From thatcat Sent Sat, Feb 28th 1998, 13:54
From thatcat Sent Sat, Feb 28th 1998, 13:54
On 02/28/98 00:27:13 you wrote: >Hey there...this question is mainly for those of you who have >composed music on computer(from samples) and have had studio >experience with mixing onto CD... >I've recently been writing sample based songs in a program called >SoundForge, which is a powerful wav editor...The songs(I hope) are >good enough for release if i send them out to the right people, but i >have a problem. No matter what i do, there's too much hiss and not >enough volume. The samples are all in CD quality(44,000), but i have >to set the volume low on soundforge so that it doesn't max out and >start to distort... >My question is: is it possible if to fix this at the end before it >goes on vinyl/CD, or am i screwed from the start, and shouldn't even >bother? I just don't want to spend hours and find out that they're >not worthy of release due to bad quality...thanks for any input!! heh...about the first musical thing i ever did was putting together samples on a neXt computer back in '93. i think there was more electromagnetic interference than music...anyway...there's not a whole lot a mastering engineer can do if the volume of your samples is low, and there is a lot of hiss. use sound forge to normalize the tracks to max. volume and see how bad the hiss is. also, sound forge has a plug in for noise reduction which can remove some hiss, but if the hiss is as loud as the music, it won't be able to kill it without destroying the original audio as well (most nr programs destroy audio in very interesting ways, though) to compare quality, listen to your stuff and then listen to one of your favorite cd's...if they're close then you're probably ok. if they're not close, if your stuff sounds much worse, then you're probably not going to be able to improve it too much. there's only so much eq and nr that can be done, and mastering is generally fairly expensive. as for whether anyone would still enjoy it or release it, that really depends on the music itself. if the music is brilliant, the sound quality can be ignored, to a degree. a lot of aphex twin's early material was mastered off of cassette tapes or 4-track tapes, and doesn't sound all that great...but it's great music so you ignore that fact. .. "a dream is worth a thousand pictures, the mouths of lampreys a thousand more..."