mastering

[david.lake]

personaly, having just recently started mastering music more regularly (and not just my own) I agree with a whole bunch of stuff said in this thread and feel i want to contribute with my view (which seems to be very simliar to alot of other engineers) just incase producers read this to get their head around "mastering" as a concept...

among them:

the better the sound that comes to the engineer, the better the master.

idealy, the mastering engineer does nothing."

Mostly though, clients have requests, like "make it phat like beatport" whatever that means, but ive so far interpreted it as "as loud as possible without destroying the punch", and they are usualy happy with a result thats got an RMS value between -12 db or as loud as -8 db. depends on the material.

and also, sometimes, it means they want me to compensate for poor mixing from the start. something I just don't do unless there isn't any other sourcematerial available (than, say, something poorly mixed and clipping). Salvaging stuff takes too much time.

I find me telling clients to mix this or that differently and having a conversation with the musician works much better to get a nice end product, and I consider it part of the job.

There was one time i got a badly clipping track, and i requested a new render, and that one was just clipping slightly less. so i had to request again and again and explain, so finaly on fourth try i got something i could work with. timeconsuming and tedious to say the least.

[ewinz]

thanks for this thread