dogfall
Max Output Level: -90 dBFS
- Total Posts : 34
- Joined: 2007/04/11 14:38:05
- Location: Tennessee
- Status: offline
Mastering
I have a few questions: I'm running X1 Producer with the V700R. 1. What would be the correct way to prepare my files for a mastering company? Should I not use any of the mastering tools like vintage channel to get the best quality mastering from the company I'm going to use. 2. As for files: what do i send them and what format and so on. 3. If i decide to master myself, do any of you know of a few good video tutorials? Thanks in advance! Steve
|
BlixYZ
Max Output Level: -74 dBFS
- Total Posts : 805
- Joined: 2010/12/31 16:45:54
- Location: Barrington, NJ
- Status: offline
it depends on whether you are sending it to a world class mastering lab or just a more modest one. dont use any processing on the master bus if you are going to a big name mastering pro. otherwise, i would use the vintage channel (one of my favorites still) to get the tone and character you are looking for, just do so at a reasonable level so the mastering engineer has headroom to work with. a typical lab will just do gentle eq and levelling and maybe some sonic processing (exciters).
anything creative you want done to the whole mix, like a reverb space or a cpmpressor that "pumps" you should do before you send it.
|
Guitarhacker
Max Output Level: 0 dBFS
- Total Posts : 24398
- Joined: 2007/12/07 12:51:18
- Location: NC
- Status: offline
Most "Mastering companies " will have a set of guidelines for you to follow. If you do so, it makes their job easier.
Most want files that are mixed by you to taste and completely un-effected. No compression, no reverb, no nothing..... that's what you are paying them to do for you.
Your job is to get the mix "right" and let them do the rest.
My website & music: www.herbhartley.com MC4/5/6/X1e.c, on a Custom DAW Focusrite Firewire Saffire Interface BMI/NSAI "Just as the blade chooses the warrior, so too, the song chooses the writer "
|
listen
Max Output Level: -79 dBFS
- Total Posts : 593
- Joined: 2008/09/12 06:07:55
- Status: offline
If your not doing it yourself
Make sure this question is posed to the mastering company/person you intend on using.
- Listen - FOH Mixer & Recording Studio Manager Nothing but the grace of God - mggtg. VS 700C - R / CONSOLE 1 / NEVE PORTICO 5017 / TASCAM UH-7000 / SONAR PLATINUM / REASON RECORD 9 / VMP 2 / UREI 7110's / UA LA-610 MkII / AUDIENT ASP 880 / CREATION STATION 450 V 5 WINDOWS 10 / HOME 64 - BIT / SKYLAKE CORE i7 (i7 - 6700, 4 CORES/8 THREADS)
|
John
Forum Host
- Total Posts : 30467
- Joined: 2003/11/06 11:53:17
- Status: offline
Guitarhacker
Most "Mastering companies " will have a set of guidelines for you to follow. If you do so, it makes their job easier.
Most want files that are mixed by you to taste and completely un-effected. No compression, no reverb, no nothing..... that's what you are paying them to do for you.
Your job is to get the mix "right" and let them do the rest.
No compression, no reverb, no nothing? Then what is mixing?
|
SuperG
Max Output Level: -63 dBFS
- Total Posts : 1371
- Joined: 2012/10/19 16:09:18
- Location: Edgewood, NM
- Status: offline
John
Guitarhacker
Most "Mastering companies " will have a set of guidelines for you to follow. If you do so, it makes their job easier.
Most want files that are mixed by you to taste and completely un-effected. No compression, no reverb, no nothing..... that's what you are paying them to do for you.
Your job is to get the mix "right" and let them do the rest.
No compression, no reverb, no nothing? Then what is mixing?
The way I read the history of the 'mastering' profession, the main function in the early days was to optimize the material to the media. In those days it was vinyl, which has it's own peculiarity. Too much loud bass and you're skipping needles. To much volume to the cutter and you have to increase track pitch and shorten the program length. Compression and leveling was needed to fit the material in the limited dynamic range of vinyl. All of these altered the final sound, but everyone trusted the mastering engineer to make the decisions needed to make the material sound 'good'. Today, it appears to be much less driven by processing material to fit the medium at hand than it is as a second opinion and second set of ears. A mastering engineer is simply going to concentrate on the mix as a whole (all they have is the stereo mix-down after all) and audition it on several sets of speakers. I can see him/her making subtle adjustments here and there, leveling, EQ, and so on. Everything needed to make perfect and adding anything missing. I think what some might mean about compression is simply not to try and put much effect on any master - you're still gonna need channel-based compression for thing like guitars, vocals, and so on.
|
John
Forum Host
- Total Posts : 30467
- Joined: 2003/11/06 11:53:17
- Status: offline
SuperG
John
Guitarhacker
Most "Mastering companies " will have a set of guidelines for you to follow. If you do so, it makes their job easier.
Most want files that are mixed by you to taste and completely un-effected. No compression, no reverb, no nothing..... that's what you are paying them to do for you.
Your job is to get the mix "right" and let them do the rest.
No compression, no reverb, no nothing? Then what is mixing?
The way I read the history of the 'mastering' profession, the main function in the early days was to optimize the material to the media. In those days it was vinyl, which has it's own peculiarity. Too much loud bass and you're skipping needles. To much volume to the cutter and you have to increase track pitch and shorten the program length. Compression and leveling was needed to fit the material in the limited dynamic range of vinyl. All of these altered the final sound, but everyone trusted the mastering engineer to make the decisions needed to make the material sound 'good'.
Today, it appears to be much less driven by processing material to fit the medium at hand than it is as a second opinion and second set of ears. A mastering engineer is simply going to concentrate on the mix as a whole (all they have is the stereo mix-down after all) and audition it on several sets of speakers. I can see him/her making subtle adjustments here and there, leveling, EQ, and so on. Everything needed to make perfect and adding anything missing.
I think what some might mean about compression is simply not to try and put much effect on any master - you're still gonna need channel-based compression for thing like guitars, vocals, and so on.
I agree to a point. You're right about mastering being a means to transfer audio to vinyl, traditionally. But although true there was some tweaking going on the RIAA curve built into all phonographs took care of that. The masterer only needed to apply the curve when he mastered. The master meant that a aluminum disk was being made to press the vinyl into. It was the master. Then we get master tapes. That meant the final mix and not the raw tapes. They weren't "mastered" until an aluminum disk was made. What you heard was the mix not the mastering. Today mastering can mean almost anything and some mastering engineers place their own stamp on a mix. I really believe that there is too much processing for often little gain. On the other hand I have heard outstanding mastering on material that was mixed well but not perhaps great. Here a talented masterer can make a big difference. To though its appears as if the he is fixing a poor mix not bringing out something. That to me should be done by the mixer. To me if a mix is really good the need for detailed and extensive mastering is not needed. I do believe mastering for an album is important. But we are back to the single in commercial music. I not sure I want all music to sound the same and that is what I hear in pop music today. Not mention that loudness seems to be the biggest reason to have something mastered. I do wonder about just how much is done to music these days simply because we can. What happened to simply recording what is there? The question that I was asking was how on this earth does a mastering engineer have anything to do with reverb. That is an artistic decision not a technical one and rightly belongs to the mixer. Suppose I record in a concert hall and add no reverb and the mastering engineer adds his own. To me that would be an abomination. I think if it really needs mastering as a correction its a bad mix.
|
SuperG
Max Output Level: -63 dBFS
- Total Posts : 1371
- Joined: 2012/10/19 16:09:18
- Location: Edgewood, NM
- Status: offline
John
SuperG
John
Guitarhacker
Most "Mastering companies " will have a set of guidelines for you to follow. If you do so, it makes their job easier.
Most want files that are mixed by you to taste and completely un-effected. No compression, no reverb, no nothing..... that's what you are paying them to do for you.
Your job is to get the mix "right" and let them do the rest.
No compression, no reverb, no nothing? Then what is mixing?
The way I read the history of the 'mastering' profession, the main function in the early days was to optimize the material to the media. In those days it was vinyl, which has it's own peculiarity. Too much loud bass and you're skipping needles. To much volume to the cutter and you have to increase track pitch and shorten the program length. Compression and leveling was needed to fit the material in the limited dynamic range of vinyl. All of these altered the final sound, but everyone trusted the mastering engineer to make the decisions needed to make the material sound 'good'.
Today, it appears to be much less driven by processing material to fit the medium at hand than it is as a second opinion and second set of ears. A mastering engineer is simply going to concentrate on the mix as a whole (all they have is the stereo mix-down after all) and audition it on several sets of speakers. I can see him/her making subtle adjustments here and there, leveling, EQ, and so on. Everything needed to make perfect and adding anything missing.
I think what some might mean about compression is simply not to try and put much effect on any master - you're still gonna need channel-based compression for thing like guitars, vocals, and so on.
I agree to a point. You're right about mastering being a means to transfer audio to vinyl, traditionally. But although true there was some tweaking going on the RIAA curve built into all phonographs took care of that. The masterer only needed to apply the curve when he mastered. The master meant that a aluminum disk was being made to press the vinyl into. It was the master. Then we get master tapes. That meant the final mix and not the raw tapes. They weren't "mastered" until an aluminum disk was made. What you heard was the mix not the mastering.
Today mastering can mean almost anything and some mastering engineers place their own stamp on a mix. I really believe that there is too much processing for often little gain. On the other hand I have heard outstanding mastering on material that was mixed well but not perhaps great. Here a talented masterer can make a big difference. To though its appears as if the he is fixing a poor mix not bringing out something. That to me should be done by the mixer.
To me if a mix is really good the need for detailed and extensive mastering is not needed. I do believe mastering for an album is important. But we are back to the single in commercial music.
I not sure I want all music to sound the same and that is what I hear in pop music today. Not mention that loudness seems to be the biggest reason to have something mastered.
I do wonder about just how much is done to music these days simply because we can. What happened to simply recording what is there?
The question that I was asking was how on this earth does a mastering engineer have anything to do with reverb. That is an artistic decision not a technical one and rightly belongs to the mixer.
Suppose I record in a concert hall and add no reverb and the mastering engineer adds his own. To me that would be an abomination.
I think if it really needs mastering as a correction its a bad mix.
I agree with most of what you're saying. Vinyl mastering was a process that evolved over many years. Naturally, the engineer had to apply the RIAA curve, but he had to make the music fit within the confines of vinyl. He'd audition the acetates he cut to make sure the result was what he'd imagined, and if ok, the acetate was off to plating. At some point in history, it probably made sense to use tape with mastering effects applied rather than directly inserted to the cutter chain (excepting RIAA), and that became the 'master' tape. I need to point out that I wholeheartedly agree on things like reverb and such - that's just not the mastering engineers job to change the basic character of a mix. I see mastering as adjust 'overall' dynamics and or leveling/maximizing (somewhat like vinyl needed), and subtle mix eq, transient recovery, and such. These can be accomplished using EQ's and multi-band compressors. I think something like iZotope Ozone has pretty much all one needs. The mastering engineer's advantage though, is he knows all this stuff by heart, and he's coming at a mix from never having heard it before, and he's done this for many genres. My completely personal, unscientific, possibly bogus opinion is, unless you're a professional recording musician, if you're fairly handy with a DAW, you can learn this.
post edited by SuperG - 2012/12/02 15:18:31
|
dogfall
Max Output Level: -90 dBFS
- Total Posts : 34
- Joined: 2007/04/11 14:38:05
- Location: Tennessee
- Status: offline
Thanks for the post! it will be going to masterdisk in new york. I have used some effects on vocals and compression to level out the mix. Steve
|