mastering

[ernstinen]

Hi Guys,I ALMOST turned my recording studio into a mastering house awhile ago, because I've done a lot of mastering and have the ears for it (pat on the back ). But the problem I ran into was the mixes people brought in were normally terrible. I'd be honest and recommend a re-mix rather than just take people's money. I'm also REALLY into mixing, and it was just too frustrating for me, so I gave up the idea.So it's basically down to the old adage: Crap in, crap out. I just spent a few weeks re-mastering some of my rock band stuff, and the tracks that sounded great originally needed very little in the mastering stage; the older stuff (when I was cutting my teeth on recording) took hours and hours to make it sound listenable! And I used every tool in my arsenal, believe me. If the original mix is bad, EQed completely wrong, overly compressed etc. it's VERY hard to make it sound like the competition.My 2 pesos,Ernesto

[gitarrero]

Quote:3 - in film/tv you have to be careful about mastering, since all the music will mastered by the film music editor (or some such person) and having 'mastered masters' can create problems. So we need to master our mixes enough to "sell" them to the listees, but not master them so much that they will cause an issue when used. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be well-mixed, of course. Hjust a little note here from my experience so far: it's true that some companies do their own mastering, so having the un-mastered finalmix is defenitly a good thing.having said that, the majority of tracks I've delivered to music libraries and directly to film editors were mastered by myself.but then again: mastering is not just "put a limiter on it and sqash it" - mastering is (if looked detailed on it) an art of it's own. I wouldn't say that I'm the "master of mastering" (..now is that a title..? ), but I'm able to do it well enough that my tracks play seemless between the "big" commercial recordings.however, I agree that - especially if one can't really do a great mastering - it's better to do only some soft "smoothing" instead of doing too much and make further mastering hard or even impossible.my 2 cents cheers,martin