To Master or not to Master????

[e2lovze]

I recently had a song forwarded (woohoo!) that had not been "mastered" by my engineer. It was noted that the recording was "broadcast quality". We are now wondering if we should even consider mastering any of the other material at all, given the expense and time. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Eric

[davewalton]

Quote:I recently had a song forwarded (woohoo!) that had not been "mastered" by my engineer. It was noted that the recording was "broadcast quality". We are now wondering if we should even consider mastering any of the other material at all, given the expense and time. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Eric A lot of us (including myself) do everything at home and so even though I might take some of the steps a real mastering engineer might take, I know I'm not really "mastering" my tracks, just sweetening them a little maybe. Besides, a library or publisher might want the tracks unmastered because they master them to their specs.Save the money, come to the Rally in November and buy dinner for the forum members. Dave

[nomiyah]

Quote:Save the money, come to the Rally in November and buy dinner for the forum members. DaveI'd like to make a Taxi Community Tshirt, I hear you're the Tshirt guy, Dave. What do you think, would Michael mind if we used the Taxi Community Logo at the top of the forum and put it in Cafepress? Not trying to make money just identify proud forum members at the Rally.

[davewalton]

Quote:Quote:Save the money, come to the Rally in November and buy dinner for the forum members. DaveI'd like to make a Taxi Community Tshirt, I hear you're the Tshirt guy, Dave. What do you think, would Michael mind if we used the Taxi Community Logo at the top of the forum and put it in Cafepress? Not trying to make money just identify proud forum members at the Rally.I only deal with the "Listen to Dave Walton" t-shirt sales. When I'm flat-out wrong or give inaccurate information, it's all I can do the keep the sales up until I redeem myself with a helpful post. Of course you'd have to ask Michael but my basic take is that I don't use logos or stuff (other people's) like that for anything other than maybe if I had a links page on my site (something I need to do), I would use a logo but only after asking first.

[triviul]

Quote:I recently had a song forwarded (woohoo!) that had not been "mastered" by my engineer. It was noted that the recording was "broadcast quality". We are now wondering if we should even consider mastering any of the other material at all, given the expense and time. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.Thanks, Eric I do a lot of work for a music technology mag, and we did a test where we sent out the same three tracks to five different high-profile UK mastering houses, then extensively blind-tested the results alongside the original unmastered tracks. What we found was that the subjective loudness differences between the tracks were far and away the most important differences between them. When lined up for subjective loudness the quality differences were very very small indeed. In the light of this, I've always tried to make sure I put out everything I do as loud as I can. (Now this isn't a diss at mastering engineers, but the place they really earn their money, in my opinion, is in making multi-contributor albums sound consistent and in preparing proper masters for duplication.) If you want some of my ideas on increasing loudness, try http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may07/a ... htmHowever, it is just as important to ALWAYS KEEP AN UNMASTERED BACKUP VERSION! (Sorry for shouting, but it's really important.) That way, if you find you need to remaster at a later date, you can do so.

[og]

Quote:However, it is just as important to ALWAYS KEEP AN UNMASTERED BACKUP VERSION! (Sorry for shouting, but it's really important.) That way, if you find you need to remaster at a later date, you can do so.That's probably a good idea in any case. You may need to work on it w/o the software you had before. Or get better stuff.

[stick]

Yeah, mastering is a fine art.The loudness thing is an unending discussion. You want your tracks to compete with whatever the client listened to just before putting in your CD, but the louder you make it, the more you squish out your dynamics and punch. The mastering guys that can make it loud and keep the punch make bank. On my own pitches I always do a "client listening" version with my own mastering compression/limiting, and then when the mix is finalized, I print the "Pre-master" without all that stuff so my mastering guy can work his magic. If the record project has a low budget and I'm the mastering guy, I print the same mixes and then do all my mastering in a separate session so I can flip from song to song quick to compare loudness, eq, etc. My current limiter of choice is the Sony Oxford Limiter. The "Enhance" function is able to add some perceived loudness without killing the punch of the track. I'm able to get pretty close to some commercial mastering. Of course, a lot of loudness comes from a good mix. A bad mix made loud will get further out of whack...