Mastering

[Solipsism]

Forget mastering yourself. mastering is high skill and cant be done by bedroom users of live.

Mastering can be done in your bedroom. Check out Sonmi451 - Vladivostok on the U-cover label
http://www.u-cover.com/u-cover/m.php?data=news
Produced & Mixed with Ableton instruments & FX. Mastered with Waves Q8 & L2.

[djastroboy]

So how much of this applies to pure electronic music where things are already coming out pretty well under control?
There seem to be lots of opinions about mastering, but who will enumerate just the things that are important for techno?

[feyshay]

You can master in the box. You'd need some decent plug-ins. But if you really want to do it right, you would need a very good room, very good monitors, and then probably best to have some good hardware to boot--like a 2 channel compressor and parametric equalizer.
IMO, mastering is like any other step. You can easily screw it up (like playing the instrument, recording, and mixing). Nothing magical about it, though, if you're doing the rest of the steps with minimal experience. It's a learning process. Get some plug-ins and save up for some hardware. Most folks will hand it off to a professional. The professionals will tell you this is a necessary step, and it probably is if you're going to try to market your music.
If you're not worried about that, enjoy the learning process.

[radeon]

Forge- You keep p[icking on my posts. Did I do something to anger yourself? Be quite please and let me have my rights to speech OK.

To master properly it is NOT only a couple of plugins. The most important things in master room are THE ROOM AND THE MONITOR. No bedroom studio has been treatment of the room like a proper master room. Ask Bob Katz what his most important equipment is. HE WILL SAY room and monitor.

[radeon]

Forget mastering yourself. mastering is high skill and cant be done by bedroom users of live.

Mastering can be done in your bedroom. Check out Sonmi451 - Vladivostok on the U-cover label
http://www.u-cover.com/u-cover/m.php?data=news
Produced & Mixed with Ableton instruments & FX. Mastered with Waves Q8 & L2.

yes I know sure it can be done. Just becuase it is a release does no meaning ity has been professional mastered. Hav eyou listen to some dance releases from net labels recent?? I listen allways and many are terribles with low rms and harmonic balance wrong. There is many bad song sounds around everywhere.

[forge]

Forge- You keep p[icking on my posts. Did I do something to anger yourself? Be quite please and let me have my rights to speech OK.

To master properly it is NOT only a couple of plugins. The most important things in master room are THE ROOM AND THE MONITOR. No bedroom studio has been treatment of the room like a proper master room. Ask Bob Katz what his most important equipment is. HE WILL SAY room and monitor.

I had to go back to last page to see what you referring to there - totally forgotten - that post was a month ago, and it was right after the post you made about camp Ableton then asked me to delete the reply...so no hard feelings, water under the bridge and all that....didnt even realise it was still there..

and besides, I was taking issuewith the "dont even bother trying" comment about bedroom mastering - you might not be able to get Bob Katz level masters etc, but you can do alot with plug-ins and know how - most importantly know how

[Inductive]

This question shows up in every forum at least once. The thing is, mastering is this huge other part of making production quality material. Its not impossible to do but running your whole mix through a few plugins will not usualy get the results youd get from paying a chunk of cash to someone who does it for a living. I personaly dont have things mastered. I dont even send out demo's of my music to labels or anything. I always have meant to but thats a whole other thing.

My point is, who cares if you get some 'perfect' sound? Are you acualy going for a pro release? Do you realy feel like you can hear what you need to hear on your equipment (including ears) and know how to respond to it with the software you have? If you run everything through an eq plugin and some multi band compression, do you realy know your particular tools inside and out? There are all kinds of numbers and rules of thumb and tricks that the pro's know that are prety hard to stumble on in a short amount of time.

Realy, who cares about the master anyway? It wont fix a boring song. Focus your time on the mixing, the more time spent there, and the steps before it (writing the song, dealing with sounds) are much more important. When you get to the last step, go for it. If your dealing with a record label or something and they base thier opinion totaly on your overall master you may be looking at the wrong label. If things sound that bad, your problems are almost always occuring before the mastering phase.

I do have a hardware finalizer, which I consider pretty ghetto mastering. I use (currently, this changes) endorphin vst at the end of ever master chain in my songs. I dont even consider this mastering personaly. I dunno, this discussion always bums me out, lets all just work on making great music. Mastering is boring, kinda hard, and a part of the whole music thing I dont realy even feel the need to think about. Make good music, screw what tools you use, screw everyones opinions including mine. And everyone, jesus, stop drinking light beer. If you want to be in better shape move around every once and awile, dont skimp on taste.

[ChiDJ]

Two things:


1) Ears

2) Years and Years of experience

[Dean Eager]

Two things:


1) Ears

2) Years and Years of experience

Or $150 and Izotope Ozone 3, it's the sheeeet

[mdb]

You want it mastered properly, Take it too Brian Gardner..

http://briangardnermastering.com/
http://mixonline.com/recording/intervie ... n_gardner/

Doing it yourself is like Painting your car yourself with a can of spray paint.

[vinkalmann]

You want it mastered properly, Take it too Brian Gardner..

http://briangardnermastering.com/
http://mixonline.com/recording/intervie ... n_gardner/

Doing it yourself is like Painting your car yourself with a can of spray paint.

Keep in mind that the people who know how to paint cars started out not knowing how to paint cars.

[FireForEffect]

I think of it like this...if you are just making mixes, master them yourself..it works great for me..however if you have original tracks, send them off. It is REALLY worth it. You could spend your entire life learning to master properly..stick to making music and let the pro's do the mastering..that is unless you have all the time in the world. I dont so off the original tracks go. I use a guy from Ibiza..Kaskade and others use him as well and get GREAT results.

[mdb]

You want it mastered properly, Take it too Brian Gardner..

http://briangardnermastering.com/
http://mixonline.com/recording/intervie ... n_gardner/

Doing it yourself is like Painting your car yourself with a can of spray paint.

Keep in mind that the people who know how to paint cars started out not knowing how to paint cars.

Yeah, and they probably fucked up a lot of cars too

[paraxia]

ok, see if yo can find the psp vintage warmer vst. its bad ass and has some mastering presets which work *wonders* for me.

[Angstrom]

If you want to begin to know what to do please evereyone, buy
The Bob Katz book

it explains exatly what you are doing amid all those bits and bytes.

Often we now just need to make our tunes as loud as those of the DJ that played before - it will help you with that too, tell you exactly how to acheive best results. But more importantly it will help you make mistakes when taking stuff to master for record (if you do that). This is a separate issue from playing out your own stuff at the best levels, taking a 16 bit pre-normalised & multiband flattened wav to a mastering house is a waste of everyones time.

I really reccomend that book to everyone in this field, although it is intended for 'mastering engineers' it is very informative for all, and it may make you re-assess things that you did without thinking before. Not in an audiophile "what a twat, that hardly matters in the real world" way, but in an "oh fuck what have I done!" way.

yep, really.