Mastering my music.
Clarification, please.
What I think mastering is.
1.Finding the flaws that I can't hear through my own speakers and fixing them.
2.Making the song sound the same in a variety of speakers.
3.Maximizing the volume.
What I hope it's not.
1. Someone making creative changes to suit their taste in music or music trends. Creative EQ, etc. How they think distorted guitars should sound. Etc.
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You're correct. In the mastering phase no creative decisions are made, that's all done in production/mixing. Mastering also deals with sonic consistency between tracks
>no creative decisions are made
Is it safer to use an automated mastering service than a human who is making subjective decisions?
I have never understood how people 'make sure it sounds the same on different types of speakers', which is an essential step.
Just, logistically....how the fuck would anyone go about doing that?
magic
no, because all songs are different and there is no cure-all treatment for mastering, every album will be mastered differently than other. hence the existance of studios that ONLY do mastering
Not sure what you mean you automated mastering service, but you or the mastering engineer you hire will eventually be making mastering decisions that hopefully won't be subjective. There is no one preset or Eq/compression chain that will work on every track
Having a trained ear. Most producers should not be mastering their own music for this reason alone.
an ME's job is to take the life out of your music and make it louder
Mastering Engineer here
(no, I'm not a grammy bigtime Mastering engineer, but I'm also not a self-described armchair Mastering engineer. I have lots of clients and teach Mastering at a fairly prestigious University).
I don't believe anyone should master their own stuff. I don't think you *shouldn't try* but just acknowledge that taking your work to someone who is equally or more talented than yourself with be extremely valuable, as they will be much more objective and their focus and initial impressions are totally different than yours ever will be on your own work.
Mastering is both very technical and objective, and very creative. Involves corrective and technical objectives as well as creative ones. It totally depends on the tracks and the situation.
As far as your points go:
1. yes
2. yes
3. yes
**4. making creative and technical adjustments to compensate for the changes made above
It's a whole comprehensive process and every track is a completely different world unto itself. It's generally very surgical, and any one adjustment tends to be subtle but all of them together can be quite a big change.
this
just normalize and publish
no one cares a single fuck
Not OP but this is great info. Do you prefer stems or the full track bounced to audio?
Proof that mastering is an artform:
Generally I get the full track but generally I do rock, folk, ambient, orchestral, etc. The genres that absolutely need to be brought-in in stems are things like Hip Hop, almost any dance music, electronic, etc. I personally don't think it's necessary but my "opinion" of how genres should be mastered is irrelevent. If someone wants their EDM track to sound like the EDM tracks they love, we're gonna need stems. It can get messy with signal flow too. One thing that chaps my gears are like 7 stems and all our time spent basically mixing the track. When I do stems it's for level adjustments and some sidechaining tweaks only, most of the mastering signal chain is still on the final mix unless there's a silver bullet in throwin an EQ on the synth stem pre-limiter or similar.
Are you...are you saying this was mastered well....
sounds like shit
check the master on as many different kinds of setups as you can
that's all well and good but how does that DIFFER than mixing, what you say seems to be pretty ambiguous between mixing and mastering.
what separates the two? what distinguishes them as unique concepts/processes?
this is also misleading.
are you saying you are attempting for them to sound the SAME on every sort of setup?
here's a hypothetical question, what if the sound sounded great on half of systems, but shit on the other half? are you attempting to equalize it to the point where its "identical" on all systems?
because in the case of it sounding like shit on one system, you wouldn't change the whole track to compensate for that one system reproducing it poorly, or would you?
what preferential treatment do you give to certain systems, or is the aim to be "the same" on as many as possible? is there an "industry standard" list of systems it should sound good on?
as in, headphones/speakers/car audio/etc? how many do you test?
to make it sound good on different setups so it sounds ok in a car , headphones or on cheaper speakers like most people use
not so much make it sound the same
it's a cottage industry that's marketed under the illusion of things you can't hear without $25,000 worth of monitors compressors exciters and limiters
basically bullshit
people have loved music bounced to cassette mixes recorded off of AM radio
fidelity is overrated
It's a big topic. For example, nobody should be mixing into a limiter, because that should be done later. A good mix still needs lots of work to be brought up to the competitive levels and spectrum strength that people expect of mastered music. That whole process is done after a good and sensible mix is made, and usually by someone who specializes in mastering and usually not the person who mixed or produced the track.
The simple act of putting a limiter on a track, for example, is going to introduce all kinds of problems that need to be compensated for (usually with things like EQ, multiband compression, etc). Also the equipment used in mastering is usually exorbitantly more expensive and specialized from mixing gear. A single stereo EQ for mastering might cost $6k, whereas the entire desk that someone mixed on might cost less than that. Same goes for monitoring and metering, etc. Stereo image adjustments, phase coherence, multiband dynamics, limiting, unmasking competing frequency bands to maintain percieved or "psychoacoustic" clarity, all while preserving or enhancing ambience and reverb, is all very tricky. For example, the reverb on the track can sound perfect until you fix the snare dynamics with a multiband expander... so it's a constant surgery to get everything singing. It's totally different from mixing.
Taking this even further, so it's all done in such a way as to translate fine on laptops and on PAs is another challenge. How far can you push the spectrum? How loud should it really be? How much harmonic distortion will sound good everywhere and where's the line? Is it even safe to have audio with a crest factor approaching 1? Is it going on the same EP/Soundcloud/etc as other tracks? Should they match? What if they want to press it to vinyl? Etc...
I usually spend an hour per track on something that's already a good mix.
It's not all about fidelity. It's not all about the equipment. It's more about the person doing the work.
The general public doesn't need a microscope and a biochemistry lab, they just go to the pharmacy and buy antibiotics. But the scientists who develop and prepare that shit really need the microscope.
if you ask experienced engineers what songs they think were mastered poorly and what was mastered proficiently, all of them will give you different answers
it's totally subjective
It can't sound the same on any speaker. If you really want to do a good job you gotta make sure that it sounds decent in mono and also test it out on phone speakers.