Mastering is HARD!

Before I get into this, I'll front load the conclusion: In all the talk about mastering, if your monitoring isn't flat, even the best ears won't do any good. Of course, the compromise is to intimately know what your gear sounds like ... but I think that takes thousands of hours of critical listening and an extensive knowledge of acoustics.

I self-mastered my last album (The End of Silence). I was very excited about it. I had resolved to remove myself from my music in order to master it. I couldn't afford an ME at the time, but I badly wanted to release my album.

 

I believe I got 70% of the way there with the help of the free videos and articles at productionadvice.co.uk, as well as the information available at http://www.masteringtuition.com/

I think I managed to successfully divorce myself from my music so that I could look at it as objectively as possible. I analyzed it intently for problems without thinking about the mix and the compromises that led to things sounding the way they did.  I carefully selected and manipulated various plugins to (as transparently as possible) make my music loud as well as dynamic as well as punchy as well as clear as well as crisp. I compared it  on various playback systems. I also compared it to Auto mastering (mastering box, AAMS, e-mastered, LANDR), other pro masters, and the final mixes - and I level matched them all so that I could be as accurate as possible!

It was extremely painstaking, aggravating, frustrating, rewarding, happy , sad ... it was every emotion I can think of wrapped into one giant hairball. 

But I have now realized my monitoring situation was utterly inadequate for mastering. 

............... :(

After listening to one track (Swallowed) and then every other track on a system tuned to be (what I believe is) flat (using Sonarworks reference 3), I can hear a terribly pronounced bump in the upper mid range which is making everything sound cheap. I re-checked on my car, and listened again on everything I have.  Now in every case, I hear that cheap sounding boost in the 4-6k region. The sadness of this realization is nearly overwhelming.

So the long and short is that after listening on the tuned system, I decided to make two changes - a wide 3db cut at 4.1kz and a narrow 1 db boost at 10khz ... the result in the song :swallowed' is that it's become the song I was envisioning in my head all along, and it sounds pretty well the same on everything I play it through.

Now my hope is that there isn't some other etherial thing I'm missing ....

Sheesh mastering is HARD! 

Album Launch - notes from the Studio

Here are a few big lessons I've learned recording, mixing, producing and mastering "The End of Silence".

1. You can do it! If you play an instrument or sing and have any amount of ability to use a computer, with a little bit of training you can be well on your way to creating recordings you can be proud to release.

2. Recording: It doesn't really matter what you use. What matters more is how you use it. The big lesson I learned is to aim to get things right at the recording stage, because as much as it's a pain to try to 'fix' a bad sounding acoustic guitar in the mix (I had to do that), it's an impossibly un-gratifying pain to try to deal with it in the mastering stage (I also had to do that .. but ultimately I re-recorded it so that it sounded good right off the bat).

3. Mixing: You don't have to compress everything. It's ok to let some things slide into the background and provide a nice wash for the main instruments to rest on. I did this with acoustic guitars in a few songs, and I think it turned out rather nicely.

4. Mastering: There is more to it than EQ, compression and limiting. For example, making sure you encode mp3s properly. I sent one song out that had an accidental easter egg of being 18 minutes long. You could fast forward all the way to minute 18, and parts of the song would still be playing. But if you let it play from start to finish, it was just the regular 3 minutes and change. :) However, for the audio sweetening part of mastering, I'll let you in on my method. In the end, what worked for me was a hybrid of modern auto mastering and traditional manual mastering. I used a program called AAMS and played around with the profiles until I found roughly the sound I was looking for. I processed each track through that and left enough room to do more work. Then I did all of the final compression, limiting and extra EQ tweaks manually using level matched reference tracks). And I mastered as best I could to DR8. The results are that each track is plenty loud and clean.