ACX: Mastering

welcome back to the audio book creation exchanges course and home narration I'm John McElroy okay hi lied that consolidated audio file we just created it isn't really finished audio but it's as finished as you're likely to make it that brings us to a truly unfamiliar concept mastering but simply mastering allows you to improve the overall sound of a recording that's all it is really but the Devils in the details and mastering is a maze of processors and settings I can't teach you about this topic in a 10 minute video it's way too complex but you do need to know about tools commonly used in spoken word production and how they work to improve audio quality at some point you may want to consult with an audio pro to help you perfect your home recordings you'll find a whole complement of mastering processors in the audio suite menu and Pro Tools experiment with them if you have a chance just from looking at this audio I can tell that it's dynamic loud sections here where the waveform is fat soft over here where it's not in fact it's too dynamic and I have to fix it imagine that you're listening to this on your desktop computer you set the volume to hear the loud parts but as soon as you reach these soft areas you can't hear the narration so you adjust the dial then the loud parts come back and the volume is too loud and you have to dial it down back and forth up and down it's a bad listening experience that can only be helped with a processor called of compressor a compressor works like an automatic volume adjuster it squeezes the loud parts down so they're more in line with the soft ones it's as if someone were riding the volume dial to maintain steady levels here's the original track in blue here's the process to track in green see that the levels are now more uniform but I've created other problems yes the hot levels are tamed but that makes the softest material in the record - accessible remember the noise floor that I mentioned in the first lesson the ambience in the recording space this wasn't recorded in the perfectly controlled environment so that sound of air moving around is a little too high so I'll filter out some of it with Equalization called EQ for short normally EQ is the first line of processing and spoken word recording but for reasons you'll understand in a moment I'm doing it now here's the original track and the compressed audio track here's the filtered track you can't see the difference here and over the Internet you probably can't even hear it and that's why I didn't show you this first but trust me it sounds better I stripped out the low frequency Rumble and high frequency airiness that marks a lot of amateur recordings but it still sounds a little thin and frankly the background ambience is still too noisy let's deal with the thinness first and fatten up the recording with a special kind of compressor called a limiter a normal compressor gently squeezes a signal and smoothes it a limiter sets an absolute ceiling on how much signal gets through we've already done the squeezing now we want to raise the loudest levels of the recording to that ceiling without distorting the signal while boosting the other levels proportionately here are the original compressed and eq'd tracks here's the limited track in red it's not a subtle difference the transients those individual parts of the waveform are broader and therefore louder limiting lends more presence to the voice and that makes the recording more engaging as I said you can't absorb mastering techniques in a short video there are too many settings and concepts to grasp my suggestion hire an audio engineer to set up templates just for you after all you'll be using the same equipment in the same place with the same voice every time you record ask your pro audio source for suggestions now let's move on to the final lesson the elements of successful narration

Channel: AudibleACX

Views: 23,610

Keywords: ACX, VIDEO4, FINAL

Id: lsKn6cA0_Iw

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2011