losthighway wrote: Sat Dec 16, 2023 11:47 amAnd 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!

I don't do this kind of work with any regularity, but if I did one of the first things I'd do is pay an ME for their time to evaluate some of my mixes (ideally pulled from multiple sessions) to get feedback and maybe pinpoint common issues. That seems like a good use of $, probably better than the equivalent in more gear or software.

It would be, I'd be happy to do that, wouldn't charge much either.

One funny thing I've noticed over the years: the people who ask for feedback are usually the ones who need it the least. I'm always saying "honestly your stuff sounds really good, easy to master, not really hearing any issues". The people whose shit sounds all crazy never ask.

I was thinking about the 'everyone with a mastering chain on the mix buss' thing on my walk just now, and generally the more experienced the mixer, the more finished it's likely to be. Heba Kadry is probably working regularly with way higher-profile folks than I do. Mitch Easter sends me stuff sometimes, he leaves a few db of headroom but it always sounds finished already. I did a record over the summer for another experienced producer, his solo record, and he was real clear that he was happy with how the mixes sounded and really just wanted a second set of ears. His record sounded great and I mostly got paid to sip coffee.

Back in like 2011 I got to master a record Tchad Blake mixed, and you probably don't need me to tell you that those mixes were very finished. Mastering that was a piece of cake, what was hard was the artist said they had two other songs they needed mixed as well and could I do it, and oh btw we need all of this done in 3 days. Oh sure, 2 days to mix 2 songs that need to sit next to the work of one of my heroes, no problem.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Sat Dec 16, 2023 2:42 pm I was thinking about the 'everyone with a mastering chain on the mix buss' thing on my walk just now, and generally the more experienced the mixer, the more finished it's likely to be.

I guess that's ultimately the goal right? Though part of the fun of sending something off for me is knowing it will be going thru cool, expensive shit: shit that you almost have to try hard to make things sound worse with (unless it's broken I guess). Even a lot of established engineers usually aren't running their entire mixes through $7,000 tube EQs or whatever.

A former poster here attended a mastering session at Abbey Road and was getting the grand tour, "..and these strips here were part of the EMI chain used on Beatles recordings, that is a thing available for use" and he was like "of COURSE we're gonna run my album through that!!"

It's funny what mastering has evolved into. There is still corrective stuff of course, but as far as 'cutting masters' (small vinyl releases aside) we technically don't need it. It's not like youtube is gonna reject your music for having an out of phase stereo kick sound or whatever. I don't know if I ever wanna reach the level* where an ME told me "all I needed to do was gauge some levels and hit print", it's fun getting stuff back that sounds way better!

*don't worry I'm a long fuckin' way from that

Last night I was messing around and organizing my little studio while listening to this album plus some old Sound Techniques stuff



It fully drove me insane how good those records sound thru my board and little low end JBL monitors. Like when she would start stomping or sawing the fiddle differently it was like someone else was in the room with me. My recordings don’t do that at all I’m pissed

penningtron wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 8:47 am it's fun getting stuff back that sounds way better!

Yeah, it should be! I had a client write me the other day saying something like "I had a huge grin on my face the whole time I was listening." Which of course put a huge grin on my face because that's how I hope people react.

Anyway, I don't think anyone really needs to have "my ME didn't have to do anything!" as a goal. Just because your ME did a few eq moves and whatnot doesn't mean you failed or you suck at mixing or anything like that. When I master my own mixes there's always something to do, I have clients who can mix circles around me and there's always something to do. Even on the records that really sound killer and I say I just sit here sipping coffee, there's something to do.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 10:18 am It fully drove me insane how good those records sound thru my board and little low end JBL monitors.

Yeah I'm listening to it on the little horrible soundbar on my office computer and it sounds really good and lifelike even through that.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 10:18 am My recordings don’t do that at all I’m pissed

Like I mentioned earlier about listening to a wide variety of music in your studio, if you really want to improve your recording/mixing game, one of the best things you can do is a/b your mixes with a bunch of your favorites. And be brutally honest with yourself.

You'll be comparing mastered stuff with unmastered mixes so you'll have to turn them down a bunch to make a fair comparison (that Youlean loudness meter is great, but do this by ear, trust me it's easy, it's not like learning a song by ear, just turn them down till they sound about the same level as your mix).

I really got my ass kicked when I did this. Handed to me. It was humbling. But once you get over that, you have all the information you need right in front of you. Listen, compare, make changes. It's not like learning a new language, you already know how to do this. Doing this sort of thing didn't make me into an A-list mixer or anything, but it really helped a lot, and I feel like I got a lot better fairly quickly.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 10:42 am Like I mentioned earlier about listening to a wide variety of music in your studio, if you really want to improve your recording/mixing game, one of the best things you can do is a/b your mixes with a bunch of your favorites. And be brutally honest with yourself.

That reminds me of something else I see on mastering FAQs:

Don't evaluate the master on the system you mixed it on.

Brutal perhaps, but doesn't that also help you get better?

(I think everyone would agree that a variety of systems is ideal for evaluation)

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 10:18 am Last night I was messing around and organizing my little studio while listening to this album plus some old Sound Techniques stuff



It fully drove me insane how good those records sound thru my board and little low end JBL monitors. Like when she would start stomping or sawing the fiddle differently it was like someone else was in the room with me. My recordings don’t do that at all I’m pissed

Gosh that sounds good!! Thanks - I had not heard this

Here's my last try at mastering. It sounds better than all my previous attempts. Looking for a critical review. I'm working on adjusting my ears to my studio (mostly playing my favorite songs on my speakers while I hang out). I would like an outside critical ear on it, I think it would be beneficial to know what I'm not really hearing and should be looking out for. My studio setup has some sound treatment, but nothing really scientific, just general stuff. The space isn't ideal, but it's what I have and I want to learn to work with it. (The song is just something recorded at practice, not something album ready.)

When listening to the unmastered mix, it felt like it needed more low end sub and high end sheen with a little dynamics control. I started with a clipper to just catch any top end clip (more on that later). It's catching a few here and there, nothing dramatic. Next, I have a mid/side EQ that I think helps improve the stereo space without widening. I focused the low end more in the mid and high end more on the side. After that, did a light touch with a compressor to tame the dynamics just a little and have everything sit together and gel more. The compressor also does a little EQ and coloring that I like, so it's adding more low/high stuff and some tube color, giving a more overall aggressive sound (I'm actually using the same compressor on the end of the drum buss, but the EQ is more smoothing out the high end to make the cymbals less harsh). It still felt it needed some EQ polish at that point and I didn't want to fuck with the mid/side. I added a stereo EQ after the compressor to bump the lowest lows, high-mids, and highs (looking to play on the kick thud, growly bass, with a sheen on top). That went into a limiter and then into a peak limiter, getting just over 14 LUFS on the output meter. It's probably the first time I got the cymbals to not sound like shit on Soundcloud, so I think I got the peaks taken care of and I'm thinking the clipper might be helping there, because it's the first time I used a clipper on a master. (I found a great article on mastering for Soundclound specifically, and the engineer suggested that a 44.1k/16 bit WAV file will achieve the best result - Soundcloud seems to be a real outlier when it comes to compression).

penningtron wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 12:55 pm That reminds me of something else I see on mastering FAQs:

Don't evaluate the master on the system you mixed it on.

Brutal perhaps, but doesn't that also help you get better?

(I think everyone would agree that a variety of systems is ideal for evaluation)

OK, so the reason we say 'don't evaluate the master on the system you mixed on', is because part of the reason for hiring a ME is to correct for any flaws in that system.. So for example say you mix on speakers that have no low end and you boost and/or don't cut the low end in your mix so it sounds good on those speakers. That low end boost sounds obviously not right to me when I master it so I shelve it back or whatever and send you back a nicely balanced master. Which on your speakers might sound thin compared to the mix you're used to hearing. But everywhere else it'll work better.

All that said, whenever I had anyone else master stuff for me back in the day, the first thing I ever did was put it on in my studio. So i know everyone's going to listen to their masters the same way, it's probably your best set of speakers, of course you're going to. But yeah, a variety of systems is the best way to evaluate.

Anyway, that brings up something else I wanted to mention: anyone self-mastering, you're probably mastering on the same system/room you mixed in, and you need to be aware that this is a big handicap. I'm not saying that to discourage you or get you to hire me, anyone interested in this stuff should dive in. But again, a big part of mastering is listening to it in a different (better) room on different (better) speakers. Without that, you're working at a disadvantage so you need to be aware of it.

Why? Because say you have speakers that are all boom and sizzle (like old Genelecs) or say they're all weird, lumpy midrange (Event 2020s). A mix on the former is likely going to have a bit too much midrange, the opposite on the latter. It's easy to hear this stuff on a different set of monitors, but if you're mastering on the same ones you mixed on, well you already made it sound how you want on those. I used to mix on the Events, and over time I learned that if I left the mix sounding kinda boxy on those, it'd sound right everywhere else. OK, that's doable. But if you go to master something and it sounds boxy to your ears, you're going to want to reduce that boxiness and cut some midrange, and well, you see what I mean?

If you post here, you probably have a good pair of headphones, and those can really be your friend. I personally don't really like listening on phones and rarely do it, but if you're working in a home studio environment they're almost for sure going to have a deeper/flatter low end response than your monitors. So use those to help, and evaluate your mastering on as many other sets of speakers you can find, the car, laptop, whatever. It doesn't have to sound incredible on everything, but it should work.