OK,

I'm going to pretend that there isn't an argument about what mastering means and whether or not there are professionals who do or do not know what they are doing, and whether or not this is a black art.

I can tell you that there are methods which can take what you have now, run it through a preset called 'country rock', and doggone it if it doesn't make it sound more like what a proper country rock tune on the radio sounds like.

rharv pointed to one of the plugins that have presets like this, Ozone. In Tracktion (for those of you that purchased it at $19 last year, there is the Final Mix plugin which functions very similarly). http://www.mackie.com/products/tracktion2/mackie.html

The final mix plugin has the following for a signal chain - all inside this one plugin:

6 band parametric EQ, for pre-dynamics shaping
3 band dynamics processor
6 band parametric eq, for post-dynamics shaping
limiter; with lots of controls of knee points, etc.

Now, with that kind of signal chain, there are infinite combinations of parameters. However, the good thing is that it comes bundled with about 100 presets, some aimed at final 2 track treatment, some aimed at individual track treatment.

You can indeed cheat significantly with this plugin, or with Ozone - which rharv pointed to farther above in the thread.

The presets are outstanding. You may need to tweak them a bit, but while this sounds like copping out, indeed spending a few minutes auditioning presets that seem to fit your desired outcome can lead to amazing results that would take hours and days to construct on your own.

All of this is coming from the mindset of treating a final 2-track mixdown for some extra special sauce that you were unable to achieve through traditional mix exercises.

I know that the best way to go about this is through proper mixing and individual track technique - please let's not go preaching about that.

To the OP: To demonstrate, I will do this for free for you. Send me a PM with a link to a high bit rate .mp3 of the file; at least 192kbps. Send me some links to the type of song you want your track to sound like. Then I'll fiddle around putting it through some of the presets in Final Mix, and send you back the links of 192 kbps .mp3 files. I'm not going to spend more than 20 minutes on it. Most of that time will be spent rendering the output audio files.

There will be one or two of the links that are likely going to be improvements to your ears.

When that Tracktion 3 deal went down for $19 last year, it was worth it alone just for the FinalMix plugin. Mackie made it so that it will only work native in Tracktion - it's really too bad, because they could be bankrolling quite alot of money for sales of that plugin alone.

-Scott

My Songs, photos, writing,etc.
My Sound Cloud