I love finding musicians here on the forum, and giving my advice or taking over the project completely. For free. It depends on my time or whether I personally like the recording and find inspiration.
That's my gig (or goal) at the moment as well. Really pumped about the whole home mastering thing, and I'm more and more convinced that it is possible to get results worth distributing/that you can be proud of. But --- and this is a big but, there is so much specialized knowledge involved in mastering that it's almost overwhelming, and the final results of a master in terms of the final EQ curve and technical specs seem to depend on a stunningly complicated set of factors.
However, just like mixing, I think that mastering can be made into an overly muddy and complicated process. I tend to over-complicate both my mixing and mastering - I think mainly because I don't pay enough attention during the recording phase of my projects. The example in this thread is a good one for that. I spent an inordinate amount of time mixing everything, but recorded everything as almost an afterthought.
Martin Maniac said:
When I added the exciter to my raw track...quite frankly, it sounded much better. It was a definite improvement to my ears.
It is possible that the exciter did something good for your track, and no doubt it sounded better
to your ears. But it's also possible that the exciter
ruined the track while making it
louder, which made you THINK it was better. This was one GIGANTIC lesson from this test. While John's master won out, it was also the loudest. I don't know how, but he managed to smash it to within an inch of it's life (DR7) while still maintaining clarity and depth.
Quite literally, the only way to tell if it's better is to Level Match it with the original and turn up the volume on your speakers so that both tracks are
sufficiently and identically loud. If you don't do that, you'll be fooling yourself every time. I should know, I fooled myself for
years.
If you want proof, here it is ...
There is a great free loudness matching plugin by TB Pro Audio called AB_LM. the x64 version is fantastic.