penningtron wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 11:45 am I never regret paying for the things I'm incapable of doing on my own.

Tom Wanderer wrote: I tend to DIY everything. EVERYTHING.

I'm DIY to the max too (most of us here probably are, no?) and I LOVE being able to pay someone else to solve problems I can't. I could probably do my taxes myself, but why? It's a few hundred dollars to have my accountant do it, he does a better job than I ever could and I don't have to think about it at all, just write the checks. The plumber charges me $150 to have his apprentice come over and turn one knob, I'm happy to pay cause I didn't know what knob and my problem is solved lickety split, I can go back to playing guitar all day, great.

Tom Wanderer wrote: I need long breaks between mixing and evaluating mixes because, not only is it exhausting, it can be so deflating the way we tend to beat ourselves up about anything and everything from aspects of the performance to the capture to tiny, completely insignificant things that no one else would ever have an opinion on in a million years.

Yep. Especially if you're doing everything yourself. You have to remember that everyone else is going to hear it 180 degrees from how you hear it, if that makes sense.

One great thing about mixing ITB is just being able to put something down for awhile and come back to it. Even a week later, you come back to a problem mix and OH! right, I see now, here's how to fix this.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Cheers, MoreSpaceEcho. This thread got very good.

Thanks, I'm very happy to help. Mastering is the only thing in the world I really know anything about!

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 10:00 am

Owen wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 9:22 am Here is one I have never dealt with.

What if you were preparing a live version of a song to have as a bonus track to send to a ME. It has all the hallmarks of a audience recording, but has a quality I like, is it worth cleaning up on my end, or should it be sent over warts and all to the ME? If I should do some cleaning up what would make the ME life easier?

Can you clarify what you mean by "cleaning up"?

In general I'd say just mix the fucker to the best of your abilities, make it sound how you want, and send it off. A ME's life is already easy, don't worry about us.

Cool, yeah, we mixed it the best we can; like how it sounds. Just it looks like Iggy's mix of Raw Power and I am not used to sending over a song that is so blown out vs. properly recorded studio tracks.

I think we touched on bass being a difficult thing to get right in untreated rooms with lesser-quality speakers (hi, it me!).

Scott MSE, do you get projects where clearly there’s something off with bass - likely due to some less-than-pro recording circumstances- and if that happens would you punt it back to the client to remix, or can you generally tune things to everyone’s satisfaction?

cakes wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 10:21 am Now that you mention it though, when do you feel you need to mess with a stereo image?

Sorry, missed this earlier.

Sometimes it's just a general sort of "eh maybe this should be a little wider" feeling.

Sometimes mixes sound suuuuuper wide in a not-great way. Maybe the overall balance is ok but it feels like the stuff on the sides is distracting from the stuff in the center, the tambourine and the keyboard are drawing my attention away from the singer. So I might pull the Side back a little bit or turn up the Mid, same diff.

Sometimes it's not that the mix is too wide, but more like the vocal is a little buried and I'm trying to bring it out, push it forward a bit. In that situation I'd probably do it more with eq than actually adjusting the M/S balance. I might do a boost at say 1k just on the M, and leave the S alone. Sneaky pro tip for subtle widening: do different boosts on the M and S, i.e. boost 2k on the M and 1k on the S.

Every once in a while a chorus will feel like it's not really hitting like it should and I'll go in and cut the track up, do different stuff on different sections. So maybe bump the overall level up a tiny bit at the chorus and/or widen it just a bit there.

I feel compelled to say that I'd be doing all of this stuff in as subtle/unobtrusive ways as possible, I don't want it to sound like I'm ever trying to drastically change anyone's mix. The goal is always to do as little as possible. Sometimes that's a lot, but even then the idea is that it doesn't sound like it.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 1:15 pm

cakes wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 10:21 am Now that you mention it though, when do you feel you need to mess with a stereo image?

Sorry, missed this earlier.

Sometimes it's just a general sort of "eh maybe this should be a little wider" feeling.

I find my self doing more Narrowing of the Stereo to match other song rather than widening. I t to mix all my guitars, bass and drums at about 75%-80% of the stereo width cause I'd go mono most of the time if people would let me. If I line up 2 songs and one feels super wide compared to the other I'll narrow the wide one to match. My levels are usually within what I'd call finished from the mixing stage so when i'm "mastering" (not really what I'm doing at all) All I 'm really doing is lining up the songs that will be presented together on a time line and making sure they tonally and spatially feel together. The processing is really minimal.

Anyway, people use too much Stereo these days, and Atmos can suck it entirely.

twelvepoint wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 1:15 pm Scott MSE, do you get projects where clearly there’s something off with bass - likely due to some less-than-pro recording circumstances- and if that happens would you punt it back to the client to remix, or can you generally tune things to everyone’s satisfaction?

Short answer is I can tune it so everyone's happy.

Long answer, as far as bass, yeah sometimes I get projects where there might be all sorts of problems with the low end. Upright basses can be really unruly beasts. They tend to resonate at 74hz (a D, more or less), so that's a bad problem for starters. Add a bunch of proximity effect making the low end in general all woofy, add a big round boomy bass drum sound....and sometimes the mixer won't have really compressed any of this and my VUs are swinging wildly all over the place and I find myself doing 7:1 compression on the low end and what the hell this is mastering I'm not supposed to be doing that....

Crazy amounts of boom on kick drums. Totally understandable because who has monitors that go down to 40, let alone 20. I used to struggle with that so bad back in the day. It would sound fine on my monitors but I'd take it into the living room and it was just massive boom obliterating everything else. So frustrating.

Anyway as far as sending mixes back...,something would have to be really technically wrong with it, like crazy glitching or some obvious problem. A few times I've had mixes come in mono, and I'll ask if that's intentional (it never is). But as far as anything sonically or aesthetically.....I don't want to be telling people how they should be mixing. This might be someone's first record, this might be the best they can do, it might sound great to them. I'm just going to work with what they give me and see what they think. and honestly almost always they're happy with whatever I did.

There's lots of times where I might think "this would be way better if they did X Y and Z" but that's just my opinion. I don't wanna be the hesher engineer in 1993 going "you gotta have the big reverb on the snare man".

I'm enjoying this mastering engineer AMA!

One q - are you finding more and more folks are sending stems in addition to stereo files? It seems like that's becoming a "thing."

Similarly, one of my sometimes-bandmates is a pretty busy mastering engineer and he mentioned that most of his works comes through mix engineers, not artists directly. I think I read an interview with Heba Kadry a while back where she mentioned something similar - that since everything has basically gone ITB and everyone is basically mixing through some approximation of a mastering chain on their 2-bus, it's made life easier for a mastering engineer to have a closer relationship with whomever is doing the mix as there's progressively less room to actually do the job of mastering as it is traditionally understood, since stuff is coming in already squashed to shit and EQ'd.

Just curious how things are changing now that anyone can have a fairchild for like $99.

mdc wrote: Sat Dec 16, 2023 9:17 am I'm enjoying this mastering engineer AMA!

One q - are you finding more and more folks are sending stems in addition to stereo files? It seems like that's becoming a "thing."

Similarly, one of my sometimes-bandmates is a pretty busy mastering engineer and he mentioned that most of his works comes through mix engineers, not artists directly. I think I read an interview with Heba Kadry a while back where she mentioned something similar - that since everything has basically gone ITB and everyone is basically mixing through some approximation of a mastering chain on their 2-bus, it's made life easier for a mastering engineer to have a closer relationship with whomever is doing the mix as there's progressively less room to actually do the job of mastering as it is traditionally understood, since stuff is coming in already squashed to shit and EQ'd.

Just curious how things are changing now that anyone can have a fairchild for like $99.

I don't actually get stems all that often, which is fine, as I (and most ME's I know) prefer working with just the stereo mix. I don't mind stems obviously, I'm happy to work with whatever, but it's more work so I have to charge more, and maybe this is an old fashioned mentality but to me, working with stems is still kinda mixing, you listen differently. If you have stems in front of you it's hard not to think/listen like a mixer, and I get paid to listen like a masterer, so....anyway the answer is i get stems rarely enough that I don't even have a fixed rate for it, I'd just work something out with the client.

As far as everyone having a mastering chain on their 2 bus, you'd be surprised. Most stuff comes in perfectly reasonable, overall level and squash-wise. It's pretty rare that I get mixes that are totally bricked already. If I do, I just roll with it, turn them down a bunch so I have some headroom to eq and then just turn them back up.

I don't know what people are running on their 2 buss, and I assume most people probably have *something* but generally speaking I don't hear a lot of heavy handed buss stuff.

My client base now is the same regular folks as it was 10 years ago, and I feel like the quality of mixes I get now is way better than a decade ago. The tools we have now are sooooo much better, everyone's gotten better at working ITB, maybe people have gotten more room treatment, whatever. Most stuff that comes in sounds pretty good to really good, mastering is straightforward, it's pretty rare that I press play on mix and think oh fucking hell what am I going to do with this mess? And honestly those mixes are kinda fun, because if it's really wonky I can try some really stupid stuff I'd never do on a good mix, usually with surprisingly good results and I learn something new.

Obviously I like when there's stuff for me to do, but I get some mixes that are basically finished and there's not really anything to do except listen to it and verify that it's fine, maybe do a tiny bit of eq or de-essing, that's fine too, if it sounds good it sounds good.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: My client base now is the same regular folks as it was 10 years ago, and I feel like the quality of mixes I get now is way better than a decade ago. The tools we have now are sooooo much better, everyone's gotten better at working ITB, maybe people have gotten more room treatment, whatever. Most stuff that comes in sounds pretty good to really good, mastering is straightforward, it's pretty rare that I press play on mix and think oh fucking hell what am I going to do with this mess? And honestly those mixes are kinda fun, because if it's really wonky I can try some really stupid stuff I'd never do on a good mix, usually with surprisingly good results and I learn something new.

And sometimes your regular clients email you pictures of their gutted control room and you help them improve their treatment and speaker placement. Possibly in hopes of getting mixes with less unwieldy low end? Definitely to be an awesome dude. MSE FTW!

Seriously you guys, if you're thinking of paying someone to master something you have your guy right here.

*blushes*