| HAR-BAL - AN FIR DIGITAL EQ DESIGNED FOR AUDIO MASTERING, WITH A MUSICIAN FRIENDLY INTERFACE |
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Last night I spent more time using Har-Bal and then finished up with the mastering chain you suggested. First of all, Har-Bal is just amazing! I can't believe how much of a difference it makes. I thought my mix was decent, but Har-Bal makes it possible to dramatically improve what I originally thought sounded decent. And I know I've only scratched the surface. I suspect the more time I spend with it, the easier it will be to get the mix just the way it should sound. The two songs I worked on last night sound better than anything I've done without professional mastering. I'm not a mastering engineer and don't think Bob Ludwig has anything to worry about, but Har-Bal makes listening to my own mix very listenable. Congratulations on creating a fantastic program. I know I said this before, but I will enthusiastically tell everyone I know who does any recording about Har-Bal. It's so rare that a program does what it says it will do. Har-Bal does! Best Regards, Hi, First, congratulations. Great product, really like it and it has very quickly become an indispensable reference tool. Secondly, the attitude you guys have is very refreshing. Well done. I hope you can maintain it in this horrible music industry that we all populate!! I am blown away by the information and your positive responses in your customer FAQ despite some of the questions being a trifle impertinent at times! If you ever require an endorsement or comment from us on your truly great product, well you've already got it. Well done. Oh... And I'm not after anything - I'm just genuinely impressed technically and by your company attitude. nice Rich Narco Hey Guys!, I just wanted to thank you for the Har-Bal program! I spent a year working on a CD project. The demos I sent to the mastering house sounded great, but when the engineer began the process of mastering, something just went wacky with my mixes. The engineer couldn't do much with it except beef up the audio signal. After getting the master back, I was devastated (to say the least). I just didn't know what to do, so I loaded the mastered music into the Har-Bal, manipulated the songs, and was able to straighten all of the frequencies out perfectly!! Using a regular 31 band EQ would not get the results I needed. The Har-Bal cleaned up the mix, and never degraded the quality of the music, no matter how many changes I made. Thanks Hal-Bar creator! The Har-Bal Kicks Butt, and saved mine!!! Sincerely, Dear Paavo WOW! I just installed your HAR-BAL and used it on a couple of songs I have been killing myself over on a really nice jazz album that I tracked and mixed and mastered last month. Those two tunes were the bane of my life..thinish and the bass was just plain weird. I spent maybe 10 hours on those two pieces remixing, remastering over and over, trying to bring them into line with the rest (which I didn't charge the clients for because I thought it was something I felt I needed to solve myself), but I was still unsatisfied with the results. I have been dragging my feet in producing the final master. Then comes HAR--BAL...and in 15 minutes without knowing diddly about the program these two tunes are solid. Thanks so much! Mastering some songs was a mystery, an almost endless do-loop, coupled with dozens of CDs burned and tried in every place I knew to get a final perfect master. Things are going to be a lot happier around Grass Shack Records from now on. Mahalo, PS: Feel free to use my heartfelt comments on your site. And keep me informed on your new upgrades. I would love to see you guys make this as a plugin as an analysis tool on a track to help to see the spectral energy in a track in mixing situations. See, you have me dreaming! I just finished a 6 song demo and Har-Bal was indispensable. It is even more powerful than I originally had understood. Besides normalizing all the tracks I was able to really spend time A/B testing with and without. Spent a lot of time in certain magic frequencies determining the effect of Har-Bal. All I can say is that my mixes done in my little home studio are as loud for sure as any commercial product and (minus the technical flaws - after all it is a demo) really does come across full spectrum. Thanks for such a great product and making it affordable for the home studio owner. Can't wait for the next released rev. Respectfully, Earle, Thank you for this program. It has made mixing and mastering my music so much easier. It's great to be able to use both your eyes and ears when working with music. Your program has allowed me to take some of my past recordings and breath new life into them. My instruments jump out where they used to be buried. My sampled instruments sound almost authentic. Thank you again. Best regards, I just had to write and let you know how impressed I am with this program. I have labored over mastering for a long time and your program made it not only easy but easy to understand. I love the visual aspect of being able to see the results of my work and also the ability to switch from one setting to another to compare and select the best one. I'm a Mac user and I just bought a PC so I can use your application. That's how impressed I am! Thanks and keep up the good work. Larry GadlerRattleSnakeTracks Studio HarBal is absolutely remarkable. I just used it 15 minutes ago on a remix of the Sopranos theme which I had done last month but the master was put on one side because it was missing something and we had spent hours tuning it and were only making it worse. HarBal showed the problem IMMEDIATELY and fixed it in less than a minute. The improvement was remarkable. Normally I can get pretty close to a good balanced master with just my ears but with this track I just couldn't do it. My ears were not tuning correctly to the heavy electronic instrumental tone colors. The greatest wonder of this tool is the automatic maintenance of perceived loudness with Eq edits. Any fool can adjust an Eq but doing it and compensating for the loudness adjustment used to be a pain in the butt. You ended up taking twice as long to avoid audio references drifting all over the place. I can now "trust" my Eq edits and the freedom this gives everyone makes HarBal, in my humble opinion, the single most important item of audio equipment I have purchased since I invested thousands of dollars in two DPA (B&K) mics some years ago. Please keep developing this gem. This software is one in a million. Paavo please feel free to use the above in any marketing/advertising endorsement you wish. I hope HarBal is the big commercial success it deserves to be. Best regards I love Har-Bal. I've used it to fix a few of my past mastering crimes. How well could I have used it 10 years ago, when I mastered my first album. I'm looking forward to what you have in store for us in the way of updates. Robert Schulze Lutum, The program works perfectly on my XP system. One thing I would like to request if you should update the program (not that it needs it) would be a place on the program where the name of the reference file that is being used could be displayed. While using Har-Bal, I often found myself forgetting which file I had loaded as the reference. Otherwise, I couldn't be happier now knowing where and how to fix a mix in a very simple and elegant way. Thanks again Paavo for creating this tool. When my organization found out about this product it was already unbelievable, but when someone like me whose not an engineer and have no experience with music mastering/equalizing equipment can actually MASTER a song in 20 minutes or less, you made a believer out of me! I am recommending this product to EVERYONE, not only aspiring producers, but also songwriters that produce their own songs and have home studios/small project studios set-up. This is truly a revolutionary yet VERY user friendly product. Hi Earle, You and I talked back and forth several months ago and I mentioned I would buy your Har-Bal filter.... well, I did buy it, and I used it to help me master my latest self-released, self-recorded album. It helped me take average mixes and improve them slightly so they sound better on more speakers. Definitely worth the money. I'm not an expert yet, and I still have a long way to go to get my mixes exactly the way I want them, but Har-Bal did help me out quite a bit. My mixes would not have been even at the humble level they're at without it. Thanks for the great product! Take care and I'll make sure to contact you again in the near future. Feel free to update my testimonial (James Durham ION1.COM Multimedia Development) with a link to my album -- all of the final mixes on this album went through Har-Bal at some point in the mastering process: http://www.cdbaby.com/aeolianmay Best Regards, Thank you, thank you, and thank you Your tech support team is the best. I reported a bug I was experiencing and your folks sent me a fix within two days. This has got to be a record!! Just wanted to drop you a note telling you thanks. Funny, I was looking at some of the forums and I see some folks knocking your product. They must be idiots because they haven’t even tried the program. Anyway its their loss I guess…man I love this thing!! Customer for life I just had to drop your company a note! I must say that things have changed since I bought your program. I am a videographer, and my video and audio has to be just right for my clients. They expect their finished product to be perfect. I used to have a hard time getting my audio right...I no longer have that problem. It's weird because some clients have given more compliments on my audio than video. Thanks to the genius that thought of this:) Now you guys need to make a program for video! Demetria Clark All I can say is Holy ()(*^ this thing works! Thanks for coming through. So many of us have been mislead in the past with technology that does not perform as advertised. Keep the development going, you really have something worthwhile here. I was able to Harbalize some material within a few minutes of getting up and running and I am blown away by the results. At first listen you think there isn't that much different but then you turn it up, play it on other systems listen in the car and all of a sudden you realize what has happened....you've been Harbalized! Thanks Paavo, You and your team are geniuses. Respectfully, I don't usually do this but I wanted to let people know about this really great mastering tool. After recording in Korg D16, exporting the wave files into my computer and mixing and mastering with N-Track studio, there is one more step I take which makes my songs perfect. I use something called Har-Bal. This is a way to adjust the sound spectrum using a visual interface. It has produced remarkable results for me. You can set up filters for EQ, use reference audio from any type of CD and then adjust your settings to match the reference CD. The visual interface makes it very easy to use. Once you have a good sound you record the mix and it adjusts your original file and makes a copy with the added adjustments. The key of course to good recording is having a good source, hot levels, no distortion. In the Korg D16, I kept my source levels between -12 and -4 db. Once I exported the wave files I made sure that most eq adjustments in the NTrack were subtractions which allows me to boost where I need the extra punch. Less is best. The N-Track combined with a bunch of cool plugins mixes and masters the sound but the extra ability to then take the completed wave mix from the NTrack lets me polish this to sound like a commercial CD. Har-Bal was selling for $99 when I purchased it a few months ago. I have no affiliation with them but can tell you they are very responsive to questions. They even called me from Australia (I'm in So Cal) to make sure I received the link to the license code they sent. Great customer service and a ton of sound knowledge there. Go here to listen to "Inner" or "You Are the One" both begun in D16 and finished with Har-Bal We have close to 30 songs on this site: www.mp3.com.au/jjslim all recorded with D16. Four Albums, "One Shining Star" our released CD, three other Albums we are filling with songs. Now with a great process we can work on perfecting the songs we had recorded earlier without using the Har-Bal tool. Let me know what you all think. I would appreciate the feedback. Mark Hi, You've achieved not one, but two firsts in the world:
The first of these must be regarded as a plus. I've owned your program for approximately 48 hrs. In a considerably shorter time than that I have managed to:
I would suggest you feature the latter on your web site: your program is good for more than mastering. Example: Faults of this program: Many Thanks for a program that is going to be really useful. Best Regards, I installed HarBal today and I just have to tell you how completely amazing your product is. I am simply shocked at the results. I had one particular hi-energy electronic piece I've been trying to master for over a month. I must have re-mixed/re-mastered it 25 times ! After 30 minutes with HarBal (using the techno ref), it was THERE ! Unbelievable.... Absolutely the best software I've ever bought ! Earle and Paavo, I am truly amazed by this product. My music is riding in a Bentley on Yugo Dollars. I'm telling all my friends to check out this software. For anyone that can read and use a mouse, it should be easy to manipulate. I think the results after Harbalization (w/digital audio limiting) is "Da Bomb". I will be uploading my new Harbalized tracks to my mp3.com sight immediately and promoting this software. It takes a lot of guess work out the engineering process. Sincerely, Well what can I say but WOW!!!! I love this Har-Bal (even though it tells me some of my mixes are not as good as they should be). The results are just what you advertised. It is simply amazing. You have made the mastering job SO much easier. Thank you for creating this important and wonderful tool. Thank you also for offering Har-Bal for the lower introductory price. Sometimes a product comes along in music that changes everything (and at the same time levels the playing field). Har-Bal is such a product and it will be used on all my mixes. There is an "old school" consensus that a mix needs to be mastered at traditional mastering houses where those with the "golden ears" can do their magic. This has unfortunately been true for the most part because the tools were just not available to do the same job at home or wherever there is a computer. Like any other groundbreaking product, Har-Bal changes the rules of the game by making a good mix dependant NOT on the "golden ears" of seasoned pro's in the mastering business, but by anybody with a computer. With Har-Bal the ears are working with our eyes. It is much easier to see where a mix needs adjustment than to trust the ears. Anybody can use this program on any source material and within seconds start improving the subtle dynamics in a mix that would take a set of "golden ears" many hours AND quite a lot of expensive equipment to accomplish. Har-Bal is an idea whose time has "finally" come. Bravo! It IS just as easy as it looks...can you imagine something this simple., This is unheard of, especially at this price! Har-bal is definitely going to change the game for the independent music community. This is only the FIRST version of it...CAN IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS? I'm glad to have been one of the first to experience it and actually was able to do it myself! Anyone that cares about their music should be harbalizing it!" Mill Davis I just purchased Har-Bal, based on the SOS review. It's awesome and deceivingly simple to use, this will be used extensively here on all of our future projects and for retouching past releases. The first 'Harbalized' release will be our BF003, house and tech-house. All tracks 'Harbalized' adding depth, transparency and a polished, professional character. Thank you for making such a great product at such a great price. (Finished, final mastered audio examples pre/post avail upon request, just let us know what format/resolutions Btw the audio on the sight is not 'Harbalized' yet) Jordan Vesteyo, When I first discovered Reason (by Propellerheads) I was blown away. Prior to that moment I'd been a hardware fan and a reluctant software user (mainly sequencer). Then a few years went past. A couple of nice software packages came about, but nothing spectacular (mainly VST/VSTi, but *very* CPU hungry!). Then I stumbled across Har Bal at some music forum. The person describing Har Bal hadn't used it but was curious and wondered if anyone else had tried/seen it. To me it made perfect sense and seemed like it was the "missing link" to my set up. Like a lot of semi pros I suffer from too much bass/treble in the mix and have all kinds of EQing problems. But with Har Bal all those problems are gone. And I mean "all". When I explain how good this program is to other potential users I let them know that it's the equivalent of having a recording engineer with the best ears in the biz with you 24/7. Or like someone's taken their fingers out of my ears and now I can hear my mixes with so much more clarity. Har Bal is up there with Reason as being a life changer in the way I can make music. I salute all of you at Har bal and wish you success. Cheers, |
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