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Looper's Delight
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Ronan Chris Murphy: >It is not my belief that look ahead brick wall limiting is always >bad. It is part of almost every record I make, but it often gets >used inappropriately , either over used or used on content that is >not benefitted by it. My reason for throwing out a warning about >compression and limiting in my previous post is that a lot of >looping music (especially soundscapes or textural stuff) can really >be harmed by poor application of limiting or especially multi-band >compression because they can compromise a lot of the natural >dynamics between frequency ranges that can be part of a tunes evolution. This is a great point, and one i've witnessed personally just recently. Co-lister Hoby and i--under the moniker "Pseudophone"--have an EP coming out on the free netlable, Negative Sound Institute, next month. In the mastering process, the mastering engineer-- who is highly skilled and delivered great final results, i should say--originally misunderstood one of the pieces in a way that fits your scenario exactly. The track is called "The Reach", and is all about the dynamics of the textures shifting to create a sense of internal vertigo, like your whole sense of self is tumbling over and over into some cavernous abyss. It's comprised entirely of voices and treatments. The mastering engineer went to work on it using multi-band compression and slapping a mother of a limiter at a fairly low threshold, making the resulting track sound like a thick slate of electronic synthesis--which was interesting in and of itself, but entirely missed the point of the piece. The dynamics were gone, the mystery was gone--cool as the result sounded. Once we communicated the point of the piece, he understood and favored more gentle EQ, then perhaps slight multi-band compression and finally a limiter at a higher threshold, and all the mystery of the original was back and sounded better than ever. Point is: the mastering technique needs to apply to what it is you're doing. There are other tracks on the EP where his original method of more aggressive multi-band compression and limiting worked great. And as for mastering to 0dB, we found with a primarily ambient record that the thick clusters of frequencies mastered to such a level distorted the outputs on some CD players. We had our whole project mastered to -1dB--which is a big difference, BTW-- and it works swimmingly. Peter Koniuto ______________________________ Peter Koniuto Creative Recordist - Composer Red Sun Soundroom Niskayuna, NY On our hi-fi this week... http://www.RedSunSoundroom.com/ peter AT RedSunSoundroom.com ______________________________