What exactly is mastering??
- Thread starter illest1029
- Start date
mshilarious
Banned
gullfo said:should be required if you're going to be certified and licensedany mixes or mastering done with a fade at any point in your career means you're immediately barred from the "Mixing & Mastering Union of Certified Audio Engineers™"
I wouldn't go that far. You are allow one fade-out for every fade-in.
Richard Monroe
Well-known member
I dunno, I think of mastering as the step where a guy with a ***great*** room and ***great*** ears, and a ***shit load*** of ***killer*** gear does to the final mix, what the mixing engineer did to the raw tracks. Very sophisticated narrow-band EQ is applied, to shelve unecessary frequencies, and create the space for each of the components of each song to live. Further ambience, compression, or noise reduction may be applied to the finished mix. Of course the material is formatted, with the order of the songs, and appropriate space between them.
Often, what's really good about a good mastering house, is the things they *don't* do. They don't apply EQ, compression, or noise reduction, when it is not necessary, just so they can say they did something. They don't fix what's not broken. My most educational experience with mastering was my album, "Reunion". The mixing was done at Littledog studios in Malden, Mass., and the mastering was done by Sjoko at NGS Productions in Santa Barbara. Both of these guys should be well known to more long time Home rec'ers.
Now, Littledog did great work, especially on the vocals, and was instrumental in processing drums which were sometimes not recorded as well as I would have liked, largely due to my inexperience. He virtually saved a couple of songs by creative processing. Sjoko also did great work, giving the album the finished sound it needed. However, it was clear to me that Sjoko had a different vision of how the album was supposed to sound than Littledog did, which was sometimes closer to my vision.
Both approaches were useful to me. Littledog showed me alternatives, some of which were really *better* than my version, and sometimes his ideas were rejected. I was, after all, the producer, and Littledog didn't try to produce it. He mixed it. There were always those litte things that I wasn't so sure about that weren't worth fighting over, where I just let the nice mixing engineer have his way. Then Sjoko went around and undid a bunch of those things I wasn't so sure about, putting them back more the way I had them in the first place.
The net result was a good compromise, and in the end, some of it is me, some of it is Littledog, and some of it is Sjoko. I can really, really relate to what people say about a different pair of ears. A typical example are the violin and viola tracks. The songs where strings were used are either folk or medieval/rennaisance inspired. The strings player is Audrey White, a full professor of strings at the New England Conservatory. I assure you, she is a badass violinist. However, she wanted the sound of a *medieval* violin, which had almost no resonance in the boxy body (a mute is used to simulate this), and the bow is slacked, as the medieval bow had no tensioner, and was held with the thumb, with the hair wrapped around the bow.
This took me a while to get used to. Let's say Littledog didn't exactly fall in love with it, and attempted to *improve* it by EQ and ambience. Sjoko virtually undid a bunch of what Littledog had done, which pleased the violinist no end. And the EQ wars were on. To be fair, Sjoko didn't get the vision on one song. It is a satire of Deep Purple, somewhere around "Machine Head", and Sjoko tried to EQ it to make it flow with the rest of the neopsychedelic/folk album. He made some heavily processed classic pre-metal sound like The Hansons! Because the rest of the album was so good, I respectfully asked Sjoko to re-master that one song, and explained my purpose. He sent me 2 alternative versions, and one of them was just fine. So please don't think I am bashing Sjoko. Nobody gets everything all the time, and he was helpful and responsive in fixing the problem, no additional charge.
My point here is that by letting 2 different people finish out the project, I got better results than if either one had done it all. They didn't always agree, but they weren't supposed to, either. In the end, as the recording artist, and as producer, I was satisfied with the finished product, which I know I couldn't have done. It's really something to listen to the mono raw tracks, house mix, no EQ, no ambience, then to Littledog's final mix, then the mastered version. It's like watching Lucy Lawlwss turn into Xena, warrior princess.-Richie
Often, what's really good about a good mastering house, is the things they *don't* do. They don't apply EQ, compression, or noise reduction, when it is not necessary, just so they can say they did something. They don't fix what's not broken. My most educational experience with mastering was my album, "Reunion". The mixing was done at Littledog studios in Malden, Mass., and the mastering was done by Sjoko at NGS Productions in Santa Barbara. Both of these guys should be well known to more long time Home rec'ers.
Now, Littledog did great work, especially on the vocals, and was instrumental in processing drums which were sometimes not recorded as well as I would have liked, largely due to my inexperience. He virtually saved a couple of songs by creative processing. Sjoko also did great work, giving the album the finished sound it needed. However, it was clear to me that Sjoko had a different vision of how the album was supposed to sound than Littledog did, which was sometimes closer to my vision.
Both approaches were useful to me. Littledog showed me alternatives, some of which were really *better* than my version, and sometimes his ideas were rejected. I was, after all, the producer, and Littledog didn't try to produce it. He mixed it. There were always those litte things that I wasn't so sure about that weren't worth fighting over, where I just let the nice mixing engineer have his way. Then Sjoko went around and undid a bunch of those things I wasn't so sure about, putting them back more the way I had them in the first place.
The net result was a good compromise, and in the end, some of it is me, some of it is Littledog, and some of it is Sjoko. I can really, really relate to what people say about a different pair of ears. A typical example are the violin and viola tracks. The songs where strings were used are either folk or medieval/rennaisance inspired. The strings player is Audrey White, a full professor of strings at the New England Conservatory. I assure you, she is a badass violinist. However, she wanted the sound of a *medieval* violin, which had almost no resonance in the boxy body (a mute is used to simulate this), and the bow is slacked, as the medieval bow had no tensioner, and was held with the thumb, with the hair wrapped around the bow.
This took me a while to get used to. Let's say Littledog didn't exactly fall in love with it, and attempted to *improve* it by EQ and ambience. Sjoko virtually undid a bunch of what Littledog had done, which pleased the violinist no end. And the EQ wars were on. To be fair, Sjoko didn't get the vision on one song. It is a satire of Deep Purple, somewhere around "Machine Head", and Sjoko tried to EQ it to make it flow with the rest of the neopsychedelic/folk album. He made some heavily processed classic pre-metal sound like The Hansons! Because the rest of the album was so good, I respectfully asked Sjoko to re-master that one song, and explained my purpose. He sent me 2 alternative versions, and one of them was just fine. So please don't think I am bashing Sjoko. Nobody gets everything all the time, and he was helpful and responsive in fixing the problem, no additional charge.
My point here is that by letting 2 different people finish out the project, I got better results than if either one had done it all. They didn't always agree, but they weren't supposed to, either. In the end, as the recording artist, and as producer, I was satisfied with the finished product, which I know I couldn't have done. It's really something to listen to the mono raw tracks, house mix, no EQ, no ambience, then to Littledog's final mix, then the mastered version. It's like watching Lucy Lawlwss turn into Xena, warrior princess.-Richie
....
on a side note about mastering, I had the pleasure of watching Dave Shirk (spelling?) of Sonorous Mastering in Tempe, AZ master my last band's disc, and it was a sight to behold. He's did a lot of Relapse stuff in the past, not sure if he still does their bands.
This dude didn't even use a mouse, he pounded out all these commands into his keyboard like a mad man and ended up with a CD that my friends said was the loudest, punchiest thing they'd ever heard. I was in awe. Our drummer asked him how he liked the tunes and he said he wasn't even listening to them from that aspect. It's then I realized mastering engineers are on another plane of existence.
on a side note about mastering, I had the pleasure of watching Dave Shirk (spelling?) of Sonorous Mastering in Tempe, AZ master my last band's disc, and it was a sight to behold. He's did a lot of Relapse stuff in the past, not sure if he still does their bands.
This dude didn't even use a mouse, he pounded out all these commands into his keyboard like a mad man and ended up with a CD that my friends said was the loudest, punchiest thing they'd ever heard. I was in awe. Our drummer asked him how he liked the tunes and he said he wasn't even listening to them from that aspect. It's then I realized mastering engineers are on another plane of existence.