importance of mastering

  • Thread starter Thread starter Peck
  • Start date Start date
good points

flatfinger,

Thanks for the post. I enjoyed it... minus the VD.

mshilarious/ironklad audio,

That's the deal. I'm not booking tours or selling merchandise at all yet. I'm just making a cd... so... but I do know a lot of people locally that would buy the Cd.

I just know that if I have a 100 friends/family of mine buy the cd, and they play it around and someone else likes it, then I could sell a few more cd's that way.

I played in a band in highschool that recorded in a studio, we burnt the cd onto cd-r's (thank God we never actually put it in record stores, or did anything serious with it, b/c I cringe when I listen to it now) and that cd spread faster than I would have ever thought.

That was all through friends giving it to friends etc... and they were being sold for $10 from some guy I didn't even know. I thought it was cool... it made me happy that someone was enjoying it. Somewhat irrelevant though, considering a lot of those cd's were probably just burned and not paid for...

My point is I know when I put out this CD I want to be proud of it this time, because once it starts spreading you don't have any control over it anymore. So... I think it would be a good idea for me to get it mastered professionally. It's not really a question anymore in my mind. :D
 
Peck, I can understand exactly where you're at.
And masteringhouse, your points are equally true.
I've been writing/composing/playing for about 30 years, but (except for a brief stint with a Tascam Portastudio in the mid-late 1980's) am new to recording - brand new to digital home recording.
Just regrouping after committing a couple recording sins.
If I could afford ten Les Pauls and ten Strats I would get them right away.
If I could afford this and that... of course I would do it.
I would love to finally get my cd sounding consistent in all the places I test them (the only major fault was in the big rooms), then go get it professionally mastered.
Then again, I have a couple albums/cds where the recording quality is noticably budget but somehow through the haze the heart and soul of the musicians still speaks and still touches.

What about someone just doing the best with what they have at the moment, make it available and those with the receptive ears will appreciate it and understand? Then, maybe, if things improve, you could later get a pro mastering on the same - or some of the same material?
There's always two sides: immediacy/undecipherable and detailed/overworked.

Again, I'm no sound/engineering expert... this is all new and mostly intimidating.
I'm just trying to put myself in the place of diverse standpoints.
They are all valid.
 
The thing to also remember about mastering is that it is the audio equivalent of a detailing job on a car. You can take a rusty, dented, old '73 Pinto and have it professionally detailed and what will come out the other end will be a freshly washed, polished, pinstriped and shampooed rusty, dented, old '73 Pinto.

In the same way, pro mastering is not a magic bullet that'll make a bad mix sound good, it'll simply make a bad mix look and sound like a bad mix that's been pro mastered.

The cost of pro mastering is justifiable only when the performance and the mix are good enough to warrent it.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
The cost of pro mastering is justifiable only when the performance and the mix are good enough to warrent it.
G.
Click to expand...

I agree with half of your statement G., if the performance warrants it.

I have some live concerts of stuff from The Who and The Ramones where the mixes/recordings are pretty much crap but I love to listen to anyway. I would guess that mastering helped out to some degree on these. It would have been a shame not to master these only because the mixes were poor. Of course if a remix would have been possible that could have cured this it should have been done before the mastering stage.

As you say though mastering isn't a magic bullet to make a poor recording sound like a million pesos. It's only there to bring out the best of what's given to the ME to start with.
 
Of course, if one has the best recording and mix they can get with what they have to work with they can better attract someone else to pay for the mastering.
 
masteringhouse said:
I have some live concerts of stuff from The Who and The Ramones where the mixes/recordings are pretty much crap but I love to listen to anyway.
Click to expand...
Well, that's certainly true. And I listen to a bunch of old blues and jazz stuff that is of dubious recording quality that has been pro mastered, not because the mastering job made it sound spectacular (it didn't), but because the content is - as it always should be) - more important than the technical quality. "It's the content, stupid." If the performance is not worth listening to, it doesn't matter how it's polished.

But I think for the most part you actually agree with where I'm coming from. We both know that the production process, when done right, frontloads the burden. The key to it all is in the tracking. Blow that, and the mixing and mastering are just playing a game of catch-up ball which can only rarely be won. One should not (in general) purposely decide to just wing the tracking and then "fix it in the mix". On the exact same theme, one should not just wing the tracking and expect to "fix it in the master". A pro mastering job is not going to fix a bad mix; it can help, sure, but it'll not be the same. Your Who and Ramones recordings and my Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters recordings are testament to that. They still sound inferior.

There is a law of increaing returns when it comes to mastering. To go back to the car analogy, that Pinto is still going to come out looking like that Pinto, and the fact that it's professionally detailed will have little, if any, effect on the impression it imparts to the observer. People are not going to say, well, at least it's clean and polished, they are going to say it's a rustbucket, that the detailing job was like putting a bandaid on a chest wound, and that spending a hundred bucks on it was just not worth the money.

On the other hand, take a late model BMW M5 - with 20K miles on it and no dents or rust - out of the driveway to that exact same detailer, and it will come out the other end looking like a brand new vehicle that belongs on the floor of the auto show instead of on the driveway, and will look like a whole lot more than one hundred bucks better. It'll "look like a million bucks." Pro detailing on that car is more than a bargain.

I submit that it's similar with a quality mastering job; the better the tracking and mixing, the more the mastering is worth it (the greater the return for the money.) and that spending a few hundred or a thousand bucks for an A-list mastering job on an otherwise slapped together garage tape with poor tracking and inadequate mixing is not going to result in a final recording that sounds like a million bucks.

But, take the care to get the tracking right and take the care to mix it with creativity, balance and emotion, and folks like Tom will be able to give you a mastering job that will make your disc sound like it was worth a million bucks.

G.
 
timkibler,

glad to hear you know where I'm coming from... good luck with your recordings.

G and masteringhouse,

I appreciate all the insights. I'll put my biggest emphasis on the tracking for now and make it sound as good as I can with what I have. Then I'll put that same emphasis on the mix. And I'm sure I'll have a hundred more questions along the way. But thanks for everything. :)
 
I took some old Robert Johnson songs that were dumped down from cassette...i cleaned up the crackle and hiss and brought all the levels to be equal and a/b test is night and day brought out things that i couldn't hear on the tape,like him hitting the guitar when he was strumming, the original was recorded on a phonograph ...but i used wavelab with the noise reduction and limiting.It made the songs shine...
 
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