So, I decided to make something for spinning class and ended up challenging myself to do the whole thing using ONLY Subsynth! Someone else did a whole track using only Modsynth, but I'm not so clued up with it yet. Nevertheless I think I did okay with this one ;)
A personal challenge
Something went terribly wrong with the audio. I pushed the master volume slightly higher than my previous tracks, because they ended up not loud enough, but this resulted in a much more distorted sound on SoundCloud (weird how it sounds fine on the device). I couldn't get it to compress more of the peaks in order to even out the levels across the track. Is there any other way or possibly another app that can do this? Please help :|
for the love of music
Sounds like overall gain staging and mix volume combined with a high pre-limiting setting... you can share the project file.
Or a few pointers if you want to check some of these things and build your volume back up, but cleaner. Feel free to ignore or feed back on.
- Pre-limiting - back it off to 10-11 oclock for now. Post and Master volume at 12 oclock. The overall aim will be to mix quiet, and boost at mastering.
- Turn EQ and limiting modules in the Mastering section off. Probably get rid of any aux stompbox FX. Not the delay/reverb though.
- With all the mastering FX off, you don't want the board mix pushing the master volume past about 2/3's full. Back the faders off so it's roughly giving you that, you should be able to keep a similar mix by dialling everything back proportionately.
- Also on your mixer. Are you using much of the EQ past 12 oclock? I've found that when I dial past 0 on the mixer EQ in Caustic it adds quite noisy gain. If you did, try to make it a subtractive use of EQing in your mix. Back off frequencies you don't want instead of trying to force the voicing by spiking EQ bands up. Like the channel volumes you can just work through and back every dial off by certain degrees, to keep the same EQ shapes you made but taking out those noisy boosts.
- ^^ This also could probably allow you to minimize or eliminate compressors at mixing stage, by not giving yourself anything you have to reign in.
Then turn the master EQ and Limiter modules back on. EQ - I would also use subtractive gain here and avoid adding big boosts. Play the track through and edge up the PRE limit and the master volume until it's nice and fresh. Ideally you don't want to be pushing the pre past 12oclock either. That's what to back off if it's peaking and clipping too much now.
Invaluable advice, Lazerwound... I won't dare to ignore!
I tried all your pointers, and agree fully with everything you said. I now recall learning some of this way back, working with live performers - pretty much the same applies there.
The moment I reset all limiters and compressors, everything made more sense. So I made some changes but nothing changed significantly until I decided to export the file as 32bit instead of 16. Huge improvement! It's a much larger file to upload (data fees are insane here), but definitely worth while. I probably should have mentioned the fact that it sounds overly compressed (like a 64kbps file) is much more concerning than its bad audio level.
Please keep in mind that even now it sounds better (although it still comes back heavily compressed from SoundCloud), it's still not mind blowing. That's because, as I've mentioned, everything was done in Subsynth, meaning the kick, snare, hat, and everything else are just simple sine waves in Subsynth, shortened and manipulated only as much as the Subsynth allows me to, in order to sound as close as possible to the real thing. This, and the fact that it goes straight from Caustic to SoundCloud - there are no other tools involved.
So, mission accomplished I would say ;)
Once again, thanks for those pointers. That's crucial to getting a better result. Less is more, right?
:)
for the love of music
*** UPDATE ***
And so, after more careful analysis, I realised that the sound quality in the SoundCloud app is much worse than that of their website. I had to forcibly open the link in Chrome in order to get to this conclusion. Too bad.
for the love of music
Check this out , it has already been done bro and the hardest part to make in subsynth were the drums (atleast for me).
http://www.singlecellsoftware.com/node/9491
Facepalm! I didn't know that. To prevent confusion, I changed this thread's title. Thanks for the heads up, Nirmal!
;)
for the love of music