0002: How To Avoid A Common Mastering Mistake

well hey there hero how’s your journey
going I can tell you that for not one
not two but three of your fellow
students and clients of mine over the
last few months the same little tiny but
common mistake has popped up and they’ve
all set up flares either sending me a
distress call or a distress email or a
post in the Pro Connect group on vo
heroes calm all around the same mistake
that’s very common I want to help you
avoid that mistake and I want to help
you fix it if you can’t avoid it all
coming up in just a moment in this
episode of the vo heroes podcast well
hey there it’s David H Lawrence the
seventeenth and in this edition this
episode of the vo heroes podcast and
thank you by the way for your comments
on the previous ones we’ve been having a
great time with this I’m really excited
about it but this in this case I feel
like I’m throwing a lifeline out there
because I didn’t realize it was a
pattern until I saw these three things
all in a row so a couple months ago then
last month and then just over the
weekend I had a client say oh my gosh
one of my clients just sent me back the
work that I did for them and they want
me to do a little update a little pickup
a little change in one case the name of
the company of the client had changed
and they wanted to change nothing else
about the two minute explainer video
that my client had done for them they
just wanted to update the name of the
company that’s it everything else about
the performance was great there were
just two places in the long piece where
the name of the company was mentioned
they wanted the new name of the company
replaced there so what would you do
you’d go back to the original wav file
before you level ated it or normalized
it to minus 3db or eacute it or did
whatever you needed to do to give them a
finished piece of work now this happens
all the time in audio books as well
people will master and finish and
convert to mp3 – three normalization
level later all that stuff but they
won’t say this is the mistake they won’t
save the raw wave
file the raw edited wav files so what I
mean by that is not your raw recording
not all of the mistakes and the the
whole audacity project but the final
piece that has the right silence at the
beginning and at the end and all of the
mistakes edited out but not exported as
a level ated WAV file brought into
audacity normalized you know the
mastering parts of things
normalizing 2-3 converting to mp3 all of
that stuff stopping when you have the
raw wav file and exporting that what
people often do is they don’t save that
raw way file like why do I need that
this is exactly why because when you
have to make a change or when you have
to make a pickup it is so much easier to
do that when you have the raw WAV file
because it hasn’t been colored it hasn’t
been changed it hasn’t been compressed
or eq’d or normalized or converted to an
mp3 and then having to be converted back
you’re working with an earlier edition
the raw initial Edition that has been
edited together but not gone on to be
burnished and polished in the mastering
process now that’s the mistake I don’t
want you to make okay
always save in any category whether it’s
audiobooks or commercials or explainer
videos or animation or IVR it doesn’t
matter save that raw edited finalized
WAV file but not mastered and colored
and run through filters and mm-hmm
whatever you want to do with your audio
after the fact to make it ready for your
client so that’s gonna be a WAV file the
way to avoid that is to always save that
WAV file and believe me I’ve had people
complain why don’t we want to save all
these big WAV files they’re huge they
take up space on my hard drive on it but
look if there’s one thing that’s cheap
in the world of technology its storage
you can get a 5 terabyte portable drive
for 70 bucks now so don’t don’t cry to
me about not having space get an
external drive and save your work yeah
you probably will never have to do
anything with it but on the off chance
that you do
you don’t want to have to re-record that
entire thing to match just a couple of
pickups that you could then open the
original wav file match your performance
do those little tiny pickups drop them
in and then remaster that’s the proper
way to do it run it you know export the
new version with the pickups as a WAV
file run that through level 8 or bring
that back in and normalize it to minus 3
dB convert it to mp3 and send that off
that’s the way to do it you obviously
want to check your work make sure it
sounds right but that’s the way to do
that now what happens if you haven’t
saved the wav file
okay so let’s reverse engineer this just
a little bit what you’re trying to come
up with is the same sound once you’re
finished you don’t want there to be any
audible switch between what you had
recorded before and what changes what
little tiny changes you need to make in
the audio to do the update or the pickup
for your client so the way to do that is
bring the finished mp3 file into
audacity the one that they’ve sent you
back or the one that you have saved on
your hard drive listen to the sentence
that contains the pickup the name of the
new name of the company or the the word
that you didn’t do right who knows maybe
you said Tuesday instead of Thursday I
don’t know but it’s going to be
surrounded by some content a sentence a
phrase maybe even a couple of sentences
if it’s the the crossover word between
the two sentences whatever it is just
pick a piece that has a clear beginning
in a clear end and record that properly
okay once you record that properly it
won’t be the right level yet but record
it with the same try to remember back to
we needed the recording try to record it
with the same intention the same
approach to your microphone everything
the same without trying to match that
final sound that the mp3 currently has
and then take those two pieces and
master them as if you were creating that
audio all over again run those pickups
through level later and normalize those
pickups to minus 3db don’t convert them
to mp3 but in audacity in all of the in
the two files that you’d probably have
open you probably have the the piece
that as it exists with the client the
current piece that they want you to
change and the pickups once you bring
those level ated normalized eq’d
whatever you had to do to get to where
you were now back into audacity you’ll
have two different files open grab what
you need in in its entirety from the
pickup file and replace the wrong
updatable parts in the file that the
client currently has now you’ll want to
listen back to that and see if the level
is the same if you attack the microphone
properly if you’ve run it through level
ater and it’s big enough if you’ve
normalized at mp3 there’s a good chance
it will match but you may need to adjust
that final level to fit to make sure
that it flows smoother that’s the only
recourse you have other than
re-recording the whole thing and that’s
a performance issue right so hopefully
that will help you recover if you don’t
save that original raw edited wav file
but have I made if I put the fear of God
in you to save that raw WAV file let me
know in the comments below if this is
something that’s happened to you if you
have another way of doing it you know in
my case I just wanted to show you how to
reverse engineer what that final sound
would sound like and try to make it
match what what they want you to keep
all the rest of it and then export that
final piece to em that final updated
version to mp3 and off it goes you know
check it and then off it goes to the
client so let me know if you have
questions about this in the comment
below comments below this video I’d love
to know if what I explained to you made
sense I’d love to know if you have
another solution for it
there’s lots of ways to come at this
that’s the way I do it I’m always open
to new new ways of doing it and I
appreciate you taking the time to either
watch or listen to the vo Heroes podcast
I’m David H Lawrence 217th and I’ll talk
to you in the next episode.