questions from a 'newbie' to mastering (well, kinda newbie)

[:prime-rate:]

So i've recently gotten into mastering some of the projects i've recorded for friends that don't want to pay to get them mastered by other people (they come back to me cause i don't charge much...)

Im familiar with the general principles of mastering, i.e. what the purpose is and how to make tracks sound like a record and all that, but i was wondering if any of you vets have any specific tips/rules of thumb for mastering both rock and jazz projects.

i know it's more about the ear than anything, especially mastering - but what's typical for compression and limiting settings for a loud rock recording? Is it ok to compress the signal and then limit? (that's what i've been doing and it seems to work sometimes...) And do people still use extra reverb on the master in this day and age? I've worked in a couple of great professional studios but i've never actually watched/heard anyone master a project, exept myself. i have plenty of experience tracking and mixing, but this mastering thing has got my panties in a twist...

I realize after writing this post that these are ridiculous questions, and that it all depends on the final mix, project, target sound and so forth, but if you could throw me some words of wisdom i'd appreciate it. thanks.

[@?,*???&?]

First things first. Send them to Capitol Mastering at Capitol studios if budget is the reason they don't want someone else to do it. Tell Beatrice 323-871-5003 you'd like their after hours rate. Work with Mark Chalecki and attend the mastering session. You'll learn loads and you'll learn you'll never get the same level on your disc a real facility can give you. I'd never consider mastering myself unless I'd spent at least $50,000 or more on esoteric equipment, cable and sonic room treatment. Mastering engineers set-up exceptionally critical listening environments that expose anomalies in the music. Have you got a room such as that?

[tiger vomitt]

i know it's more about the ear than anything, especially mastering - but what's typical for compression and limiting settings for a loud rock recording?

sorry to give a weird answer, but really whatever sounds good (on as many playback systems as you can check it out on) should be fine. sometimes the typical limited to shit mastering job is what is called for. for even that can be ok as long as it sounds good to the peeps. btw, that's usually not the right approach

Is it ok to compress the signal and then limit? (that's what i've been doing and it seems to work sometimes...)

yes it is ok, and quite common too.

And do people still use extra reverb on the master in this day and age?

yes, occasionally.

now,

i am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong whatsoever about people futzing around with doing their own mastering. i dont know why some people get so insane about it. like the mere mention of it compells them to strike the potential masterer down with lightning or sumpin...dang!

is it the same as bringing to an ME that has the right tools and the right room? of course not. will a given person's mastering job, done at home, be able to compete with the big time dudes' work? no, probably not. would it be fun, educational and maybe even a little profitable for a person to experiment? hell yes!

go for it, have fun with it. and dont let anyone tell you otherwise. power to the people y'allz!!!


p.s., dont forget to use an L1 with the ceiling at -20 as the last stage in all of your masters.


peace,

pointy, oh wait im not pointy anymore, im tiger vomitt now oops

[@?,*???&?]

Prime-rate,

What's your digital clock source? Is everything being clocked individually or are you just using plugins?

[:prime-rate:]

i'm just using plugins

[soundguy]

IMO, this kind of thing is akin to waking up one day and deciding out of the blue to become a black belt Judo instructor having only just watched some kung fu movies. People spend their whole lives working up to being able to master records and it is absurd to talk about home mastering or whatever you want to call it, its not just something you go and do. People build rooms that cost more than their few pieces of gear which cost more than most control rooms...

That said, there is certainly nothing wrong with tweaking some mixes yourself, just turn the knob until it sounds good. For my dollar, mastering is all about letting some other guy deal with your mixes, some dude who has absurd experience doing it. Paying someone for anything short of that is not a really great way to spend money, its not like there is a shortange of mastering guys or anything.

Its kinda like, if you wanted to train as a Jedi Knight, who are yo gonna go to, Samuel L. or Yoda? You know Yoda's got the experience and he'll show you the way. Samuel L. just has a wallet that says Bad Motherfucker on it, and really, what Jedi was ever impressed with that cowboy bullshit?

If you are gonna "master" at home, turn the knob till it sounds good. If you want your record mastered, expect to pay a heralded guru to do it.

Realize that Americans have this awful disease, and really, my generation is really on the cusp of it. At some point, manufacturers were able to convince the american public that since the once very expensive technology that only technicians were qualified to operate was now affordable for the average middle class consumer, all of a sudden, that technician became a trivial thing. Well, you see, the resolution of this camera is so high, its (ahem) professional! so your pictures will be just like the pro's. A camera does not make a picture, light does, but kudos for removing the photographer from the situation. this has happend with digital video cameras in the motion picture industry, this has taken over recording studios as so many places have gone from one stop shopping to having to accomodate whatever tracks were recorded at home, etc. And now mastering. Sure, you have the same computer that can do the same things. Thats fantastic. The ME has 20 years of experience and this guys resume has platinum records all over it. THAT is what its about. I can buy a brush, but I'd do a terrible job of painting a house, let alone a picasso.

I dont think people freak out about this, its just that once upon a time we relied on technicians to do a very techinical thing and now that the masses can afford the same tools, there is just no respect for the art or experience involved, and its a shame.



dave

[tiger vomitt]

i agree. i think we need a new name for dudes who do further work on their own mixes as stereo entities. it's not usually really "mastering" and it's kind of a bad frame of mind to be thinking of it as such (because what real ME's do is different and more advanced). but like we both said there is nothing wrong whatsoever about people doing further work on their own mixes. i think it's a smart thing to do even. i'll leave the nomenclature to someone smarter than me who gives a shitt? haha

as far as the judo analogy goes, you missed something. it's not at all like deciding to be a judo master after watching some kung fu movies (wouldnt you want to be a kung fu master after watching that anyway? besides, the japanese usually get their butts kicked in those movies). it's like deciding to be a judo STUDENT, even if it means reading some manuals to get you started cuz there's no dojo in your town or you dont have money for judo lessons.

and even further, if i decided to be a master at judo, the way to start is by.....starting (to sort of quote GTA vice city radio). so i gotta say dave, that was a pretty weak analogy. !

[markpar]

Once again, Dave, you've hit the nail squarely on the head. I had a very long conversation with someone at work about why he should have his project mastered. He kept saying, "but the mastering engineer just does a little EQ and some volume leveling. I have plugins that do that."

"Yeah," I said, "but he knows where to put the EQ and how much to compress. Also, his listening room probably cost more than my house, before gear."

-mark

[jimbo]

i'm not disputing the work that an ME does. i'm not trivializing it, or downplaying it. these guys have the golden ears and that's that. BUT...there is a huge thing that everyone seems to be missing: money.

unfortunately there are alot of incredible musicians out there - unique, original, geniuses if i may say (tho i haven't come across too many myself) - but alot of these people, who are often young, don't have the money to go to a mastering engineer. it's the reason alot of people do the home recording thing and the home mastering thing. for people like this, it's either a semi-pro product done for cheap or free (if you have nice friends) or no product at all.

now i can just imagine all the replies to this: "anyone can save money if it was that important", "not all ME's are expensive", "they may not have money, but then they shouldn't get involved because they need to have respect for the process", etc etc etc.

soundguy, i understand yr stance on the decline of the american work ethic, trivializing such hard earned skills and professions. i agree to a point. there's some people who take advantage and will take these new advancements, not pay attention to the hard work of the past, start a business, charge top dollar and put the good guys out of business. (same with the chain stores vs. mom & pop's). but then there's some people who take this readily available technology, and use it like a true artist. it's a tool, yes a new tool, but still a tool and in the right hands it can be used for good. maybe not the same good that mastering is "supposed" to be, but what good is the advancement of art if we can't push or erase certain boundaries.

since we're on analogies, here's mine. back in the day (i mean waaaay back - like 1920's), if you couldn't write, compose and perfectly play a peice, you were not allowed to call yrself a musician. nowadays, we have people who can't read a note and can't play their instruments properly (by "pro" standards) who are creating music that touches and inspires millions of people (sonic youth guitars, velvet underground drums, stephen merrit vocals, etc.). it's a snobbery of the past that eventually gave way to expand the borders of what we call music. one (or hopefully many) of these people using the home mastering tools will one day bring the music to a new level that we wouldn't have been able to think of if we stayed in a strict society of "has-to-be-mastered-by-an-ME".

please understand, i am not knocking ME's. it's a VALUABLE resource, but to tell people that not mastering with an ME is going to give them an inferior product is wrong to say on an artistic level - the end result is based soley on the opinion of the listener. yes, this is going to allow alot of crap to freely get out there, and there will be casualties, but it's ALWAYS been like that. as i said before, some kid with a $25 guitar and a cheap recording program and no money to spend on an AE, a studio, or an ME - he will have to work 1,000 times as hard to make a good product, and sometimes a great product, and even sometimes a pure masterpeice. i would hate to keep him from doing that by telling him he's not doing it "correctly" by not doing it "pro".

i can sense that alot of people's opinions on this subject comes from their overexposure to terribly crappy music. as i get older and am subjected to more and more of it (my label gets submissions on a weekly basis that really take the cake), it gets harder and harder for me not to become jaded and generalize. there is good music out there. just harder to find. i hope that everyone could hold out a little hope for stuff like that.

just my 2cents (actually $2 judging by the length of this post).
-jimbo

[Verboten]

...And then there's the flip side to using the mastering gear as an artistic tool: The times when a perfectly good recording is ruined by piss-poor mastering. A good friend of mine decided not to go with a pro mastering job on his bands' recent recording - I heard the original mixes pre-"mastering" and just heard the "mastered" version. The difference is incredible! Whoever "mastered" this recording (for a case of beer, apparently) totally butchered the material. It's totally unlistenable.

When I record bands, and they ask me to master (and they almost always do, 'cuz I'm pretty cheap) I always say no - for fear of ruining their product. Plus, I give and get business from referring folks to local mastering engineers (pros) and that doesn't suck.

Having said that - I agree with the idea of using tools for artistic gain, but when dealing with someone else's art, I'd rather not screw it up.

[rich]

i tend to take verbotens route as well. mastering is somthing i would NEVER NEVER do in my studio. i have neither the room, the gear, or frankly the knowledge to do what needs to be done to an album thats being mastered.
after almost every project i do i give the band a list of some mastering options. some cheap some not. they then ask "why do i need to do that, thats just more money. the album sounds fine." i then must coerce the band into sending it to a mastering engineer. from now on ill just sit em down and make em read this thread here.

[I'm Painting Again]

Listen to Jimbo..

[soundguy]

Ultimately, this all comes down to business. If you have invested time and money into a recording which you hope to sell, or at the very least impress audiences enough to book your gigs or (gasp) buy the record or offer to put you under contract as a recording artist, paying the money for a top notch ME to handle your work is nothing more than an insurance policy on your product. If you've done that, you know that you've done all that you can do and however the cards fall is where they fall.

The main reason why independant films dont sell is because of terrible sound. I was once hired to do a dialogue edit on a feature film and with their low budget was forced to cut an entire reel per day. I had cut their entire movie in 5 days, and of course, the sound edit was for shit, for sure. This poor moron had invested almost $600K into the production of his movie and budgeted merely $10K for post sound, which is just moronic. You might as well throw your money away if you are going to finish your $600K gem in the rough with a $10K turd polishing session.

Mastering a record is none different. If your record doesnt sound like a record, its not going to be taken seriously. Even if you havent spent a lot of money on your record, it still is hard to argue the dollars. Say you find the best guy out there for $2k. You are pressing 1000 CD's, which can be done now for about $1200 and still look nice. Your cost per CD, with THE BOMB mastering is now $3.20. You can easily sell your CD for $5 at shows and if you have your own label, some distributors will give you over $7 for each record they sell. If it is actually MASTERED and not simply tweaked in your friends computer because it was cheap, you have a chance of selling many more copies of your record. someone tell me that spending $2k on mastering is too much to spend. Taking that to the bank, the amount of great mastering engineers available for half that rate is no short list, Im sure.

Mastering fees should completely be factored in as a line item in your budgets for finishing costs. I mean, do some history kids. When they had these things called records, mastering was the process of cutting your laquers so stampers could be made to reproduce your vinyl. These were highly trained dudes doing this job. Now that CD's are the standard, the bandwith greater, so mastering isnt nearly as critical in the world of physics as cutting vinyl masters was, but jeesh, when did this job become some trivial step in the process that just anyone is going to do? I have a home studio, and Im a huge proponent of DIY in a scary proportion, but some things just need to go through the proper channels in this world if we have any sake of preserving standards.

Granted, not every record sounds good enough to warrant that kind of investment and surely, if you arent planning on even a semi pro release, the thing doesnt need great mastering in the first place. But the whole line about it costing money is a little absurd, frankly. For a tolerable amount of money, you can hire, literally, the best engineers on planet earth to work on your indie release. Its just one day of work. People should get excited to have their work handled by a professional. Instead, you get this indie creed of "I beat the system and got cheap mastering on my friends computer" to which, well, no comment.

I would officially say to people that if their recording isnt worth spending $1k on mastering costs, I wouldnt bother mastering it in the first place. For the job that you are gonna get for $200, you might as well just buy the plugin yourself and learn how to use it. No engineer who confidently works mastering records is going to answer the phone for $200, better to spend your money on a plugin and some starbucks and do an allnighter figuring it out yourself.

dave

[jimbo]

but some things just need to go through the proper channels in this world if we have any sake of preserving standards.

ahh, but that's exactly my point - if you choose to follow the standards, then $2k on mastering is necessary. but not everyone in this world wants to follow standards - that's kind of the point of progression.
like you said, it comes down to business - but some people aren't in this for business, they're in it for art/music/expression. there's no "standard" price tag or process for that. it's all up to the artist - the tools they have, how they use them, how they apply the history of past works, who they collaborate with (if any) and how the vision of the project is actualized.
i kinda thought that's what tape-op was all about. i remember getting that tape-op book for the first time (that "best of the early issues" thing), and saying to myself "wow, here's some bands using whatever they have to express themselves and there's no uppity 'professional' telling them it's wrong."
i don't know about anyone else, but $2k doesn't grow on trees. that's alot of bread for some people, sure is for me. yr telling me that they just aren't doing it right if they don't have that money to spend? i'm sorry but that's not fair. i understand AE's and ME's taking pride in their work, they should, and preaching the values of their incredibly intricate process is the best way to preserve the process. but there's other ways to do things. back in the day, as you said soundguy, ME's were necessary for cutting records. now there are cd's, that don't necessarily need that - that's an advancement in my opinion. yes, there's always the moron who just decided he liked music yesterday, downloaded the (cracked) program this morning, read the manual this afternoon, and offered to record his friend's opus for $300 - it'll probably come out like shit, and it takes business away from you. and that's an example of the bad part of this situation that we both can agree on (i hope). but what about the other guys? the good ones? the ones who spend years and lifetimes devoting themselves to taking this medium to the next step by learning the rules and then breaking them? or the ones who have a burst of genious that needs to come out one way or another? generalizing is the wrong way to go on this one. because as any good engineer will say, eventually it all comes down to the song. if it's a good song, it could be recorded on a stick mic and mastered with the recording level control on yr tape deck, and it'll still move people.
this is art, and anything goes - how good it is is up for opinion. otherwise it's business, and how good it is is how much money you spent doing it the right way. i prefer the former.
and please understand i'm not being an obnoxious prick, i'm just trying to offer another side of the coin.
-jimbo

[NewYorkDave]

I "master" my own, but mine are really just homemade demos that won't reach much of an audience outside of my friends.

I "master" on the computer, and I take the following conservative approach. I use the hard limiter in Cool Edit Pro. I increase the gain only until I start noticing a difference. Then I back it off. I try to keep my clipped sample percentage below 1/10 of 1%. I've found this is a good way to make the material louder without fucking with the dynamics. I'm not a fan of compression on the mix, although I have had good luck with the Ultrafunk multiband compressor plugin when used very conservatively. It's easy to go overboard and turn your mix into squashed crap that sounds like it's straight off the local "rock" FM station. You mustn't allow yourself to be seduced by the instant gratification of MORE VOLUME. Frequent reality checks against the original mix, and ear breaks, are a must.

Most rock mixes seem to benefit from a bit of cut around 250-350Hz. This is a region that muddies up quickly. If you find yourself tempted to turn up treble frequencies, try a low-mid cut first and you might be surprised.

Check your product on anything and everything available to you. If your mix seems to need a lot of tweaking at the mastering stage, then it's probably time to remix. And if it's a really important project, then do consider ponying up the bucks to have a pro do it. There's nothing wrong with trying to learn the art yourself, but choose the projects carefully. Don't put yourself in a position where anyone could accuse you of "ruining" their record.