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I'm just playing around here...I got one of those el cheapo PC multimedia microphones (fits around your ear and has a tiny boom extending to your mouth) because (1) it was only a few bucks, and (2) I'm toying with the idea of finding ways I can creatively use it as a talkback mic, that kind of stuff...

Those are some great points. For the project studio guy who's already mixed the songs, then applies some compression and limiting to their final mix before it hits CD, that can hardly be called mastering in the true sense of what professional mastering engineers do. I'm a producer, and I often end u...

Hey, I'm not discouraging anybody from trying mastering. I'm just saying: if he starts off the thread by saying, "I want to do my own mastering, I don't even know what mastering is, send me some links so I can learn," I say to him, "Go learn straight from the horse's mouth - go to someone who knows ...

Bob Katz web site -- digido.com

Bob Katz has a really good book on mastering.

Bobby Owsinski (sp?) also has a book on mastering, but I haven't read it.

Lee, honestly, it's not something you can learn just by following a few links. That's like asking us to teach you how to play the piano and us forwarding you links to pictures of a piano keyboard with all the keys labeled. Mastering is an art, and to do it right requires some expensive equipment (mo...

Most strongly recommended: take your mixes to a dang mastering engineer and watch what they do. Then if you think you can do the job, do it. But you won't learn just by saying, "I don't wanna go to a mastering engineer, I don't know what a mastering engineer does, I'm gonna do it myself!" Glad you d...

I don't usually mic the bottom of the snare unless it's the kind of song where the drummer's doing a lot of subtle stuff, e.g. jazz, ghost notes, etc. The bottom mic does well to capture some of the subtleties of the snare. If it's just straight-up rock banging, I've never really gotten much useful ...

It really is up to the talent of the ears behind the tools.

Waves is always excellent; I would also suggest the UAD card and/or the TC card, both of which would be excellent additions to a mastering tools palette.

Ikea is a super-cheap way to assemble furniture if you're budget-conscious. The stuff won't last forever, but it can look kinda cool. I had a local carpenter guy who looked at an Omnirax picture then made me an exact copy of the desk I like (with a few tweaks I asked for). It turned out to be 1/2 th...

My Mackie 824 has a woofer going bad. I've found places on the web where I can buy the Vifa woofer used in the 824 for pretty cheap (~$40). I'm not experienced at this stuff, but I'm willing to learn. I called Mackie and they sent me their take-apart guide. Unfortunately it's not a step-by-step - it...

[This is a partial repost -- as I've done more research I've learned more about what I'm looking for. Some of these questions are repeats, others are new ones -- sorry if you've read pieces of this before in other threads. I've now added more detail on what I think I'm looking for.] I'm a stereo-onl...

As a full-time producer and engineer of much of my own stuff, I've been seriously thinking about getting into surround. I've got some projects coming up next year that I might be able to go into surround for, so I'm debating adding the extra speakers to my current Mackie 824 setup. After looking at ...

So if I wanted to buy 6 new speakers, what recommendations would you guys have? I heard about the M-Audio ($500 price range, for all 6) but that's a little below what I was looking for. What's one or two steps above that? Maybe in the $1-2k range, but not as huge as the nearly $4k Blue Sky system th...

I'd like to expand my stereo-only studio to be able to handle 5.1 surround mixing. My software and interfaces already do it just fine, so I'm down to the monitors. My stereo monitors are HR824's, and I like them a lot. I know them well, so I can mix to them, and they're nice on the ear to listen to....

Any recommendations for the best way to remove mouth noises from a vocal track? I did some sessions with a child singer and never noticed it during tracking, but now that I'm mixing, man, there's a LOT of it. I've cut out the mouth noises between phrases, but there's still a lot of mouth noise *whil...