gjmnz wrote:
This is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier about missing tutorials or documents. Even though there would be many workflows for many users, I have no idea what you just talked about. I would pay money to have a tutorial on how a person approached this part of the recording process. I don't care that it is simply their way of doing it. I just know that if I can see what other do and have it explained, I can take from many sources and create my own system, deciding what is enough or not.
Have you checked out Lynda.com's DVD by Garrick Chow about GB? It's his workflow for using GB. You might find it helpful. Also, MacProVideo sells a variety of videos about things like this you might also find helpful.
http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=504
http://www.macprovideo.com/
they may not be exactly about mastering, but they'll give you a sense how others use GB, which can be more helpful than reading a getting started PDF.
Regarding mastering... it's both simple and complicated. Simple because it boils down to "make this sound good and ready for duplication." Complicated for all the reasons HT enumerated above. It's science, art, experience, tools.
I am not sure what the character of this forum is yet,being quite new, but it would be awesome if there was a place on this board where the die hard GB heads posted there tut's or whatever.
Cheers. G.
Here's a thread in this forum in which I blathered on about mastering which, depending on your mood, may be helpful or tedious:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6894031
However, this forum tends to be not so much about discussing topics in depth or sharing work habits as it is about quick answers to standard questions. Occasionally it does veer off into an interesting discussion, but most people who use GB aren't interested in looking too much under the hood. I take it from your interest in using iControl and getting your hands dirty that your interest goes beyond the "I just want to plug in my guitar and record myself" crowd.
If you compare this forum with Apple's own Logic forum, you can see that - aside from the fact that this is about GB and that's about Logic - there's a lot more in depth discussion about audio concepts in general, and it's generally more chatty and chummy in the Logic forum. Logic discussion becomes a springboard to underlying concepts and workflows that drive the use of its features. Because GB has a lot of casual users, and because it is, after all, so easy to use, I suppose the forum tends to be more curt.
Two outside forums you might be interested in are Harmony-Central (specifically SSS), and Gearslutz.
Harmony-Central SSS veers to the other extreme, it's very chatty and isn't GB specific. However, it often goes into these topics and attracts a lot of casual musicians. It's moderated by Craig Anderton who, for example, used a recent thread about mastering as the basis for an article in EQ (which he edits) about mastering:
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forumdisplay.php?f=50
Gearslutz is a very active forum that discusses these issues in much more in depth, with lots of sharing of information among experienced engineers, and participants ranging from noobies to top industry pros:
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/
There's different forums in gearslutz that might interest you, from "low end theory" - i.e. low budget, to music computers, to the mastering forum. There's often "I wonder how that person did it on that album" and then they pop up and explain how they did it.
You could also subscribe to music magazines like EQ, Electronic Musician, Mix, etc. which endlessly cycle articles about tracking, mixing, and mastering and over time you can get a pretty good sense about what it's about. They often highlight various producers and how they achieve effects on whatever gear they're using. Since all the gear follows similar fundamental concepts, it's easy enough to adapt what someone is saying about one piece of gear to another. After awhile it just kinda starts making sense.
One of the grand Poo Bahs of mastering who I reference in the thread above is Bob Katz. While it gets a bit technical, you can sift through information on his website (he also shows up at Gearslutz so you could ask him what the **** he was talking about):
http://www.digido.com/
Finally, I guess since all forums are no more or less than their participants, if more participants shared their experience in the forum, then that would be the forum!
