Something probably stupid that I wish I could do as a blind music producer is look at the waveforms of my tracks/mixes in Reaper. like yeah your ears are the best and most reliable tool but they can be biased by headphones, how you slept, allergies like I'm experiencing today, etc. Plus there would just be something super satisfying about putting something together until it sounds good, then looking at the master's waveform and tweaking the frequencies until it fills out the entire frequency spectrum just right. I'm assuming the answer is no because I can't even begin to fathom how something like this would work, but is there an accessible tool to do this?
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victor tsaran
in reply to Quin • • •However, the problem is that you will still have to rely on your ears.
If multi-line Braille displays became cheaper, we might have a hope!
Accessible Meters
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Andre Louis
in reply to Quin • • •'Oh let me just drag this thing here, OK looks like it's lined up with the other tracks...'
Don't even bother to play it, bounce it, test it in the car (and yes this *has* happened)
only to find out it was off by a noticeable amount.
I wish I was lying to you.
Quin
in reply to Andre Louis • • •Andre Louis
in reply to Quin • • •Ask yourself *why* you want a mix to fill out the frequency spectrum though?
Did it sound good *before* you did that? Did it sound any better *after* you did that?
Is it possible your track *might* be used as a bed for someone to talk over, and there's just no space for voice because you phattened it up like a mix pig for slaughter with your waveform frequency-spectrum-filling?
Did you watch some video on youtube that says 'OMGOMGOMG if you don't fill this mix right out nobody will ever listen, and you're a bad, bad evil bad person if you don't do these 15 steps to waveform filling right now!'
When I say 'You' by the way, I mean the general You, not You, Quinn.
My students sometimes come to me and say
'Why don't we do this particular compression trick in every mix?'
I have to ask them
'Do you need to? Is it important that you do?'
And so on.
x0
in reply to Andre Louis • • •Talon
in reply to x0 • • •Talon
in reply to Talon • • •Erion
in reply to Quin • • •Filling out the frequency spectrum is not quite useful, white, pink and brown noise do that already with some changes to the lower frequencies for the two latter ones.
What you are looking for is an even distribution of the existing frequencies (Teote, Ozone, Hornet Thirty-one, WavesFactory Equalizer, Grand Finale, DSEQ3, Gullfoss, etc) do this, exciters and saturation to add new harmonic content, just to mention a few things. Ultimately, these tools, despite the aggressive marketing some of them have, can't replace your ears but they provide fast results if you don't want to focus on mixing and mastering. You still need to tweak things and it's very easy to overprocess your sound of course.
Several books could be written about how many things could influence your sound, both while mixing and mastering (from the headphones or monitors you use through the room you are in, to what your genre needs), not to mention when your final master reaches your listeners. Their hardware, environment, ears, etc, will color the sound as well. You could have a perfectly neutral master and someone could quite easily make it heavy on bass just by listening to it on gaming headphones, or better yet, listen to it in a car.
This is a very complex and overwhelming topic, but if you need advice and you really want to make your sound better, listen to the same genre as much as you can. That's how you train your ears to get accustomed to things that stick out (resonate) and over time you will learn what instrument is problematic in what specific frequency areas. Most importantly, less is more.