Gear Review: IK Multimedia T-RackS 3 Mastering Suite by Oresti

Mastering: the mysterious art of evening tracks up, brightening them, and making them LOUD. Nowadays, albums are louder than ever and it’s really starting to get out of hand - to the point that tracks are being destroyed with digital distortion! If you haven’t already, take a listen to Metallica’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” it’s cluttered with digital distortion, which makes it un-listenable to those who notice.

Even so, it is important in today’s world to bring your tracks up to a competitive volume.  This includes your mixes and contest entries right here on Indaba! Truth is, if someone is sifting through hundreds of k-os entries, pure volume and sonic power will help your mixes cut through. Even if your track is really great, if it can’t be heard well from the get go without a need for serious amplitude adjustment, it might get skipped over. Same goes for your tracks on MySpace---it may be prudent to post extra-loud tracks on the site, as the streaming-audio quality is fairly low to begin with. To the untrained ear, loud is good, and a lot of the time, that’s what you have to deliver.

Beyond the included compressors, limiters, and EQs included in your DAW, you should try checking out mastering-specific plug-ins. IK Multimedia has just released an overhauled version of their mastering suite, T-RackS 3. It can be used as a standalone program as well as a plug-in on most DAWs. This is convenient because this way you don’t need to open ProTools or Logic if all you are doing is mastering your tracks. The standard version of the suite is only $200 retail, and includes four great dynamics and EQ processors. If this isn’t your first foray into mastering and you’d like a larger variety of tools, there’s a deluxe version that includes nine different processors and goes for $500. Both versions include advanced metering with loudness meters, a spectrum analyzer, and a phase scope.

Professional mastering engineers can charge about $100-200 per track, and about $1000-2000+ for an entire album. They offer experience, and hyper-expensive outboard gear, and this is what T-RackS attempts to emulate with great digital versions of vintage gear extremely useful presets. When in standalone mode, simply pull in a couple of tracks to the playlist area, choose from a wide variety of presets, and you’ll be well on your way.

In order to show you the quality and range the software provides, I created examples of too drastically different tracks. One is of a punk-pop group I recorded in my living room, and calls for screaming loudness, while the other is a hi-fi recording of a jazz quartet I did in a 2-million dollar studio, which calls for subtle and smooth sweetening.

For the punk-pop recording Rock Sample UNMASTERED.mp3, I started with the preset entitled “Super Loud.” It seemed an appropriate title and automatically took the track from 10 to 12! The preset layered a clipper, which saturated and warmed the track, an EQ which brightened it and boosted some low end, an optical compressor which let me even the track out a bit, and finally a brick wall limiter which really let me crank it without obnoxious digital distortion. As you can hear Rock Sample MASTERED.mp3, the song now packs a bit more punch and will really meet the challenge of neighboring tracks in an iTunes library or on MySpace.

As for the jazz track Jazz Sample UNMASTERED.mp3, I went with something a bit subtler. The “warm tape sat” preset provided the necessary warmth and slight volume boost for the track. Another convenient feature is a “loudness suggestion” chart, which allows you to pick the genre of music you’re working with, and then an associated mark is put in your metering area to keep you on point. This let me keep a visual note of the differences I was aiming to keep between my master of the pop-punk track versus the jazz. The preset on the jazz track really opened up the sound and made the recording sound a little less digital Jazz Sample MASTERED.mp3.

In the words of a fellow T-RackS 3 user and professor of mine, Bob Power, “I urge you all to try mastering your own tracks.” It will really give you an appreciation for the process. I’m very new to mastering - a couple of months ago I was scared of even trying it, as I simply didn’t understand the point of it. Sure, professional mastering engineers, just like most professionals, will most likely do a better job than many of us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spend a couple of hundred bucks and try it on your own! Who knows, maybe you’ll get good at it and charge to master tracks for fellow Indabans!