Mixing and mastering instuction?

Production
21

Please never guess.

A characteristic of the person making the argument does not validate nor invalid the argument. These are both common fallacies called ad and pro hominem. Look them up.

The existence of something has never been evidence of its value.
What about the far more vast in comparison amount of music that has been heard and enjoyed without electronic effects on the entire sound? Or the fact that record labels don’t take mastering into account when deciding what to release? Or the lack of evidence that outsourcing mastering makes the difference between a top 40 hit and a flop?

I’m trying to help prevent you from blowing your money. Donate it to charity instead.

Something that I have always found very distressing are fallacies presented as quote-unquote “sound arguments.”

So please stop.

22

u a politician ?

23

Only in my head.

1 BigUp
24

you agree with what i said, but i don’t agree with what you said.

Mastering is a big deal imo but its a different part of the process. You can get a tune sounding real good from a good mixdown. A good ME will make that tune shine and also a good ME will simply tell you that your mix is poor and needs work if your mix isn’t ready for polish. Especially crucial when it comes to mixing/mastering for vinyl. My original point was too, that a producer should not worry about mastering because A. a good ME has years and years of experience on many different styles of music B. when its your tune you cannot make accurate judgements on what needs to be changed, you are too close to it, heard it too many times, and will never be able to make the adjustments of a trained outsider.

So, we are in partial agreement, but as you said mastering is pointless. I cannot agree with you fully

25

Can you point to a top 40 track that wasn’t mastered by a third party specialist? Mastering won’t make a terrible song a good one, but it is an important element in making sure things are presented in their best possible light. They are also the last quality control check that any mix will get before it’s committed to release. A ME (a real one at least, not the 15 year old in their parents basement) will be working on very high end speakers in a very well treated room that they know very very well. They WILL hear things in your mix that you don’t. If your DAC’s don’t cost more than most PC’s they probably aren’t up to snuff for mastering. Also most professional ME’s have signal chains that cost upwards of $10k for a modest setup for the analog processing outside of top shelf monitoring and conversion. There is a reason why they use analog when it’s the right choice over an equivalent plugin. DSP will only get you so far. But the most important reason to hire a third party specialist for mastering is that they have the experience of working on hundreds of commercially released albums and singles. They know from experience what works and what doesn’t for any given genre and will apply the tools that are appropriate for any given task or problem (and the experience to use only what is needed, not everything in their arsenal).

It doesn’t help that at least 90% of EDM is mastered very poorly with 0 dynamics and slammed brick wall limiters, with lots of misinformation out there on how to master. The fact that so many people think multi band compression is required for mastering proves this. Multi band is reached for as an absolute last resort to solve very specific problems in bad mixes because of the artifacts created at the crossover frequencies are far from transparent. Even then, it’s rare to use more than one or two bands of processing. Also the splitting and re-summing of the signal creates tonnes of intersample peaks if the signal is even within -3dBfs, so you wind up having to do much heavier limiting than you would otherwise. I can guarantee you that a track with -10dBfs+3 RMS will sound much bigger and punchier on a large sound system than a track that is slammed to -6 or higher like you see in so many releases. Plus, many digital streaming services are already implementing equal loudness algorithms throughout their catalogue so needlessly ruining the impact of your music for the sake of loudness is now a really bad idea. Whether or not mastering is worth it to you says more about your confidence in the commercial viability of your work. Will spending the minimum $500 ($150 is in the slap an izotope ozone preset on it league) to get your album properly mastered and presented in it’s best possible light make the difference between good tracks and bad tracks? No. But it may make a somewhat amateurish mix sound relatively viable so that people don’t turn it off or skip it after 30 seconds. If your mixes are already viable, then you probably already understand the value of what a ME will bring to the table.

2 Likes
26

This nonsensical ramble got two likes? Holy shit DSF.

Can you think of a tune that went through outsourced mastering that was not a hit?

Then get better at making tunes for free.

It’s not about how big it is, it’s how you use it.

You could choose to not use their equipment for free.

Then why aren’t they known musicians? You’re a specialist in your style. Jack-of-all-trades? Master of none.

Thanks Captain Obvious for your excessively long, irrelevant and well-known statement that loudness is shit. You could choose to not increase the loudness yourself for free.

Quality is not the same thing as commercial viability or else MTV would play good music instead of that “commercially viable,” “well mastered” shit it pays royalties for. The reality is that nobody is buying my music, so why would I have the over-confidence in its commercial viability? Are you telling me that you are so “confident” in the commercial viability of your music that you spend $500 on mastering an album because you’re selling so many copies that the imaginary 0.001% difference in sales will total $500? Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Here.

I meant per track when I wrote $50-100, not per album.

Then don’t pay for it. You can get better at making tracks for free.

You can’t fix a bad mix in mastering. You can, however, get feedback on your mix and get better at mixing for free.

If your mixes are good, then there will be nothing for the ME to fix as per your previous statement and if you are good at mixing down then you will be very good at mastering as it is much easier.

I win. Don’t blow your money nor fund snake-oil salesmen, please.

27

Yay! You win all the internets.

Of course not everything that is professionally mastered is a smash hit. That’s absurd. The popularity of a track has to do with so much more than sound quality.

No mastering can’t fix a bad mix, it can only mitigate the problems.

Perfect mixes often don’t need much more than a fraction of a dB of limiting. But good mixes are a lot more common than perfect mixes. And mediocre mixes are far more common than that.

Well known mastering engineers most often are not people you would know for their music, because it is a highly specialized skill set that they have chosen to dedicate their professional life to.

As far as MTV, I don’t think they’ve played music videos for well over a decade, and top 40 shit is probably the worst offenders in terms of loud mastering. I said commercially viable when I should have said something eloquent about what your music is worth to you. If you have never released any music, it probably isn’t worth paying someone else to master it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to the OP. But beyond the amatuer scene, aka when people actually pay you for your music (doesn’t mean they are selling 100,000+ units and they don’t need a day job) then yes, mastering often makes a difference in the sound quality. That sound quality may not translate into more sale’s but it will improve the end product none the less, and if you care enough about your art and want it to be the best it can be, a second set of ears in a different room and different speakers can optimize a good mix and help minimize many of the problems of a less than perfect mix.

I won’t agree that the loudness is shit paradigm is self-evident until I start seeing that reflected in the majority of commercial releases. The choice to make it overly loud almost always comes down to the insecure artist/label wanting their shit to slam as hard as everyone else, not the ME, who is usually arguing for a more dynamic and impactful version.

Also, i don’t know what analog compressor you are gonna get for $100, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to use that for mastering either.

28

Also, of course you can always get better at mixing and production for free, and you should never look at mastering as a mystical process that will magically transform a track that isn’t fit for release into one that is. Mastering is an entirely seperate process from mixing, and the quality going in is reflected in the quality coming out.

If you are making tracks that only your friends and a few interweb randoms are gonna hear then DIY mastering is probably the right choice, and it will teach you a lot about headroom and gain staging.

I’m not advocating mastering as a shortcut to avoid learning how to make your mixes sound how you want them to sound. But saying that it is snake oil is really only aplicable at the hobbiest end of the spectrum.

29

so much stupidity in this thread from mr. “what’s an 808?” xero & mr. “buy an analogue compressor for $100” thelonious_punk / black_cockatoo, wow.

1 BigUp
30

Why would you do that? In the evaluation of art, there is no such thing as perfect.

If it’s so profitable and something you know so much about, why don’t you do it yourself?

They still play a Top 40 and there are other stations that play popular music videos like Channel V.

Yet it remains popular.

If it’s worth a lot to you, you would want to do the work yourself and not sacrifice the opportunity to partake in something you enjoy, that is the act of making music that you like the sound of. If its worth to you means that you should outsource it, why don’t you outsource mastering engineers and ghost writers while you’re at it? The answer is because that would undermine the point of pursuing music: To partake in something you enjoy doing. If you have to pay somebody to do something which becomes easier when your mixdowns are better, that would demonstrate a lack of confidence in your own mixdown and mastering abilities.

You’re comparing the outsourced mastering against the unmastered version, not your own mastering. If you can create mixdowns that people are happy to pay for, you can very easily handle mastering. You yourself said that at that point mastering requires very little.

Subjective.

I’ve already stated that you can get feedback on your mix for free.

It’s not self-evident; there’s plenty of evidence of it. Here’s a starting point:

I got my Boss RCL-10 for A$100 which I’m very happy with. You haven’t heard it, so don’t try to comment on its quality. I have previously stated, and we did agree, that quality and commercial viability, in this case price, are two separate properties.

I’ve already stated that it’s not how big it is but how you use it, or would you care to explain how that is incorrect? Even if that were true, you could invest the US$500 you allegedly spend on mastering instead on a compressor under the belief that that difference when used in the appropriately subtle way will be audible, let alone five times better. If you’re not spending $500 on mastering an album to release commercially, which is what I suspect, then don’t preach what you don’t practice and as I previously stated: Please don’t guess.

You’re yet to provide any econometric evidence that outsourcing mastering is worth the money nor statistical evidence that outsourcing mastering results in a significant increase in perceived quality over the mix engineer’s own mastering and that the mix engineers or producers value that difference more than the money or equivalently priced gear and still have the burden of proof to demonstrate that it is true. You can’t take what the customers say as true because you have previously stated that they are too inept to be appropriate authorities on the topic and you can’t take what the MEs as true because they are profiting from people utilising their services.

Do you not recognise obvious similarities?

Who else?

Very easily and quickly learned by reading and was already very relevant to mixing.

As for 111, do you not recognise the lack of logic or as you put it “stupidity” in making a non-contributory and abusive post when I, or anybody else, can very easily flag it?

If you’re just going to present obviously incorrect arguments in order for me to take the effort of doing the thinking for you, then I am not benifiting from this debate and will choose to not continue as I have other things that I want to achieve in my life. It’s like pissing into the wind: I’m getting covered in my own piss.

That’s what toilets are for.

Feel free to inevitably get the last word in, then politely discontinue discussion and ultimately forget that this thread ever existed.

31

Well, actually I do do mastering for other people, on a near daily basis for a number of bands and electronic producers. Everything from complete unknown artists to projects that have been written up in the New York Times and people who play major American music festivals, so I’m not just talking out of my ass here.

Obviously, third party mastering isn’t for you. As you said previously, no one is paying you for your music yet, so it may be hard to justify spending the money on something that you won’t see a return on.

It’s rather presumptuous to assume that I haven’t heard something without knowing anything about me. I own a number of older boss racks (for mixing purposes). If you think that your Boss compressor gives you the same kind of euphonic sound enhancement and headroom as something like say a Rupert Neve Designs Master Bus Processor with its 72v power rails (144v swing from peak to peak), then good for you. But I think you will have a hard time finding any professionals that agree with that opinion.

In the professional audio world there is almost always a separate mixing engineer from a mastering engineer, because they realize that there is a clear difference in the skill sets required for both tasks. But you are obviously so much smarter than those clowns.

1 BigUp