Harball On A Brandon Mix

[Hans]

Because of my lack of knowledge of how these sites work i did place this message in this part, it should be in the mastering section>harbal.
my excuses.


As an example of what Harbal is capable of, I took the song made by Daniel Sexton, posted on recording diaries, the before mastered version.

It's a bit on the harshside(mabe because of the mp3 format) and a bit to loud at least with your headphones, but i did it to show you what can be done with Harbal(a some kind of automastering tool)

I imported the song in ableton live, made it a 24bit wave file and exported it.
I then ran it through Harbal , did some adjustments and exported it still as a 24bit wavefile.

I imported the song into Cubase 4 and exported it as a 256kb high quality mp3file.

I didn't use any compression, bit reduction or anything else.
It was just done with Harbal on a regular laptop with a conexant audio card and headphones.

grtz. Hans

[brandondrury]

It's a bit on the harshside(mabe because of the mp3 format) and a bit to loud at least with your headphones, but i did it to show you what can be done with Harbal(a some kind of automastering tool)

I agree. It's on the harsh side. I don't like it.

Oh....the low end is even worse!!! It's turned the kick into some kind of drum machine sounding thing. It's clearly bumped up 100-200Hz a bunch!!! I didn't even know you could turn a kick drum into a 808/909 with just EQ!

This is what I don't understand these automatic mastering applications. I don't get what people are trying to gain from them. In this case, my creative vision for the song has been negatively effected. We moved AWAY from where I wanted to go. When Eric Conn mastered it, he moved it into a direction I wanted to go.

If I wanted the mix more present than it already was, I would have done that. The excessive upper midrange makes the acoustic and vocals sound small as if I used a $100 MXL mic not the Soundelux U99 on chose for a reason. The low end sounds corny (as in comical).

I think people are scared that they aren't "doing it right" and that a automatic process is going to make sure they aren't doing it wrong.

They don't understand that there is such a huge range of acceptable tolerances in mixing land for the overall spectrum (and it has very little to do with genre), but there are very specific tolerances for unleashing the maximum effectiveness of any given song.

Is it wrong to have more bass than AC/DC's "Back In Black" on a rock tune? I say No. I say HELL NO!! A zillion rock songs have more bass that Back In Black. However, these automatic gadgets say yes.

That's not mastering. That's not 2bus processing either.

I'm still waiting for at least one example where these automatic gadgets make one of my mixes sound better.

Brandon

[whiteaxxxe]

I do not know, what monitors do you use. the sound maybe isnt perfect, but real good. and my ears and my monitors are ok.

and har-bal IS NOT an automatic mastering gadget. before talking so, have a look at it and understand, waht it does, and (Important!!!) what it does not.

[cakewalkgg]

Ive purchased har-bal and used it quite a bit.. it is definately not in my opinion a automastering tool... that term is pretty silly really.

I am satisfied with my purchase tho.. Ive found it to be a great analysis tool, and yes is some cases make small adjustemts to a mixdown with it. more often than not, I have a mixdown that I cant get to sound right.. I let har-bal build the profile of it, then visually see the areas that are over-using, or missing energy in the "curve" then have to determine if this is bacause of the mix.. or just the instruments in the mix.. and go back and remix. When its real close, I may use the "empethatic eq" to make very minor adjustments.

The "air" is a decent stereo widner, but can be found in many other plugins, and the limiter doesnt give you enough control or visual feedback for me to us it as my mastering limiter.. I like har-bal, but use it as it was intended or you get the same kind of results you get when using the presets in ozone... or t-racks... pseudo-pre-mastering is not an automated thing... it takes fine...fine tuning. your better off doing nothing than selecting some click here to master BS idea.

[cakewalkgg]

and its real easy to get caught up in the "when I a/b the before and after it sounds better" thing.

1. almost all of the time you experience this after running a file through a "magic" program that "masters" the audio, it is louder... We always think louder sounds better. That topic is probably addressed in other threads..

2. its real important to compare the a/b at the same AVERAGE volume... or Im telling ya, your ears will decieve you

3. and of course... you need to be using good monitoring equiptment and environment. My room sucks, when Im getting excited about a mix and start turning it up... I inevitable get it wrong.. when I keep my nearfields real low I usually wake up and re-check my mix and am not suprised.

This is probably for another thread, but I thing theres a realation to how the "mastering for 100 bucks software" is percieved. I think most of this software is quality stuff, but folks that think a few clicks does it... are just hearing something louder and getting fooled

[Hans]

Ok,

Let's be honest:

It is definitely not possible to master an mp3 file, whatever software, speakerconfiguration or no soft but just hardware you have.

There's too much cut away from the original recordings because of the compression algorythm.

It wasn't my meaning to master this song and say hey, look at me ma, no hands.

I wanted to state (and still do) that Harbal and more or less AAMS are capable of giving the opportunity to make your songs sound better after you mixed them.
Maybe i've done things wrong ( youthfull enthousiasm ), but I really think that this software can take your musical skills to another level and makes sure that you don't sit down and bend your toes because everything sounds terrible whenever you want someone else to listen to your music.

If you really want to know what it is just go to their website.

If i was aksed to master a song, i would ask for a non compressed, non normalized(this kills dynamics) file.(Normalize is something you never want to use.) no mp3!!, just the raw mix without any effects or whatsoever.
And please below zero db of course.

There is no such thing as mastering out of the box, without knowing what you're doing.
It would be great though and maybe somewhere in the future..........?

Mastering is a technical skill and like any other one you have to learn it.

That said, i'm not a master engineer. i am learning and every- or anything that helps is ok with me.

It would be nice though to open a thread that gives the opportunity to try out to master (not mix) a given song.Just for the learning curve.

Anything that helps anybody and me to learn to get a better sound is great.

(Why is my name in red on the original message? am i a dangerous specie?)

grtz. Hans

[brandondrury]

It wasn't my meaning to master this song and say hey, look at me ma, no hands.

I wanted to state (and still do) that Harbal and more or less AAMS are capable of giving the opportunity to make your songs sound better after you mixed them.

So are you blaming what Harbal did on the fact it was an mp3? If I can find the original wav file (I know I have it around here somwhere, but some of my archives have been missing) I'll send it to you, but I suspect it'll use the same outrageous (in my opinion) EQ settings.

I don't like what Harbal did. I didn't like what AAMS did to my mixes either although as I said in my review, if I had 3 weeks to find the right reference, it would work. That's always subjective, but I feel that the guy mixing the tunes should always have his vision realized by the mastering engineer.

It was clear, in this case anyway, that Harbal did not take my vision in mind.

Maybe i've done things wrong ( youthfull enthousiasm ), but I really think that this software can take your musical skills to another level and makes sure that you don't sit down and bend your toes because everything sounds terrible whenever you want someone else to listen to your music.

If you think there is an improvement with this stuff, knock yourself out. I have heard a few mixes that I thought did sound better with the auto stuff, but I can't say this about any of mine.

Mastering is a technical skill and like any other one you have to learn it.

I don't disagree. However, I think this mentality takes emphasis away from the mixing process. Just get the mix exactly how you want it and then mastering won't be needed for that song. At best, the mastering engineer will listen and say "Done!". That's always the goal for me. (It certainly hasn't happened yet, but that's the goal.)

and har-bal IS NOT an automatic mastering gadget. before talking so, have a look at it and understand, waht it does, and (Important!!!) what it does not.

My fault. It is not an automatic mastering gadget like AAMS. It appears that Har-bal is an automatic EQ matcher. That doesn't really change the fact that it's not an "ear motivated" process.

Brandon

Regardless, it's only aim seems to be to match another file without taking into account the 6 billion factors that a real engineer does when arranging, tracking, and mixing a song. I bet this would work great on cover song recordings.

I am satisfied with my purchase tho.. Ive found it to be a great analysis tool, and yes is some cases make small adjustemts to a mixdown with it. more often than not, I have a mixdown that I cant get to sound right.. I let har-bal build the profile of it, then visually see the areas that are over-using, or missing energy in the "curve" then have to determine if this is bacause of the mix.. or just the instruments in the mix.. and go back and remix. When its real close, I may use the "empethatic eq" to make very minor adjustments.

I like this idea! Sometimes a mix will stump you and you don't know how to solve the problems you are hearing. By going back to the actual mix and solving those problems (where they should be solved) you will never wreck a mix on the 2 bus.

I like har-bal, but use it as it was intended or you get the same kind of results you get when using the presets in ozone... or t-racks... pseudo-pre-mastering is not an automated thing... it takes fine...fine tuning. your better off doing nothing than selecting some click here to master BS idea.

I agree 100%.

[Hans]

Wow that's fast

Well, give me the original wave file and i'll try to do my best to make a nice sounding song out of it.With harbal.And in the context you like.

grtz. Hans

[cakewalkgg]

Hans, harbal has a simple mastering instructions on their webiste... If you dont have the plugins in the example, substitue with something similiar.. I think its a good place to start.. Ive actually got some decent results using these directions. Again this is too general to use and always expect good results, but I think it gets you into a better mode of thought than just tweaking the EQ in har-bal.

Mastering Tutorial

[cakewalkgg]

Hans, Ive tried the EQ matching and it really in my opinion doesnt work.. the problem is, you almost never really have the same instruments in the same spectrum as the reference materiel.. So if your guitars dont live in the exact same frequencies as the reference guitars.. then the "matched" eq curve will be representing some other intruments energy. In the end.. my material always sounded foolish when I matched a reference with harbal. Anyway, good luck with it, and if you have a different experiece with it, please share with us. Again, I am actually a fan of the product, I just dont buy into all of the touted features.