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  • Mastering with Vienna Suite

    I'm trying out the Vienna Suite demo and am very impressed with it so far.

    I'm almost finished up with a project and I want to try mastering it. I never mastered before, just mixed. I've watched the videos and they're very helpful. But I'm wondering, when mastering, in what order should I run the plugins? Any help would be appreciated.

    Thanks,

    JET


  • Hello JET,

    like always in audio, there are no rules, just guidelines that might (or might not) fit the task at hand.

    Plugin order and settings will depend a lot on what you want to achieve. The most common thing would be to have a Limiter as the final processor, to avoid any overloads. Other than that, you will most likely need a Master EQ, a Compressor and/or maybe a Multiband Limiter for spectral balance, but you will have to find out yourself which one comes first. - I know that quite a few master-engineers use small amounts of artificial ambience to enhance the imaging of a mix; there were also cases when some distortion (in the sense of Exciter, or even in the sense of satruration effects) helped the mix a lot. - Sorry to be so unspecific, but it's a bit like explaining how to fly an aeroplane in three sentences. ;-)

    That said, it is always a good idea to have somebody else doing the master of a mix you did, ideally in a different (properly tuned) acoustic environment. A "second opinion" helps a lot to avoid misbalances due to personal preferences (or acoustic problems). (Mixing is my main professoion since more than two decades now, and I try to avoid mastering my own mixes whenever I can. :-) ...)

    ... there are many online sources available covering the topic in depth,e.g. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug04/articles/computermastering.htm , http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb99/articles/20tips.478.htm , or books like http://bobbyowsinski.com/The_Audio_Mastering_Handook.html.

    HTH,


    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • Hi Dietz,

    Thank you very much for the advice and the SOS links. That's just what I was looking for.

    I agree completely that in a perfect world it's best to have someone else master. In my real life I was a studio musician, and everyone else took care of the recording aspect. But in today's world, I get to play: videographer, video editor, composer, musician, mixing engineer and mastering engineer. What's the old saying,"a Jack of all trades, a master of none". it seems to apply to me today. That said, the many presets of Vienna Suite make this process less ominus than it onc was to me.

    JET