Does anyone know of anyone who teaches/tutors mixing/mastering relatively cheap? I watch a lot of videos and tutorials, even some that are freebie giveaway tutorial series and they don’t really seem to help much since they are never in the same genre, and the track that they give you to start out with usually sounds better than what I start and end with. All of the online courses in my google search are all $1000+ which I can’t spend and I dont think I would need a 12 week course anyway.
Although I do learn a from every track I do, it seems that my masters all end up sounding duller and quieter in comparison to what I listen to.
I think what I really need is someone to take a look into the projects of a couple of my tracks and see what I’m doing wrong, or what I should be doing.
not sure where you live, but you can probably find a mastering house or an engineer willing to give you some tips during a session (for a fee of course)
as a music producer, I’d suggest to fully rid your mind of learning to “master” on your own. Its not something you need to make music, and its not something you really even need to make music sound ‘good’. Mixing down on the other hand is absolutely crucial.
My advice is to find a mastering engineer who is geographically close to you, and ask if he minds you sitting in with him when he’s mastering some of your tracks (which you’ll pay him for, obviously)
That way you get a quick session on what he’s doing to your tracks, how it affects the sounds, what he uses etc.
Pretty much this. If you nail your mixes your tunes will be 90-95% of the way there. I am very willing to listen to good, unmastered music by independant artists.
Yea I’m like 90% sure its my mixdown, but I’m not going to rule out the possibility of me fucking it up trying to master it. I have some of my tracks on splice.com. The last one I did i have the original project up on splice instead of the stems if you want to look/listen, although its not the final mixdown, since i have been bouncing the stems and mixing/mastering from there, but you can compare it with the bounce i have up there I guess.
you edited out half your post but you also said some other stupid shit that basically amounted to “oh just slap a multiband comp on there and its mastered”
swear 2 god americans are universally brainwashed with the notion “but opinions cant be wrong!”. you might subjectively think mastering isnt worth your money but, regardless, that opinion is objectively wrong - there wouldnt be an industry and a profession for it if any idiot could do it himself at home
What you’re probably doing wrong is using digital effects which sound like utter shit.
Vast understatement.
Finally somebody else said it. Are you really going to break even by increasing your sales when you pay $50-$100 for somebody else’s mastering instead of doing yourself for free?
I’m Australian and even I recognise the basic fact that ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are antonymous. Or is my “opinion” here incorrect as well?
That’s because people are brainwashed into falsely believing that effects on the master are hugely important to the quality of the art and that even if you can mixdown well, mastering is too difficult for anybody who is not a specialist. Mastering engineers literally are idiots doing it themselves at home. Psychics are full of fucking shit, but there still exists an associated “industry.” If mastering engineers were so good at making music sound good, they’d be making the beats themselves. In order for them to warrant charging you, they must do a lot or else you would appreciate that you could very easily add a 1.5 ratio compressor with 1-2db gain reduction on the mid and side channels yourself. The $100 you spend on mastering could have bought you an analogue compressor. You don’t even need stereo compression because the left and right of the side channel are exact inverses. You don’t need anything else because you have access to the individual tracks. It is a fundamentally held aesthetic principle that ‘less is more,’ so you’re really just paying someone to fuck your music. At some point you have to call fraud.
i’m pretty sure you’re trolling but if not then wow
when did the topic of sales/money become relevant in this thread about a guy wanting to learn how to master shit?
totally irrelevant point.
i’m guessing you once paid a crappy mastering engineer to master a crappy beat you made and then got butthurt when it didn’t come back sounding amazing or something, i dunno, but don’t try and discredit the profession.
if you’re genuinely not trolling then please, show us some proof to back up what you’re saying. show us how good you are at mastering your own music or whatever point you’re trying to make. right now, as it stands, there’s like 100 years and probably 100,000s of albums worth of proof that mastering is important.