How are you mastering?

[kyleevans]

This is for Brandon, or anyone else out there who is actively recording / producing marketable music. What do you do to get ready for the master besides get the best possible mix?

are you mixingdown to tape, or harddrives, or what?

what fidelity? 44.1/48/192, etc

are you doing any 2-buss limiting during your mixdown or do you leave that up to the mastering house? or maybe your mastering it yourself?

i have a million questions about that stuff. i have never gotten anything professionally mastered but I'm getting to that point.

[Andrew07]

I've only gotten one cd mastered and it was by Brad Blackwood at Euphonic Masters. Ideally you should be recording at 44.1 24-bit for home recording. I mixed the songs, didn't put anything on the 2-bus, lowered the master fader so there was plenty of headroom, and bounced it to a stereo file 44.1 24-bit. I then put all the tracks on a firewire drive and shipped it to him

[damoh]

Ask the mastering studio what they want as far as format. These days you would be hard pressed to find a mastering place that didnt work in a digital format. Hard drive or DVD are most common nowadays, usually .wav, AIFF or SDII.
A really good mastering studio can usually handle any format you caould imagine including many different kinds of tape.

Dont compress or eq your stereo tracks, just get your mix sounding as best you can with your output level not exceeding 0db.
Dont lower your volume level as Andrew07 has suggested. The logic behind it is good but there are some factors which he may not be aware of.

Your job is to give the mastering engineer as much digital data as is available.

In the process of mixing and mastering whenever a digital audio file is modified it loses bits in rounding errors which is called truncating.
0db on a 16 bit recording system gives you a maximum of 16 bits worth of resolution. Lowering your output volume in the digital domain could see you giving the mastering engineer a 16 bit signal using perhaps only 10 bits.

Even using a higher bit rate say 24 bit, because we dont record all our signals at maximum level, we lose much of the information it is possible to capture.
Every time we do a digital edit or apply an effect our signals are truncated and we lose more information.
Leaving as much digital information in your audio as possible means the mastering engineer has more to work with.

Avoid downsampling or changing your bitrate at home. Record in the highest setting you can afford and achieve with acceptable performance with your gear.

The mastering studio has the expensive gear which can downsample and dither in the least destructive and more audibly pleasing way than you can achieve in a PC at home.

Automate and save your mix. If there is anything really sticking out that the mastering engineer feels he cannot work with by 2 track stage and he is a good bloke, he can tell you and you can go home, fix it and bring him back a better raw product for him to work with.

A good mastering job is an essential ingredient to a great sounding track, but remember the wisdom of old, you cant polish a turd!

To summise, your job is to provide the mastering engineer with the best mix you can with the maximum amount of digital information.

[kyleevans]

when your doing a rough mixdown for your band, or yourself, to listen to in the car or whatever, do you run it through a limiter on the 2buss, ie, do a poor-man's mastering job on that temporary copy?

and you would never work on your mix with a limiter (even subtle) on the 2buss? maybe take it off before you create the version your sending to the mastering house?

i u

[kyleevans]

when your doing a rough mixdown for your band, or yourself, to listen to in the car or whatever, do you run it through a limiter on the 2buss, ie, do a poor-man's mastering job on that temporary copy?

and you would never work on your mix with a limiter (even subtle) on the 2buss? maybe take it off before you create the version your sending to the mastering house?

i u

[Andrew07]

When I do my psuedo-mastering I'll throw up an EQ, Sony dynamics, sony limiter, and a dither plug-in. If I'm doing a quick reference demo I'll put up an L2 and smash the shit out of it. Finally, if I was sending it to the ME all I'd do is take the plugs off

[kyleevans]

thanks, anyone have any recommendations for mastering houses in the Dallas area? or i guess in general?

[brandondrury]

What do you do to get ready for the master besides get the best possible mix?

If I know I'm getting something mastered, I take my all my "pretend mastering" plugins off the 2 bus.

For me personally, I'm a believer in mastering while I mix. I've been burned by mastering engineers in the past who have destroyed my mixes. Basically, the extreme compression that a mastering engineer will use causes all sorts of things to popup....usually mud, multilated kick drums, etc. So, about 2/3 through a mix I'll start slowly pull down the threshold on the compressor or limiter.

If I knew someone else was going to master it, I would take all that crap off when the mix was finished and see where that got me. Of course, I always like to take all the 2bus stuff off and listen anyway just make sure nothing too stupid is going on.

what fidelity? 44.1/48/192, etc

You mean, "what sample rate?". There is no direct correlation between sample rate and fidelity / sound quality. I know mega mega badass dudes who swear that 48 sounds best to their ears.

If you are mixing in the box, I like the idea of staying at 44.1Khz the entire time. Sample rate conversion is one of the most destructive audio processes. If you are mixing on a console, this is different. You are in the analog domain and there is no sample rate conversion...just another Digital to Analog to Digital conversion.

I've only gotten one cd mastered and it was by Brad Blackwood at Euphonic Masters.

How did that turn out, dude? Where you really happy with it? What are your thoughts about your mixes being mastered? Personally, I think that mastered music sounds worse on my studio monitors but better everywhere else (I guess I'm used to hearing mastered music).

Brandon

[Andrew07]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

How did that turn out, dude? Where you really happy with it? What are your thoughts about your mixes being mastered? Personally, I think that mastered music sounds worse on my studio monitors but better everywhere else (I guess I'm used to hearing mastered music).

Brandon

It was my first recording so it was way more my fault than the mastering engineer's. I tend to like my mixes pretty bright (think a tad less than John Feldman's stuff) and after mastering, a lot of the highs got SUCKED out, the mids got pushed, and the kick sounded funny. The compression on the mixes was a lot smoother and more subtle than I was doing, and the mastered finals were LOUD. It provided the "glue" to really make it sound like a record, but after mixing it for so damn long it made me kinda sad to see all my hard work of automating and perfecting dynamics was all for nothing...but I guess that's just the way modern music goes. It was rock/pop/full band stuff BTW.

Also, there's a lot of debates on recording forums regarding sample rates, but the mastering engineers Ive talked with will accept whatever you recorded at since they have the highest quality converters known to Man.

[brandondrury]

My experience with mastering was very similar. So much of the work we do to make a mix kick ass is tossed out the window in the interest of letting the listners keep their volume knobs set to a lower setting.

My mixes tend to be boxy, boomy, and muddy. I find that when I play back major label recordings on my monitors they sound super hi-fi, thin, super mid scooped, and super bright. So, my mixes are usually translate with the inverse of what I hear in the major label cds.

I find it amazing that your mixes translate mega bright on NS-10s. The NS-10s I heard were extremely bright and bitey. When mixing, it hurt everyone in the room to be in there. I remember holding a magazine in front of my face to black out some of the high end. It was real pain and it was something I would expect to be exposed to in a POW camp. Maybe it's just differences in rooms or whatever.

Back to the mastering. The only problem with us non-$5k per song mixing guys is that our issues aren't relative. This was the thing that blew me away about Wagener. He could setup a mix (without really thinking about it much) that was masterable. My mixes are not that masterable because sucking out all the mud in the bass guitar, for example will make the drums sound thin or make the vocals harsh.

Maybe it goes back to my monitors / room issues again, but yesterday I intentionally pretend mastered the mix I was working on to be painfully brittle on my monitors. On my home theater rig, it still sounds boring. Back to the drawing board!


Brandon