Mastering the track “Топлесс – Анатомия души”

In this video I master the track Топлесс – Анатомия души by Yury Kisel which he kindly submitted to us. This track is a good example of shifting tonal balance throughout the track. This shift in balance makes it difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a consistent sound with simple static equalisation. Even the peak taming feature in Har-Bal is sub optimal for addressing this issue because the problem lies in the shift average spectrum, not out of control peaking. To address this issue I make use of track splitting and demonstrate how to effectively make use of this technique.

Note that the audio and video have some syncronisation issues that I wasn’t aware of until after recording the video (un-synchronised clocking). I changed my device to record my vocal commentary with but this resulted in the recording audio sources and video source, all recorded to separate files using ffmpeg, drifting apart. Through tedious editing I’ve attempted to sync them together and although it is clear enough to illustrate the process and how to do this type of mastering, it isn’t perfect.

One other point that only came to mind after recording this video relates to the character of the final master. I noted that, particularly when limited more strongly, the track takes on a hard and sometimes uncomfortable edginess to it but I recall that the filter topology I was using was minimum phase, which naturally has a harder edge sound than linear phase realisations. It would be worthwhile trying the linear phase realisation to see if it provides a smoother character though it is something I did not do. Beyond that, the video should provide ample insight into how to do track splitting and the processes involved to do it well. The result is not perfect but maybe I’m being overly critical. I don’t know…

 

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