Mastering

[Raoul23]

I work with a lot of young bands who's budgets are very tight that I always end up mastering their songs. I tell them straight I'm no mastering engineer and it would benefit your songs to have them professionally mastered, but when I tell them the ruff cost they come back with "can you just do it for us" One band who I recorded a long long time ago and I feel my mixing skills/engineering were not as competent as they are now, did take my advice and sent 3 tracks off to Abbey Road which cost them £350. They did sound very good when we got them back and did translate well on lots of systems. What I'm asking here is if it's possible that anyone has hold or knows if there are any commercial songs out there that have not been mastered so I could show my future clients the before and after, plus so I can get more of an insight into what mastering really will/won't do to a mix


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[zedhed]

Originally Posted by Raoul23

What I'm asking here is if it's possible that anyone has hold or knows if there are any commercial songs out there that have not been mastered so I could show my future clients the before and after, plus so I can get more of an insight into what mastering really will/won't do to a mix

It's probably just easier to compare any commercial (hit) record to ones own attempt at mastering to get an A/B reference.

The main things that differentiate the end product is quality of equipment/environment and an engineers experience. That is essentially what one is paying for to get a master. Anyone truly serious in producing music for commercial enterprise will factor in the cost of professional mastering, and that is inevitably high considering the investment made by the mastering house and can be considerably higher if they have a 'track record' of hits.

If the goal is to create a demo or other such product, sending it off to be mastered may not be necessary depending on the ability of the engineer producing it since a 'mastering process' can still be applied to get a satisfactory result.

The question to ask your client is; what are you trying to achieve and how serious are you in achieving that goal? (in other words....identify the dreamers) and decide whether or not to cater to them.

[albee1952]

I am often in the same situation here. When I MUST master due to budget constraints, here is my method(feel free to ignore or mod).
#1-don't allow clipping during the mix(especially on the master track).
#2-try to do the "mastering" as a separate step(IOW, make the mix as perfect as you can without a load of stuff on the master track)
#3-bounce to disk at 96k/24 bit, even if the session is at 44.1 or 48k(as most of mine are).
For mastering, the 2 most important things you will be missing are; a fresh set of ears and (hopefully) a much better listening room. With this in mind, I keep things simple with this chain:
EQ (hi-pass at 30Hz), usually FabFilter Pro
Cytomic's The Glue(or softube TubeTech) for some gentle "glue" compression
Slate VTM(tape emulation)
Waves L2(output ceiling -.02 and no more than 2-3db of reduction)
Waves L2(same as above)
If the final product will be 16 bit, the last L2 will have dither enabled(if the original bounce was really low volume, I might add a 3rd L2(same settings). While Waves L2 is my first choice, most any mastering limiter will work fine as long as you follow similar advice(but I am not a fan of Maxim).

[JFreak]

Argh... I hate multiple limiters :/ Just do it once and do it properly.

First thing would be replacing L2 with L3LL-multi. Take a Drew Lawyne preset and start from there. I can pretty much guarantee it sounds better than any number of L2's

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Argh... I hate multiple limiters :/ Just do it once and do it properly.

First thing would be replacing L2 with L3LL-multi. Take a Drew Lawyne preset and start from there. I can pretty much guarantee it sounds better than any number of L2's

Double arrgh - the L3LL-multi is only available in bundles. Got a recommendation for something similar that's not?

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Double arrgh - the L3LL-multi is only available in bundles. Got a recommendation for something similar that's not?

Avid Pro Multiband followed by Avid Pro Limiter?

[JFreak]

But just sayin' IMO the L3LL-multi is golden, one of the best Waves plugins ever.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Double arrgh - the L3LL-multi is only available in bundles. Got a recommendation for something similar that's not?

DMG Audio : Products : Limitless

I've been demoing this amazing thing for some time now, and it's like nothing else. I'm doing some non-pro mastering for old friends, and they're very happy.


This multiband limiter has six bands and works in a kind of two-stage way (like two limiters in a row, Janne). I don't pretend to master every aspect of it, but starting out with some presets and tweaking, I got great results. It's unbelievable how hard you can push it. It's got character. Very "musical".


Not cheap, be careful - try it and you can't live without it.

[SureshKuppam]

Hi admin,
Thanks for sharing the information and can you keep on updating this content regularly to us.

Regards,

Digital Marketing Training

[JFreak]

Hi SureshKuppam, welcome to the community.

You are not allowed to publish links before you have posted X times. That's why your first post wasn't automatically approved...