Mastering... an abstract concept?

[RDR]

Mastering is more complex than making it sound good to your ears. Ideally, it should be about having your mix sound as good as you can make it while also sounding consistent on multiple different set ups. There's a good chance that a track you mix by ears only may sound quite different on other speaker setups. When I'm concerned, I generally give it a listen on my studio monitors, my headphones, my home stereo system, and then my car. If it sounds pretty much the same on all of the above and the parts I wanted to stand out do so on each, then I call it a day.

You should note i said that i was training my ears, not that it should sound good to them....

I also follow that same 'listen evrywhere' path in the process - its a great and reliable thing to do and can reveal problems.

Talk about this peepz...

"Mastering on an analogue system is different than mastering on a digital system"

discuss...

:)

[AcidTrash]

I just spent about 8 hours mastering a track pandering to much of the dogma I read about production and it doesn't have half of the impact or balls it had before. The production sounds alright but I'm stiulll favouring the master as you go technique.

[romelpotter]

your ears get tired very easilly and the cilla hairs in your ear which is how your brain translates the sound waves into pitch/freq and velocity, your brain struggles to decode the infomation accuratly. when mastering frequent breaks are a good idea, 5 mins every hours does a job but if you ca 15 mins per hour is better, if after a couple of hours your in a rut and can not progress then walk away, come back another day as mark said .. the difference is amazing and sometimes rearly obvious. also make notes at the time , just enough to bring yourself up to speed when you go back to it. but listen to the track before you read the notes... try not to let them influence you when you come back else you will end up where you left off.

[dirty_bass]

I just spent about 8 hours mastering a track pandering to much of the dogma I read about production and it doesn't have half of the impact or balls it had before. The production sounds alright but I'm stiulll favouring the master as you go technique.

Man, sometimes your attitude on here stinks.
Dogma?
What you have got is very sound mastering advice from people who KNOW what they are talking about, som who run successful and repuatable labels and productions.
The fact is, mastering effectively takes a long time to get right. You can`t just read a few things and suddenly expect to be Brian Eno.

[AcidTrash]

I just spent about 8 hours mastering a track pandering to much of the dogma I read about production and it doesn't have half of the impact or balls it had before. The production sounds alright but I'm stiulll favouring the master as you go technique.

Man, sometimes your attitude on here stinks.
Dogma?
What you have got is very sound mastering advice from people who KNOW what they are talking about, som who run successful and repuatable labels and productions.
The fact is, mastering effectively takes a long time to get right. You can`t just read a few things and suddenly expect to be Brian Eno.

I use the word dogma as I do read a lot of reviews of othe peoples tracks where select people do have a tendancy to suggest techniques without explanation of how or why and listening to their own tracks I get the impression it's just something people have told them about their stuff but they've not put it into practice. Besides, like I say I trust my ears more than my dials and just because something looks right on the levels doesn't mean it's going to be good music. The advice production advice you get on BOA is very good but generally on other sites it's a little vague and often routed in opinion and not fact. Reading back at my earlier comments though I guess I was letting of a bit of steam. Get's frustrating sometimes. Sorry about that.

[acidchild]

To me, Mastering is the most critical process in creating music. Especially Techno. Normally i wait till the next day after completing a track to start mastering. And i'm always taking breaks. Usually every 15-20 minutes, i'll stop for a bit. Check e-mail. Chat online, whatever. Then i start up again. I've been getting tips lately from someone in Cali who does mastering for a living. I'm very into this process and want to be able to do outstanding jobs. For me, the chain usually goes:

EQ>Compression>Limiting and maybe some VERY subtle reverb to add some depth and fullness.

With the L2, i find that moving the Threshold slider down untill you get some small movement of green in the LED section, then setting your output db to whatever you want (i usually set it at -1db) will yield good results. This should get you right at the 0db level w/o going into clipping. I think the hardest part of this for me though is compression. I'm not versed enough in this area. Sometimes i feel i may over compress sometimes. Compression is important to me as i like my tracks to have nice punch to them.