How are you mastering?

[brandondrury]

complained a little ("I've only mastered 111,000 CDs, what do I know?") but he did what I asked.

This is unacceptable! There is always a balance between jackass customers and artists with a vision. Sometimes they are the same thing.

You are right about the consistency. That's what mastering really is. It's about making an album sound like an album and not a bunch of songs. It's basically to eleminate the distraction of switching from song to song so that the emotional impact of each song can come through.

However, if you didn't like the song he used as his model then you have problems. He should have asked if you liked what he did on the first one. You should have then said, "Is it a little low end heavy?". Then he immediately kills the music and starts talking about "vision". You both agree on where this is going, what he hears, what you hear, what he believes the monitors are saying, and you believe the monitors are saying, etc and then you reattack the mastering.

I've recently discovered a number of places offering low-cost mastering by mail or online.

Without any experience with these, I'd assume these are in the same league as mail order brides.

[bubba]

Hi Fellas:

This looks like an old thread but WTF. I can't make up my mind what to put on a cd, much less about mastering. My answer is to just keep recording songs. I'm up around 100 songs finished in the past four years, about forty of those I would put on a cd (or 3 cd's). I have Wavelab and a lot of mastering plugins. Everytime I go to make a cd image in Wavelab, I can't make up my mind what to put on it or in what order. I am not very musically "hip". I have made over fifty Wavelab "cd Montages" and burned very few. I have tried to master my own stuff, but like they say getting a consistant sound is difficult. I guess if I can find a market for my stuff, I will get off of my ass and get fourteen or fifteen songs mastered and burn some cd's. Till then, I'll just keep playing and singing with the red light on.

Peace: bubba

[brandondrury]

I have tried to master my own stuff, but like they say getting a consistant sound is difficult.

Most of the "consistent sound" process is done by consistent mixing.

The point to mastering isn't really to make each song 100% consistent (because this is impossible). The point to mastering is to make sure the changes from song to song aren't distracting.

Brandon

[dmore]

u need not do any compresiions and limiters when u do ur mixdowns, consider the fact that u should atleast hv widemixes coz it definetely affect ur mixes if one has to widen them during the mastering session. holla.

[brandondrury]

u need not do any compresiions and limiters when u do ur mixdowns,

Then why is it so popular for the big boys to use Neve 33069 compressors or the SSL Mix bus?

I'm off the opinion that there are definites to placing a compressor across the 2bus in creative ways that don't have all that much to do with the mastering engineer. I have to know what is going to happen to my mix when it gets slammed so I can counter. There are different views to this, but the purist "nothing on the 2bus" thing has never worked for me. With that said, it's very rarely that I EQ the 2bus (maybe a high shelf boost or something if I intended that during tracking). You have to be responsible with the 2bus. I don't consider processing the 2bus the same thing as "mastering" though.

Brandon

[StephenMarshMastering]

As in all things - it's the application of mastering tools and the person applying them that makes for good mastering. Getting caught up on gear is for fools. Yes - better gerar makes better records - but it's the application of those tools that makes one engineer better than another, not the tools themselves. The fact the famous person A or famous person B uses this or that is utterly irrelevant if you don't know HOW they use it. Sure - so and so may use an SSL comp - but when? and how hard to they hit it? Is it just in the chain for vibe? Is it an analog box and you only have a plug-in? How are the controls set and WHY did they set them that way. There's WAY to many variables at play here people, great gear does NOT make you a great engineer - knowing how to use it better than everyone else does.

With all due respect - Mastering is a LOT more complex than making a bunch of songs sound like an album. I can understand how one might think doing it themselves would be worthwhile if that's all they expect to get from it.

Mastering is also the final diagnostic stage where we inspect the audio for anomalies, ticks, pops, hiss, noise, left/right imbalance, mono compatibility, phase correlation etc. Granted I know EVERYONE out there scopes out their audio and religiously follows meters so this isn't needed.....cough cough.......... it's also your last chance to make creative adjustments to the songs relative to each other - and hence - it's a really bad idea to 'finish' each track before you get them all together and see how they work and play with each other.

Mastering during the mixdown is like painting 1 room in a house with no regard for what other rooms are or will be painted. There's another reason you don't master while you mix - you have ABSOLUTELY NO OBJECTIVITY and that's the biggest tool ANY mastering engineer has to use. Sadly - Waves hasn't made a plug-in for it yet so few, if any seem to grasp that concept I'm afraid, but objectivity is the biggest thing anybody mastering can bring to the table.

Mastering isn't about someone else invading your project and screwing it up. It's about taking something you already believe to be great and leveraging thousands of titles worth of experience to blow it clear out the back door.

You could almost equate it to musical proof reading - you can look at something 1000 times on the screen but, until you print it out and read it in a different light - you'll still miss some typos.

[brandondrury]

With all due respect - Mastering is a LOT more complex than making a bunch of songs sound like an album.

Fair enough, but how many shitty mixes have mastering engineers made BAD ASS? If there are some, I've love to hear examples. I'm open to learn. Regardless of complexity, the mastering process is subtle. When Eric Conn mastered a record I produced, the processing he added was so subtle I question my engineering abilities when I heard the two. There was a difference, but it wasn't like I cared.

Not that I'll be at this point soon, but Michael Wagener mentioned that it was very common for him to get his mixes back where the mastering engineer listened, said "done!" and sent them back exact as is. In that particular application, what was complex about the mastering? Obviously, it's not complex when you don't do anything.

So, I believe the best thing an engineer at home who is tracking and mixing can do is not expect a thing from the mastering engineer. If you get a benefit, great. However, I want my vision to be as closely realized as possible. Ideally, I would love to make a record where the mastering engineer said "done!" without doing anything.

it's a really bad idea to 'finish' each track before you get them all together and see how they work and play with each other.

There is definitely the possibility of painting yourself into a corner with this. With that said, I remember one of the first projects I had mastered. It came back with the drums GONE!. It was embarassing and I was NOT happy. It turned out that my drums were mixed in a way where they required the extra level to cut through the dense mix (wall out sound guitars). In this situation, I learned that I needed to make sure that my mixes could stand being loud without losing the original intent.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I guess I'm saying that for every situation where a guitar can have too much gain, there is a guitar that can not enough gain. For every abuse of a compressor on a 2bus their could be an under use of a compressor on the 2bus. The "how" is the name of the game. While painting a mastering engineering into a corner is a bad idea, it's a bad idea to expect too much. How and where this concept applies is tricky!

There's another reason you don't master while you mix - you have ABSOLUTELY NO OBJECTIVITY and that's the biggest tool ANY mastering engineer has to use. Sadly - Waves hasn't made a plug-in for it yet so few

Bingo! I think you hit the nail on the head on this one. The checks and balances from a set of ears who has heard 400 albums on his monitors this year is a HUGE asset even if he does decide the mastering needs nothing done!

Brandon