• Hello Earle and Paavo, I’ve spent 17 months cramming my head with any knowledge I could find in order to master how to use PT8 LE. Before that I spent 3 years on a little Boss Roland Recorder. Just two months ago, I made a rather major purchase of the Waves Platinum Bundle all in an effort to take my Music to the next level of the process called Mastering. Thanks to the “Tough Love” Email from Earle, I wished I could now give him a hug (“But my arms aren’t that long!”) for Paavo and he having come up with the idea to create Har-Bal (The Harmonic Balancer) that gives one a visual way to adjust their songs. If this sounds like it is going to be a testimony for Har-Bal you’re darn toot-in right, it is! But, better than that, it is about two people that have been so helpful. In so many industries today, you don’t find many people who are so willing to help you through your quest to make better recorded music. Since, they may want to use this as a part of one of their testimony’s and remain free to deal with each individual as they see fit ,I won’t go into great detail or make any promises about the help you’ll receive, although, I hope what I have to say does equate into many more sales for Har-Bal as I have now become a believer in it. Amongst, the many DAW software I’ve bought, this is one that would be hard to pry away from me! And, “WOW” what a bargain! I will tell you that I was needlessly (rather ignorantly) compressing the hell out of my music to the point of it becoming “Stale creamed corn!” in order to make it fit within the transient parameters of many different speaker systems and had come to the place of feeling no hope for my music! Earle helped me with a tough love message that really hit home and then was so patient and willing to help create a reference model that I was able to use in Har-Bal that literally revolutionized my music. My 17 months of knowledge was worth only one thing. I now, know 2,000 ways to not make a light bulb (Thomas Edison). Earle’s simple paper on Mastering associated with Har-bal was so helpful especially in the set up and settings within the master chain (A must read!). He caused me to go back and remix one of my songs with almost no compression. I then took the reference file model he helped me with and put it into Har-Bal, took my remix and shaped it to the reference file, turned on the EQ and Air filters and recorded it to file. I put the HB eq’d file into my mastering session, bounced it and “WOW”! You name it, I had never before done a song that had translated so well sound wise in relationship to whatever was playing it (CD or File!) It may sound like I’m trying to sell you on these guys, (Earle and Paavo) and you’d be right. Most people that I know, that have a great product get puffed up and have an arrogance about them. If you feel stupid and actually are, these guys won’t let on that they think you are as well! I received nothing but patient humble help and I wish nothing but blessings upon these gentlemen and their wonderful tool of a program that has brought alive my music. Sincerely, R. M. SignalBoosting.com U.S.A.

    SignalBoosting.com
  • 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!

    Paul Alfery Roland Corporation US- MI District Sales Manager
  • 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, Kevin www.steelwind.net

    Kevin
  • 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, Jeff Milkey

    Jeff Milkey
  • 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 Gadler RattleSnakeTracks Studio
  • Just to let you know, I tried out Har-Bal on a 3 song project yesterday (my first try with Har-Bal) and have to say I’m sold! The mix I have is great and everything was sounding pretty good, but I could not quite get the sound I want to translate out of the studio and onto the home stereo or in the car. Close, but not quite. Then I tried Har-Bal…. In no time at all I was able to successfully get three great masters done! I’ve played them on every system I could get my hands on and they sound just the way I’ve always imagined they would. Great product!!!

    Dave McIsaac Diddle Records
  • 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 Aitken Producer

    Rich Aitken N I M R O D - Producer
  • 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, Richard Harrison www.GrassShackRecords.com 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! RH

    Richard Harrison
  • 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, Phil Hogg

    Phil Hogg
  • 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 Everett Hoskins Producer, Cari Vaughn

    Everett Hoskins
  • Thank you, thank you, and thank you Har-Bal is working wonders on my mixes 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 Xrtac Records

    Xrtac Records
  • 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, Jeff Milkey

    Jeff Milkey
  • 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 www.mp3.com.au/jjslim (site now shut down) Look for “Inner” and “You Are the One”

    Mark
  • 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, Mastering Engineer, Selm, Germany

    Robert Schulze Lutum Mastering Engineer
  • 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: https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/aeolianmay Best Regards, James Durham ION1.COM Multimedia Development

    James Durham
  • 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 Guerrilla Le Femme

    Demetria Clark
  • 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.

    Anonymous
  • Hi, You’ve achieved not one, but two firsts in the world:

    1. A computer program that does what it says it does.
    2. Software sold that doesn’t promise to enlarge your XXXXX.
    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:
    1. Make three tracks (which I previously wasn’t happy with) sound great.
    2. Make a horribly cat-like DI Violin sound like a violin.
    I would suggest you feature the latter on your web site: your program is good for more than mastering. Example: This violin. I had no choice in the initial sound – it was a live recording with no possibility of later replacement. It sounded dreadful. I’m sure you know. Ten minutes of frequency sculpting later – just filling in troughs and smoothing out peaks – it sounded like a violin! A real one! Faults of this program: The violin player still couldn’t play. Can you fix that? Many Thanks for a program that is going to be really useful. Best Regards, Paddi Addison.

    Paddi Addison
  • 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, Clinton “The Mayor” Crawford, C.E.O CJC MUSIC

    Clinton “The Mayor” Crawford CJC MUSIC
  • 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 Director Society of Future Recording Artists & Songwriters (SOFRAS)

    Mill Davis SOFRAS - Director
  • 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, Derek aka kaom

    Derek aka Kaom
  • 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! Joe Pedi

    Joe Pedi
  • 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, Producer, Engineer Blunted Funk Recordings Brooklyn NYC

    Jordan Vesteyo Blunted Funk Recordings - Producer, Engineer
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