What do I leave up to the Mastering Engineer?

  • Thread starter Thread starter drpez
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drpez

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I am going to be done with mixing my band's album very soon and I'm lucky enough to be giving the final mixdown to world class mastering engineer when I'm done. I'm about 95% musician and 5% engineer so I'm trying to not to step on his toes, but not sure how not to. There's a couple of things that I've been wondering if I should do at all or if I should just leave it up to him. Such as:

1) Do I try and enhance the stereo imaging with the Waves S1 plugin?

2) Do I EQ/Compress the Master track?

If there's anything else anyone can add towards achieving the goal of giving him the most flexibility to make my tracks sound great, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
 
1 - definitely not, unless you use it on an individual track or two.
2 - probably not, unless you are absolutely sure that it is what you want.

Why don't you ask the person mastering it for you? They'd give you a much better answer than any "outsider". If you're a paying client, don't be afraid to ask questions.
 
You want to leave as little to the M.E. as possible - Give him a mix that you think is PERFECT.

Then, he/she can manipulate the mixes to sit well together, try to remove any anomalies that made it past the mixing stage (if there are any), take care of the "overall volume" issue that seems so important lately and finally, render a clean and compliant production master.

On the other parts - Stereo spread plugs are normally a kiss of death on the mix buss. But if certain parts of the mix benefit from judicious and conservative use of it, it's generally not a big problem. Mixing into a compressor certainly isn't evil - A dB or two of gain reduction to "gel the mix" a little can be a good thing. But do it for the mix's sake - Not for the sake of sheer volume... If there are anomalies in the mix (hiss, noise, steady-state video whine, etc.), they're much harder to deal with on a mix that's been compressed into "loudness."

*If in doubt* leave it off. If you're sure about it, throw it on. If you need to, you can always submit with/without mixes to the M.E.
 
drpez said:
1) Do I try and enhance the stereo imaging with the Waves S1 plugin?

2) Do I EQ/Compress the Master track?

If there's anything else anyone can add towards achieving the goal of giving him the most flexibility to make my tracks sound great, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Since you are lucky enough to be sending the tracks to a world class mastering engineer, the best thing to do in my opinion would be to leave them alone. Get the mix where you like it, and then don't do any more processing once you've mixed it down. The more "enhancing" you do to the track, the more "un-enhancing" the ME may have to do later.

Let the ME do the final eq and compressing/limiting, they are in a far better position to judge what to do and probably have far better gear to do it with. Get your mix where you want it, and then leave it alone.
 
I'm looking for a good compharasation before and after Mastering.

A MP3/wav before it was mastered and one after it was mastered
 
Are you going to be attending the mastering, or sending it out? If you're not going to be there, I 'd recommend sending two versions, one with absolutely nothing done to the stereo buss, and the other with some pre-mastering done. The second will give the ME an idea of what you're looking for, and the first will give him/her the clean slate to use the higher end tools on. Also, if there are budget/time considerations, the ME can choose where to put more time in......track 3 for instance may need a lot of attention and time, and track 5 may sound pretty darn good to the ME with the treatment you gave it, requiring just an EQ tweak. In any case, start with the best sounding mix you can send to the unadultered stereo buss.

Cheers,
RD
 
Thanks for all of your help guys. It's very much appreciated.
 
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