Professional mastering on amateur products

[Jack Real]

Hi

I'm not a professional so my performance and mixes have issues. I would like to ask a professional to master two of my songs but I don't know if it will worth something or if it will just be a waist of time. Also, do you know if the mastering engineer will give me the list of operations that he performed (like compression setting, parametric filters applied, etc) ?

Thanks,

Jack Real.

 

[Hard2Hear]

A professional mastering engineer can really work magic on a basic mix. If you work on your levels to get an even blend, the ME can do something with it. At most studios you can see what they are using, and if asked I dont see why they wouldnt give you a list of what was applied, but any "settings" would be for a specific piece of gear and mostly useless to anyone else.

If you're mostly a musician rather than an engineer (like me) you may think about sending it to get mixed, too. I never do the final mixes on my own music now (the songs I need to sound really good anyways), and the sound is way better cause I have people mix who do nothing but mix all day all week. They're better and faster because thats their thing. And if you save it for like your 2 best songs on the album, it can be REALLY worth it to get it done, cost wise. Now, SOME people get offended when I suggest this, but its not a criticism of anyone...I have never even heard your work. I just know that I do it myself and it has really good results most times.
Just a thought to plant in your head.

H2H

 

[RD423]

Well let me help you with this right here first thing you need to do is keep working on your mixes and when you feel like you can't get it any better then send it off because you don't want to send a sloppy copy to a mastering engineer

 

[Jack Real]

Well let me help you with this right here first thing you need to do is keep working on your mixes and when you feel like you can't get it any better then send it off because you don't want to send a sloppy copy to a mastering engineer

Hi

The songs are mixed to the best of my capabilities but I'm sure a professional would see issues on those mixes.

/Jack Real.

 

[Massive Master]

“Who needs mastering? My answer is that if you record your own projects at home, you need mastering more than the producer who works with the top engineers in the top studios.”

Roger Nichols, Grammy Award® winning engineer
& columnist for EQ magazine.

Hardly more valid words spoken and I agree wholeheartedly. Most major studio work I do is strictly a quick polish and a volume tweak here and there. The home & project studio stuff is where the night & day differences come out. Of course, there are sometimes many directions to take a project when that is concerned, but those are things we work out.

TRUE, though - you want your mixes to be as polished as you can get them before sending them out. You want the mastering engineer's job to be "enhancement" as opposed to "correction" whenever possible. Taking a good, clean, clear sounding recording to its "maximum potential" is a far better thing than taking a poor quality recording and making it "less irritating."

 

[masteringhouse]

Hi

I'm not a professional so my performance and mixes have issues. I would like to ask a professional to master two of my songs but I don't know if it will worth something or if it will just be a waist of time. Also, do you know if the mastering engineer will give me the list of operations that he performed (like compression setting, parametric filters applied, etc) ?

Thanks,

Jack Real.

An ME can't fix a bad performance very much. If you're not sold on the performances I wouldn't spend the money to get it mastered (or to put it out at all). Personally I would rather hear a great perfomance with a less than stellar sonic quality than a medicore performance that has been mastered well.