Preparing a project for mastering

[baseinstinct]

what are the necessary preparations for an ableton project for mastering by a professional sound studio?

Here are the specs.
About 20 tracks
Made with headphones
Drums bounced to three audio tracks, 32bit
Third party instruments and effects
5 return tracks, one feeding output to other return tracks
Each instrument track kept separately. Most of them frozen, but if more mods were needed, they were 'wrapped' in groups to enable adding further effects
Collect all and save has been done, so all the samples should be in place.
Some unmasking was done with a side chain dynamic eq, but this is a job for the sound engineer, yes?
No limiting was done. Some compression for musical effects, All audio recorded under 0db, 32bit float.
Some tracks use a lot of reverb. Should it be removed to ensure there is not too much?

Commonsense says that all tracks should be flattened, no need for third party effects, but how to deal with the return tracks with third party plugins?

What would be a reasonable price for an under 8 minutes' tune?
Do you send an mp3 demo?

Are there any precautions, things to be born in mind?

[Tarekith]

To be honest none of that really matters, as you won't be sending your Ableton project to the mastering engineer but rendered stereo mixdown file. Ideally with roughly 6dB or more of headroom, and 24bit or higher. I recommend all my clients use the same sample rate as they had set in the project.

Most mastering engineers don't need an MP3 demo, you're sending them the uncompressed wav file anyway.

Price can vary a lot depending on the experience of the person you're working with. Anything from $5-$300 a song is available depending on your budget and expectations.

[Da hand]

Exactly what Tarekith said. Mastering is when you have finished Mixing your track to the best sound possible and then need a final pair of ears to work on the mixed-down stereo file.

I suspect what you are looking for is the Mixing of your song at this stage - where you send the person your project or a collection of the individual tracks to be fixed up and balanced so that your final Mix sounds amazing when rendered down to stereo. Mastering would come after this stage.

Generally, per song, Mixing costs a lot more than Mastering - as the engineer is dealing with many more variables to render their final product.

[baseinstinct]

Thanks for your replies.
What could those expectations be?

Let's say i want a tune to be mastered. I would hope to sell several copies, but that is a debut, so my budget is minimal.

I have made sure the spectrum curve matches "folk" productions, by izotope standard. I think I have successfully removed issues such as boxiness and harshness of some tracks, a bit of dynamic EQ to ensure the leading motives are not obscured, transients seem to be just fine.
I sold Adam monitors when my vagabond started years ago, and have used only my superlux headphones to make mixing decisions, so it would be good to ensure the panorama is made good use of.

Since this is going to be done on the full mix, in any case, I suppose, that will be a matter of setting up a tool like Ozone and letting Live export to wav and to mp3 - or is there more to that?
Thanks

[jestermgee]

Since this is going to be done on the full mix, in any case, I suppose, that will be a matter of setting up a tool like Ozone and letting Live export to wav and to mp3 - or is there more to that?
Thanks

Yeah if it was that easy there would be no mix engineers.

Anyone "can" do it, just depends on your ear for detail, your equipment to hear it and experience to know how to read signals with both ears and eyes. If you are really aiming at just a handful of sales you could try and do it on the cheap using an online service where it uses some vague AI algorithm and makes your track "better" but you will learn nothing from that.

You can try and do some of the work yourself but trying to make things sound "professional" it can be a challenge to get things right if your equipment isn't setup correctly and often you can just make a mess when you don't know what you are really doing, but over time you will learn.

You can take a plunge and contact a mix engineer directly and decide on a budget you would be happy with and see what they can do for you. In some cases here you can get some valuable feedback about what you need to do so you may get a reply asking you to tone something down a bit or some explanation on what they did. If the result is good then you can use that as a target and simply try and emulate the results yourself and learn that way.

Guess it comes down to your budget, time and desire.

[Tarekith]

http://innerportalstudio.com/articles/Mixdowns.pdf

http://innerportalstudio.com/articles/Mastering.pdf

Start with those IMO, that will get you started, and you can see how much of it you can do yourself (if wanted).

[baseinstinct]

Okay guys, thanks for your advice. Two scenarios here

1. Mastering. The mix is done, as I wrote (and thanks Tarekith for your articles - I read them years ago; lots of valuable knowledge). What action (by engineer) and costs would mastering involve?
2. Mixing. What preparation of material is required? Detailed questions and specs of the project are in my posts.