. Though I have to apologize in advance, if this might take a couple of days longer than planned (due to me doing Behind the Scenes work).

Good luck to all participants.

[StClair]

I just wanted to jump in here and tell you all, thank you so much for your kind words about the song. I wrote it about the first date my wife and I ever had. Every word is pretty much true and actually happened. So the song really means a lot to me. Thank you!

I also want to thank Roland for his incredible mixing that makes the song even more special! Great job, Sir!

I've listened to all of your contributions and man, is this one going to be close! They all sound so GOOD!

Best of luck to all of you!!!

Jeff

[Coiled_Ear]

I very like the 3ee master. By the way listen and compare many time the masters and really have no objective vision what sound this track should get...

[davemcisaac]

I hate to say it, but I think some of us may have a problem...
I posted my entries on PCloud yesterday, but I can't open the PCloud web page today. I know I'm not the only one that posted there. I hope they are simply having a temporary issue. If not, I think we might be screwed

Fortunately, whatever problem was going on has been resolved.