Mastering a track at a time

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I read on some place's website (maybe Blue Bear or Massive, or both) that they can master a track at a time. Is this possible? Isn't mastering about making your whole album consistent? I am but a tad bit confused.
 
You can "sweeten" or "process" a single track, but yeah, "mastering" in general - at it's core - is about the assembly of the final product and bringing it to it's final form before replication.

It (the word) does tend to get thrown around a lot...

I do a decent amount of singles, and some people want me to crank out tracks as they do - a couple at a time maybe.

I just try to let them know that if I have ALL the tracks available, it might (and usually does) change the way I approach the project as a whole.
 
well if each song on my album has different instrumentation then to make them all sound the same the ME will have to do different things to different songs..hence doing each track separately....get it?
 
but as massive said, they want to hear all the tracks seperately to approach the process differently.
 
Even though processing is done on a per track basis, I have all of the tracks setup in Pro Tools and jump from one to the other in order to verify consistency (this is different from making them sound "the same").

Once I'm happy with the settings on all of the tracks, I "print" them with the processing.

Hope this make sense ...
 
You mastering fellows have any opinions on the latest trend of sending "stems" to mastering?

I've always just sent stereo tracks to mastering (I use SAE here in Phoenix), but the idea of sending stems with maybe the vox and bass stuff seperated out sounds kind intriguing...
 
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I'm confused as to whether we are all working the same definition of the word "track" here. On some posts I think we're talking about tracks as in individual instrument tracks within a single multi-tracked song, and in others it sounds as if we're talking about tracks as in individual songs on a CD compliation (e.g. "track 3" is the third song on the CD.) Where are we at?

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I'm confused as to whether we are all working the same definition of the word "track" here. On some posts I think we're talking about tracks as in individual instrument tracks within a single multi-tracked song, and in others it sounds as if we're talking about tracks as in individual songs on a CD compliation (e.g. "track 3" is the third song on the CD.) Where are we at?

G.
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In regards to the post I made above the tracks referred to "CD tracks" or individual songs. They are arranged as stereo tracks/channels in Pro Tools, so I had used the term interchangeably.

In regards to stems, if there are doubts about a mix I personally prefer stems over multiple versions of the same song. It allows me to make changes on a more granular level rather than compromising the entire mix. Other MEs feel differently about this and may charge more for processing songs as stems or simply prefer to work from stereo tracks alone.

In general I prefer a great stereo mix over stems, but prefer stems over an imbalanced or questionable mix.
 
masteringhouse said:
In general I prefer a great stereo mix over stems, but prefer stems over an imbalanced or questionable mix.
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Me, too. :cool:
 
The only thing I like about stems is that they cost a fortune to work on. :D

Honestly, rough call - If the mixes sound good, no stems. If there are problems, yeah, I suppose.

The last few stem projects I worked on were just fine with everything at unity in the first place. With some in the past, it wouldn't have made a difference anyway - It never would have sounded any good.
 
Yeah, I think the point that the people who were promoting stems (Greg Calbi in particular) was that many people are mixing at home or on near field monitors, and can't hear how the low end is shaping up. So, if you provide him with a stem for the kick, one for the bass, and maybe one for lead vocals, he can make fine adjustments more easily.

I got the feeling it's mostly major label pushing this option.
 
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Massive Master said:
The only thing I like about stems is that they cost a fortune to work on. :D
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I disagree with John (and a few other MEs) that stems inherently cost more. If I'm able to dig in a fix an issue closer to the source, it's actually going to cost less money that trying to spend more time massaging the stereo track finding a good compromise, and the results will be better since less of a compromise will need to be made.

I think it may have to do with a personal preference in workflow and the DAW used though.
 
masteringhouse said:
...the results will be better since less of a compromise will need to be made.
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Yeah buddy - repair at any stage of the game is about compromise! I've read about stems and understand about the advantage of them in some cases, but what does that imply - the mixing engineer has been replaced by the key grip - or the producer isn't sure what market to mix for yet at the mixing stage of the process? I'd rather just hear what the artist sounds like - that's just me though :D
 
kylen said:
Yeah buddy - repair at any stage of the game is about compromise! I've read about stems and understand about the advantage of them in some cases, but what does that imply - the mixing engineer has been replaced by the key grip - or the producer isn't sure what market to mix for yet at the mixing stage of the process? I'd rather just hear what the artist sounds like - that's just me though :D
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Well everyone has their preference. If you've ever tried mastering a mix with both sibilance on some tracks and dull tracks all mixed down into stereo, compared to having these tracks separated out and being able to work on them individually you'll see where I'm coming from.

In not about mixing at the mastering stage, at least as I see it.
 
masteringhouse said:
Well everyone has their preference. If you've ever tried mastering a mix with both sibilance on some tracks and dull tracks all mixed down into stereo, compared to having these tracks separated out and being able to work on them individually you'll see where I'm coming from.

In not about mixing at the mastering stage, at least as I see it.
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YEah, that's where the definitions between mixing and mastering become a bit blurred, and where I - as predominantly a mixing engineer - have always had a little trouble drawing the line for myself. Some MEs will probably love me for that, some will probably hate me for it, but I have a hard time considering my mix "done" unless it sounds pretty good to me as a stereo mix down. I'll make stems, and be happy to send them along to the ME, but it's always my hope that they can just polish my main mixdown.

If they need the stems, that means one of two things to me; either there is a real problem with the mixdown, in which case as the mixing engineer I pulled a pretty big boner that I should fess up to, or, the ME wants to some level of remix because he doesn't agree with my idea of how the mix should sound. If it's the former, I'm glad to have the ME fix my problem and cover my ass for me ;). If it's the latter, I'll wonder just where that creative line is supposed to be. I'm curious to how the MEs feel about all that. (C'mon, let me have it, guys! :D)

G.
 
Yea, it seems to me that handing an ME the individual tracks (tracks being considered seperate parts of a song here), or "stems" would be asking them, in a sense, to mix your song for you. I'm assuming an ME would go ahead and balance the song a little further with volume and pan settings that would be appropriate for how the ME plans on going about mastering the song in the long run, but would they go as far as processing individual tracks (used in the same context as above) with EQ, compression, etc. before even getting to the final stereo track mixdown? I mean how much work are clients asking the ME to do here?
 
Glenn -

IMHO it goes back to my previous statement "In general I prefer a great stereo mix over stems, but prefer stems over an imbalanced or questionable mix.".

A ME should NOT be acting as a producer or mixer, but just trying to get the best possible product. Usually it's the less experienced engineers that I request either a remix from, or stems.

The other situation is where I have a band that can't seem to make up their mind in regards to levels of the vocals or groups of intruments, and asking for 10 mixes of the same song becomes a bit onerous.

Raising a stem up or down a few db compared to the former would definitely be less of a cost issue.
 
RhythmRmixd said:
Yea, it seems to me that handing an ME the individual tracks (tracks being considered seperate parts of a song here), or "stems" would be asking them, in a sense, to mix your song for you. I'm assuming an ME would go ahead and balance the song a little further with volume and pan settings that would be appropriate for how the ME plans on going about mastering the song in the long run, but would they go as far as processing individual tracks (used in the same context as above) with EQ, compression, etc. before even getting to the final stereo track mixdown? I mean how much work are clients asking the ME to do here?
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Let's be clear, stems are submixes, not individual tracks. Worst case there might be drums, vocals, bass, guitars mixed in stereo. Pan settings would most likey not be adjusted, nor would things like reverb or delays be added.

I some cases nothing may be done at all but to just feed all of them back to a stereo pair and have a bit of editing done like a radio version of the song, or other "clean-up" processing like noise reduction.
 
I see. It would be much simpler to hand the ME maybe four or five submix stems as opposed to handing him the entire 16, 24 individual tracks recorded (obviously :D ) . It would then give the ME just enough flexibility to go a little further with the way he intends to master it, but only if need be.
 
masteringhouse said:
Well everyone has their preference. If you've ever tried mastering a mix with both sibilance on some tracks and dull tracks all mixed down into stereo, compared to having these tracks separated out and being able to work on them individually you'll see where I'm coming from.

In not about mixing at the mastering stage, at least as I see it.
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Again, I agree with Tom.
 
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