I bought Wavelab Pro 12 a few weeks ago, but barely had a chance to mess with it until today. While I’m not a sound engineer, I’d like to learn enough of mastering to publish something polished when it comes to my music.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of results on YouTube for using this program to master typical music like rock, pop, hip-hop and whatnot, but I’m having trouble finding any tutorials for orchestral music, both for film and TV scoring, and then for classical music, the latter mostly because I did some MIDI mockups and plan on doing more, so I’d like to master them at least closer to the proper way it’s done by sound engineers in those projects than my usual go-to approach, which is to throw it at Ozone 11, hear it go to absurd volume wars levels and then bring it back to something less excessive.
Don’t get me wrong, Dom Sigalas has a great tutorial from 5 years ago that showed me a lot of what the program can do, but he was mixing a typical pop song, so his adjustments were mostly for specific instruments that I won’t deal with generally. I do have a couple of pop songs that I will definitely give that treatment to.
So, any recommendations for tutorials that show WL Pro 12 mastering classical and film scores would be really appreciated.
WL is a great tool, but I’d probably consider using a multi track DAW (Nuendo/PT) with WL as the track editor and or ARA extension.
On the other hand, if you are only working on a stereo track, WL will work fine.
It all depends on what you will be receiving to work from and what your deliverables are going to be.
I’m not saying it can’t be done in WL though. That said, it’s clearly not the DAW of choice for most Post houses and this is probably one reason why you’re not finding tutorials on doing post production work in WL.
The disclosure here is that in the dim past I started in post (if you squint at my profile picture you can probably see the word ‘post’ is still in our studio name).
No doubt there’s people on this forum that do more classical than I do so I’ll defer to them… I can make the observation that ‘source destination editing’ is sometimes thought to be valuable in that world.
My goal is to do some mastering in stereo and in 5.1. You telling me to use Nuendo as the tool for mastering surprises me because from what I gathered here and in other places online, the workflow goes from the DAW like Cubase or Nuendo, then mixdown the file and master it in Wavelab Pro. Did I get that completely wrong? I mean, I was precisely asking here a few weeks ago if I needed Wavelab Pro for mastering when I have Cubase Pro 13 and Nuendo 13, and the consensus was that Wavelab Pro offered many more features geared towards mastering.
It’s all just me, part of my own studying of music composition and production. To do some serious mastering, at the very least I would need to convert a room in my house into a small studio and get proper studio monitors, something I’m not planning on doing. That is, unless I’m successful as a composer beyond my wildest dreams and I get to buy a house way bigger than this one.
OK … apologies. I read your initial post as if you were intending to ‘master’ film tracks … and that can be a different world depending on the circumstances.
For music and what you are doing … WL is likely the perfect solution.