I need to master some live material I recorded direct to 2-track this week. I have used Cool Edit Pro to do the fade ins and outs, and have used Sound Forge 6 for awhile now for mastering. It has a tool called Wave Hammer that can compress/normalized/boost n cut volume all that the same time. Well, I want to reverberate the track a bit, too. I used Wave Hammer last night, got the level up to about negative .2 decibels - then tried to reverb - my thinking was compress first, reverb last. But the process pushed me up into clip.
I was wondering if I have the process backward. Should I:
- EQ if necessary
- then reverberate
- and finally Wave Hammer?
That way I could get the track to sound good, then apply some light compression to make the track sit a bit louder on the CD...
Anyone?