Perspective

When I listen to a song for the purpose of final mixing/mastering, I am hearing two songs at once: The song that is playing and the song I tried to create. The goal of writing and mastering is to minimize the difference between the two.

What's hard for me to understand is that the listener just hears the song. For the writer, the song is the level of achievement, the goal and satisfaction of pouring the liquid to the top of the cup without spilling. For the listener, the song is simply the drink.

Waveburner . First Impressions

I like Waveburner. Everything this does is kinda obvious, but there are some nice features, like the level meter, being able to trim the start/end point for each song, and seeing each track visually in the wave view area (like the arrange window in Logic Pro) helps you check out your normalization and clipping concerns. Plus I like knowing that the final cd will comply with the necessary standards when I send this out for distribution.

Take a quick look at the instructions to get a better idea, you can grab them from apple here as a PDF file.

FTR

For the record, here's my setup for the 17 Cures:

Propellerheads Reason 3.0 (watch the trailer for v4, it gets me jacked up). I wrote 98% of the music with this software, before (!) I had purchased my first midi controller (more on that some other time). So yes, I used the piano roll to write every single note you hear. But here's the worst part... I was on a laptop without a mouse connected! I probably could've cut the time in half if I had the keyboard and didnt have to use the trackpad.

For mastering purposes, I used ReWire to bring everything into Logic Studio Pro, then went with the following Inserts, in this order: Izotope Ozone 3, Exciter, Adaptive Limiter, Multimeter.

I think I'll be using Waveburner for the final step...

Mixing / Mastering

I believe that writing a good song is easier than making one sound good.

Mixing and mastering is a science that I am just beginning to understand. The two big dogs seem to be the compressor and limiter, but I cant help but feel the real secrets lie somewhere in the other goodies, like the Exciter, finesse with EQ, and the MultiMeter (visual tool only, I think!).

Thank goodness for Izotope Ozone 3. This thing has worked wonders for me so far...