the gentle art of mastering

[Stanley Pain]

i've just found out the cost of mastering. i know it's an art and all that, and i have the utmost respect for good mastering engineers/studios, having heard friends albums before and after. but wow. HOW much?

ok, let's assume that my first album is going to be "banging". i want the levels high, i want it mastered well.

speaking to a friend on one of THE major labels who had his first album mastered 3 times in 3 different studios on 2 different continents, he told me "do it yourself".

i don't know if it was just him being a teensy bit bitter at having forked out x amount of cash to be recouped at a later date or whether he genuinely thought i was capable of doing it myself.

i have kind of mastered stuff i've done and certainly made it sound better, but this is without using multi-band compression because:
a) i wouldn't know what multi-band compressor plugin to use.
b) i don't trust myself with a multi-band compressor in any context other than the creative.

i've simply used waves L1 ultramaximiser.

what are your thoughts on mastering what will effectively be an independently released dance/disco/new romantic/electro album?

would it be cute to have it mastered on the cheap, perhaps add to it's indie appeal

or

get it done by the pros and let it become by far the costliest part of the entire process

?

feel free to roam from technical to ethical advice
x x x x

[Yorky]

If you load the 'source' wav file into Acid as a 'track'
you can the have as many 'mastering' plugins as you like
(Waves is a good set)
but the beauty is that you can individually tweek them
and what's more as the track progresses

What I mean is, you can changes amounts of whatever
up and down in different parts of the track, so the amount
of each mastering 'effect' can change during the track.

More, you can render then listen to it, if it's not right,
go in and micro-adjust parameters etc etc here and there

Of course you can save the settings in a file.
And if you don't like it, start over.

Try that with hardware.

[opg]

I have those Waves plugins as well as T-Racks, and I'm still debating over what to use and how. Right now, I build a song by getting the drums as beefy as I want them, the synths as warm as I want, and then add a limiter and a simple EQ to roll off anything below 30Hz or so. If it sounds like I want when I'm working on it, I won't have so much of that big grey mastering cloud hanging over my head.

This kind of mindset can hamper my creativity sometimes, however. I can spend too much time deciding between two overdrive/saturating plugins (I try to use as few plugins as possible) and worrying about the current sound as if it is already mastered that I don't get anywhere with the song.

I used to be obsessed with mastering, but this is what I've learned so far (not that I have that much experience):

1. Yes, look at your song's waveform and see what's going on. Sometimes the bass is too loud and I will go back and fix those spikes instead of fretting over complex multiband compressor settings. In fact, a simple view on a spectrogram (VoxengoSPAN is a great plugin for this) helps me out while I'm actually working on the song.

2. Mastering is about volume/EQ from track to track just as much as it is final touches on individual songs, right? Well, that's why I get in those little routines of the limiter and the bass roll-off and the same saturation/delay plugins. It decreases the amount of variables that you feel you have to control when it comes time for mastering.

3. Do that thing where you listen to your songs on every time of speaker/headphone/stereo/computer possible. That's my favorite part!

4. I think comparing your volume levels to other people's CDs isn't always good. If you really like what you hear on every speaker setup, then all you really need to do is make sure the songs' waveforms are all at the same level with no spikes above that level. If you put on your CD and then you listen to someone else's CD and it's a lot louder, who cares? There's a volume knob on the stereo! This is something I think about now at least to get me to stop focusing on "is my CD professional enough?" If you go from a Korn CD to Shostakovich, you're going to have to turn the volume up. Is this a good way of thinking about it?

[Stanley Pain]

i appreciate what you're saying opg, but i'm talking purely about mastering.
i don't have any concerns with how my production sounds.

but when it costs you £10,000 to have your tracks mastered you have to ask yourself "is it worth it"?

surely there must be something in it if it costs that much? but what?

i simply haven't worried about saturation and all that mess. i've produced an album with the dynamics and equalisation and levels that please me and i haven't played into the whole "loudness wars" as i've heard some producers refer to them.

there was an interesting article in sound on sound last issue (i think it was the one with "bass" on the front cover) with an R'n'B mix engineer who complained about singers/artists wanting more saturation because that's how they heard it through the radio.

i'm not concerned with that. i'm concerned with mastering stuff properly for vinyl and CD, and for vinyl especially i'm wondering just how much bass stereo detail do i take off, how are the songs going to fit on each side of the record, do i go for a 4 side LP, how are the dynamics going to work when they reach the inside groove etc etc...

i'm sure i could do it, but it's a question of how well. the person who mastered Prince's "musicology" onto vinyl should be shot in the head. it's literally a disgrace and still pains me to this day. they used the same mast er they did for the CD. big mistake. i might even rip the vinyl to mp3 just to demonstrate how wrong mastering can go.

[opg]

Yeah, sorry for my rant, but WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA Now you're talking about vinyl? See, that word scares the crap out of me.

First, are you planning on mass-producing an album on vinyl? Because that alone would be expensive. Second, I wouldn't touch mastering for vinyl with a ten foot pole, but you're right - £10,000 seems like too much. However, I thought £10,000 would be how much it would cost to have the albums made (depending on the quantity).

Yeah, that's a tough call, because you can still get a demo vinyl press on acetate or whatever before you pay for actual vinyl copies, but it's still gotta be mastered first. I knew about the bass issues, but "dynamics on the inside groove" is something I never would have thought about.

Wait - one question - would this mastering engineer charge the same for a CD than for vinyl?

Again, sorry for the rant before

[Stanley Pain]

it wasn't a rant dude or at least i didn't read it that way!
although i say i'm not concerned with my production, obviously i am, but it's a little off topic to be talking (or ranting) about that.

my releases will be cross media. vinyl, cd, download etc.

[Stanley Pain]

[opg]

How much does your lawyer charge?

[BobTheDog]

You could buy some books and do some reading.

Bob Katz "Mastering Audio - the art and the science" is a pretty good read.

"The mixing engineers handbook' by Bobby Owsinski is interesting with interviews from top engineers.

Also "Production mixing mastering with waves" by Anthony Egizii is good, comes with demo version of the waves plugins and 6 projects on disk for the main daws and is a pretty good tutorial.


After reading all these and trying it out you will probably appreciate why they charge so much

Cheers

Andy

[Stanley Pain]

[BobTheDog]

[Stanley Pain]

this tends to be my first stop these days for tech related issues. most of the tech heads i know are into PAs.

[memedesigner]

10k in any major western currency is way, way over. Except if you are mastering, say, Wagner's Ring or similar production. It's a service, billed by the hour, or equivalent.

[Kassen]

[Stanley Pain]

i've been contacted by a high end mastering house, probably one of the most famous in the world and they have filled me in on the price of the process and it's a *lot* less than i thought. i don't think i'd want to do it myself but would love to sit in on the process.

thanks for all your comments.

[Kassen]

Wether or not youi'll be alowed to sit in on it will depend greatly on the engineer and what is to be done.

In the process described above it'd generally take a hour or so per record and the files delivered didn't have any serious problems. If that's the case it's very striaghtforward and mastering comes to equate roughly to "the way you cut it to the record".

I've also done some mastering myself and at times gotten files that led me to severely curse the creator. In situations like that inordinate amount of times will need to be spend to get something to sound good and while I'm generally quite fond of the people that had send those files I wouldn't have wanted them to be there.

Anyway, this new plan sounds good to me. Next step then, regardless of wether you'll be there, is writing instructions. Writing instructions serves two purposes. For one thing it shows that you care about the job to be done and don't considder it a formality to be performed by some anonimous grunt. This can greatly improve what you get. For another it allows you to affect how it's done.

I strongly feel that you should instruct him not to go "as loud as possible" but instead "as beautifull as possible at a apropriate volume" or something to that effect. It's also a good idea to mention similar records that you feel sound good.

[Stanley Pain]

[Kassen]

[Stanley Pain]

[Kassen]

You only want to get one track mastered?

If that track is going to be in a larger context (say a compilation) then I'd definately talk about this with how-ever is in charge of that context. Once something is mastered it's MUCH harder to deal with should that overall context need to be coherent (and likely it will).

[Stanley Pain]

[Kassen]

Ah, ok. that needn't be a big issue, depending on the tracks in question and the order they are in, but those can be tricky ones if next to super-hi-fi carefully planned out ones.

[Stanley Pain]