Mastering question

[lola]

Mastering is an art..... need a good monitoring system, a good room, lots of knowledge and the golden ears.
If you don;t have em or the knowledge or the equipment.
Do as me...

Go to a decent mastering studio, with the knowledge the ears and the system.

Have a nice studio here, a nice room, good monitoring, but i know myself, i can mix, but mastering.... mwah...i leave it alone. (and i don't have the equip for it, nor the knowledge, and i hate plug ins on it )

Btw check these guys they know what they are doing.l
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpidqcG7sSo
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGAtka8jFU
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGWs-WeHqrk

[evon]

mastering is a very very fine art that is learned in a whole different way than mixing. mixing is whats most important for an artist. if anything is to be mastered, the label will get it done because at that point, it will be reaching distribution stages. (and they WON'T be commissioning the artist to do the master...)

Why are we still mystifying mastering today? For the life of me I can't believe that there are genuine artists that don't know what thier finsished product should sound like. Therefore, if the artist knows what he is trying to acheive he would only need the tools and learn how to use them. One of the basics for being a musician is a trained/keen ear. IMVHO.

[crumhorn]

mastering is a very very fine art that is learned in a whole different way than mixing. mixing is whats most important for an artist. if anything is to be mastered, the label will get it done because at that point, it will be reaching distribution stages. (and they WON'T be commissioning the artist to do the master...)

Why are we still mystifying mastering today? For the life of me I can't believe that there are genuine artists that don't know what thier finsished product should sound like. Therefore, if the artist knows what he is trying to acheive he would only need the tools and learn how to use them. One of the basics for being a musician is a trained/keen ear. IMVHO.

+1

It's a bit like saying "Music is a fine art - my advise is to leave your song writing to a trained musician"

[Superchibisan]

its not mystical. its surgical. and yes, an artist really does know what they want their music to sound like. and they should've done that already in the mixing stage.

its not that they don't know what they want it to sound like, but rather the fact that they don't know how to make it sound like they want it to. thats what the mastering engineer is there for.

but yes, getting good at it would be a good idea. and mastering your own tracks would really cut the middle man out.

[Khazul]

What I do now is very simple - I route the audio from my computer into a DJM-800 mixer (shock horror!) and try mixing it various known good CDs of my CDJ decks - as you mix - anything odd about your own music tends to stick out like a sore thumb - spectral balance, dynamics/loudness, overall punch, feel etc. I'll do this from as early as laying down inital ryhthm parts and kicks etc to once Ive stuck a good limiter on.

I'll just aim to get the mix good and so the kind of mastering needed is basically just stick a quality limiter on it, and perhaps an EQ to roll off the low end if needed.

I figure is when checking it through the DJ mixer against CDs and it feeling right against those CDs and if I cant hear anything else wrong direct monitoring from the computer, then its probably good enough as far as me spending effort on it.

For album levelling etc - I'll leave that to a mastering engineer who gets the mixes (with no limiter or EQ on them and plenty of room to work with).

[FrancodeLeon88]

My 2 cents (which probably aren't worth that much) on this topic:

In regards to the original post - having read countless posts and articles about the mastering process, especially in the DUC forums, supposedly there is a difference between master processing on the output bus of a full multi-track session and doing the work on a bounced/rendered 2-track file. The difference is related to how DAW sum on the master bus, and how engineers/trained ears perceive the difference.

To decide what YOU should do - I would say: A/B both versions - 1 coming off the summed multi-track, versus 1 coming off a rendered 2-track. Both with no output bus processing. If you can hear the difference, then make it a two step process. If you can't hear a difference, then 1 step it is.

If you have plans to send out your track to a mastering house, don't put anything on the output bus. That's just annoying to the mastering engineer (the ME). Let him do his work - he's getting paid enough for it.

If you have plans to release the song with other songs on a medium, don't put anything on the output bus. The ME (even if its you) needs to master the songs with one another, finding common ground between each, and making a finished singular project.

Having said all that, I do all my work with a big fat mastering suite on my output bus. You may listen to my stuff, and think it all sounds like ass, but, to me, its fine, and since adopting this practice two years ago, I've not gotten one complaint concerning my sound quality on projects I've sold. I'm not interested in training my ears anymore - I spent years doing that while I was a recording engineer. I could give two shits if I don't remember how to differentiate between 1000 Hz versus 1200 Hz. My job is to make good music, that sounds polished enough so that the consumer never even thinks about the quality.

So, while I work, I keep that mastering suite on my output bus, and I compose, mix, process, all at the same time.

Having said that, I learned and spent years breaking that process into each of its tedious-ass steps: composition, rough recordings, drafts, tracking, eq-ing, creating balancing the stereo-image, additionalproduction/processing, auditioning on different monitoring systems (still do this plenty before finalizing the master), bouncing the multitrack, and then sending out to mastering.

Can some mastering engineers do black magic on my tracks to make them sound better? Yes. Is the cost worth it at this point? No.

DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com

[FrancodeLeon88]

Great topic, by the way.

[leedsquietman]

What a lot of people don't understand is that mastering is NOT remixing.

ME's are mostly there to level out tracks so that there is a consistent level on an EP or album, fix any frequency or phase imbalances and prep it for duplication/replication.

Yes, they may well use EQ and compressors/limiters/gates/stereo tools etc, but only in small doses. If the original mix is duff, then you can only dress it up a little in mastering, you cannot polish a turd. Many mastering houses will now do stems, but they are not remixing, just tightening things up so the sound fits right.

A lot of people are immensely disappointed to spend 500-1000 dollars on mastering their album, expecting their mixes to suddenly sound like sexy ear candy when they only presented an average mix. The ME can add a little 'make up' to the average mix but can't turn it into a grammy winning mix if it wasn't excellent in the first place.

Others get their mastering done by the wrong kind of engineer. You get a jazz or classical ME to master your hard rock or pumping dance album and chances are it will be too much dynamics and not loud or punchy enough for it's genre, but if you want an album with dynamics (i.e. your music is you singing with an acoustic guitar and just the odd incidental thing such as hand percussion or strings) and you don't want it mastered by someone who did the last Metallica album and who crushes the life out of it, so the subtle soft passages are just as in your face as the louder built up choruses.

Doing your research is key. Most mastering houses offer a free sample, if you want to do it this way and have the budget, at least test a few out first.

[Hidden Driveways]

Mastering an entire album, EP, or just a series of songs that need to work together is a bit different than just doing a single song. When you finish a single song in your home studio and you just want to share it with others, having a little mastering step involved is a good thing. Like I said before, when you share a song you want it to be able to stand up on its own in a mix with other music. Getting the volume up to a more standard level is pretty important to me.

Mastering a series of songs in an album is a lot more involved. Setting track crossfades and the overall consistency of the mix from song to song requires more attention - and it also requires a mastering application because you cannot do everything you need to do with Live.

I've made the request in the past for Ableton to include mastering tools in Live. I'm aware it's a lot to ask, but I would be beside myself if you could set up track crossfades in Live. This way when you make a DJ mix, you could burn a CD for someone and the listener would be able to skip through the songs if they wanted to hear. There is an extremely practical need for this, and DAW manufacturers have yet to offer up a solution. Imagine if you could make a DJ mix of songs (or your own LP or EP) in Live, export it as an MP3 that has track markers in it, so when someone downloads your mix they can skip forward and backward to songs they want to hear.

[FrancodeLeon88]

Hidden Driveways-

There's a much simpler way to achieve a continuous mix of music that the listener can skip through, without waiting for Live to create a new function.

Once your whole mix is done, render the whole thing to one long file. Then, bring that file into a track in Live. Then, cut that file into each of its songs. Then, export each as a separate file.

This method allows you to keep all your effects and transitions exactly how you want them, even from song to song, as delineated by your track marks.

If you intend on keeping them as .wav files, the listener will hear a continuous stream of music when the play through the tracks, but will also be able to skip back and forth.

If you convert them to .mp3, you may want to add some meta-info to tell players that this is a gapless album. You can do this easily with a free program like iTunes, under the info for the song. Just select gapless album. You can even do them all at once.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com

[Hidden Driveways]

Hidden Driveways-

There's a much simpler way to achieve a continuous mix of music that the listener can skip through, without waiting for Live to create a new function.

Once your whole mix is done, render the whole thing to one long file. Then, bring that file into a track in Live. Then, cut that file into each of its songs. Then, export each as a separate file.

This method allows you to keep all your effects and transitions exactly how you want them, even from song to song, as delineated by your track marks.

If you intend on keeping them as .wav files, the listener will hear a continuous stream of music when the play through the tracks, but will also be able to skip back and forth.

If you convert them to .mp3, you may want to add some meta-info to tell players that this is a gapless album. You can do this easily with a free program like iTunes, under the info for the song. Just select gapless album. You can even do them all at once.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com

Come to think of it, iTunes did implement the gapless thing. I have noticed it working. The new of Montreal album plays gaplessly. But here's the issue:

Every week I download ton of different people's DJ mixes from various music blogs and I have never encountered a mix where someone has bothered to do all of this extra work. It's always one giant file that you can't navigate. I think if this functionality was implemented into a DAW (to be easily able to set track markers) you would see a lot of people use it. It would be a smart feature to have in the product that results from the Serato partnership.

[FrancodeLeon88]

I guess.

I don't really mind that other musicians don't care to make their product (whether they sell it or not) as professional as it could be. I like that they think that's a lot of work.

It just makes my stuff look better and more polished.

I know how I feel when someone hands me a CD that is one long track. I know exactly how much effort went into its production.

As for a single .mp3 that has markers that let you skip to a track marker within that singular file, I don't own one, nor have I ever seen this. Nor have I ever read of dedicated audio editor with this function. Nor would I really see a benefit of having this, over having gapless .mp3 files. Just my 2 cents.

DJ Franco de Leon
www.FRANCODELEON.com

[Beatport]

Mastering is an art..... need a good monitoring system, a good room, lots of knowledge and the golden ears.
If you don;t have em or the knowledge or the equipment.
Do as me...

Go to a decent mastering studio, with the knowledge the ears and the system.

Have a nice studio here, a nice room, good monitoring, but i know myself, i can mix, but mastering.... mwah...i leave it alone. (and i don't have the equip for it, nor the knowledge, and i hate plug ins on it )

Btw check these guys they know what they are doing.l
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpidqcG7sSo
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGAtka8jFU
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGWs-WeHqrk

If you're doing it yourself in a home studio then "mastering" is not the correct term. Even an entry-level mastering studio uses $15k full range speakers (not nearfields) and a highly trained professional that can hear a 1 db bump at any frequency. IMO, if you're serious about your EP, pay the $300 and send it to a pro. If you have a good mix, the results will really shine and give your track a pro sound.

[FrancodeLeon88]

I've never seen ears that can hear 1 dB bump at any frequency only charge $300 for a session.

In fact, I've never heard any mastering engineer even claim they could do that.

Not that anyone can't - for example, while mixing, I can hear variations in gain at certain frequencies, even when the difference is only 2 or 3 dB, but I have to be focused on that particular sound. But to play two versions of a full song, one being the constant, and the other having 1 dB bump at 400 Hz - no ears can hear that. 1 dB is 1/3 of what humans consider a slight variation in volume. And remember, dB is a log function.

Earlier, someone mentioned the mystification (not a real word, I don't think) of Mastering. Honestly, if I spent all my time and money working on mastering techniques on two tracks, and got the mastering gear (versus the composition and production gear), I'm pretty sure my ears would be just as trained, and my products just as polished. My point is - Mastering Engineers are humans.

I think the point I'm trying to get across (which is way off the original thread's topic) is the cost to benefit ratio.

Even if I could find an ME who only charged $300 to make an EP of mine sound better than if I mastered it (and, yes, I'll use that word, even though I don't have a tuned room and mid-fields and far-fields [most near-field monitors are full range btw], the benefit of having him master my stuff wouldn't be worth $300 versus what I can produce. The $300 would better be used somewhere else: like my savings account.

To each his own.

[lola]

I've never seen ears that can hear 1 dB bump at any frequency only charge $300 for a session.

In fact, I've never heard any mastering engineer even claim they could do that.

Not that anyone can't - for example, while mixing, I can hear variations in gain at certain frequencies, even when the difference is only 2 or 3 dB, but I have to be focused on that particular sound. But to play two versions of a full song, one being the constant, and the other having 1 dB bump at 400 Hz - no ears can hear that. 1 dB is 1/3 of what humans consider a slight variation in volume. And remember, dB is a log function.

Earlier, someone mentioned the mystification (not a real word, I don't think) of Mastering. Honestly, if I spent all my time and money working on mastering techniques on two tracks, and got the mastering gear (versus the composition and production gear), I'm pretty sure my ears would be just as trained, and my products just as polished. My point is - Mastering Engineers are humans.

I think the point I'm trying to get across (which is way off the original thread's topic) is the cost to benefit ratio.

Even if I could find an ME who only charged $300 to make an EP of mine sound better than if I mastered it (and, yes, I'll use that word, even though I don't have a tuned room and mid-fields and far-fields [most near-field monitors are full range btw], the benefit of having him master my stuff wouldn't be worth $300 versus what I can produce. The $300 would better be used somewhere else: like my savings account.

To each his own.

U talking about vinyl mastering or just releasing a ep as mp3?
It's a huge difference.