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[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

I thought it might be a good idea to jot down a few sentences
in the hope of shedding some light into what mastering wont do as opposed to what it can do for a song.
The reason being,  I'm finding a lot of people expect mastering to transform a messy producing/mixing/recording into Darkside of the Moon, and other classics.
So basically what can people expect from professional mastering
in a few types of scenarios.
eg
From great quality material to work with and not so great material to work with.

Am i correct in saying that if a person/producer/band are not excited about there mix then mastering really isn't going to cut it for them.
Anyway i hope this is a decent topic.
I think its important that people realise the limits of mastering.

[Ged Leitch]

Hey Doug, long time no hear mate.
My view on mastering...

1.People really cant expect their demo cd thats been recorded over a few days with so so recorded source sounds and mic placements, then mixed in a day or two( as is common over here) to sound as
polished and rich as a major label chart release when they get it mastered.

2.They need to realise that it's the "source" sounds that make up the bigger picture when it comes to quality.

3.If they are not completely happy with the mix then although mastering can bring out or subdue certain elements in the song I prefer them to remix as it results in a better finished product.

4.Tell them " No man, I cant turn up your guitar tracks!!!" LOL
but with careful compression you can bring them forward slightly in the mix.

5.They CAN however expect a tighter/punchier sounding, spectrally balanced and fuller version of their material.

6.They CAN expect us to get rid of most types of irratating noise and hum etc.

5.They should be reminded that the only limitation of the mastering is  the " source" sounds of the mix themselves.

Just my opinion guys.
Cheers.

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

Great response W.W as always.
Cheers

[jazzius]

It really depends on the mix....some things sound not good and have great potential...others things sound not good and have virtually no potential....i would say one common factor in the "no potential" camp is distortion.....once an unpleasant distortion has been added to a mix (not necassarily on purpose), there's nothing you can do to remove it....dunno if i'm explaining this very well....sometimes i sit there and think "what the hell am i gonna do with this crap", and sometimes: "ok, ok this can be good...i'll do this and this and this etc"...it's an instant realization type of thing (owing to experience)........Darius!

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

Yes.
The digital distortion is quite messy.
The shit cumulative hidden distortion.
I think i know what you mean.

i should say i don't claim to be an expert yet this will be confirmed if you read my noob posts.
I just thought id establish that. Cause i hate it when people think there good when there shit. Like me.

[jazzius]

Not just digital distortion...distortion of every creed, color and hue....the ironic thing is, the best mixers use distortion as a vital tool in their mix arsenal.....while the worst mixers ruin their mixes with unintentionally added distortion..distortion flys at bad mixers like soup flys at a white shirt!...D

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

jazzius wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 18:32

Not just digital distortion...distortion of every creed, color and hue....the ironic thing is, the best mixers use distortion as a vital tool in their mix arsenal.....while the worst mixers ruin their mixes with unintentionally added distortion.....D

Sorry man, i was actually going to mention badly used distortion.
But didnt.

[Ged Leitch]

jazzius wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 18:15

It really depends on the mix....some things sound not good and have great potential...others things sound not good and have virtually no potential....i would say one common factor in the "no potential" camp is distortion.....once an unpleasant distortion has been added to a mix (not necassarily on purpose), there's nothing you can do to remove it....dunno if i'm explaining this very well....sometimes i sit there and think "what the hell am i gonna do with this crap", and sometimes: "ok, ok this can be good...i'll do this and this and this etc"...it's an instant realization type of thing (owing to experience)........Darius!

I think i know where your coming from, I recently have had a few CD's to work on that I noticed were not clipping, but, the guitars and toms seemed to be saturating too much.
Could be anything i guess but really annoyed me, the customer just treated it as part of the "sound" they were going for.

[Thomas W. Bethel]

Mixing use to be an Art.

Today anyone with enough money can open a recording studio and proclaim to the world that he/she is a recording engineer.(And if you use Behringer gear you don't even have to have a lot of money)

What once was learned at the elbow of a great recording engineer and by interning for a couple of years is now learned though the pages of Mix magazine and other mags.

Or sometimes it is not learned at all and the person doing the recording/mix-down does not even take time to read the books that came with the equipment (oh sorry I forgot now it is the .PDF file on the software installation disk because its too costly for the software/equipment manufacture to print a manual).

They remember reading an article about how a certain engineer got the sound on the guitar was to overdrive slightly the analog tape recorder. So the new engineer, who really has never even seen an analog tape machine,  says why not overdrive the digital recorder and get the same effect. They have no idea of what they are doing and if it says it in MIX (even if they read it wrong) it must be correct.

When it comes to mixdown they use as many plug-in effects as their ProTools rig has on every song and then they wonder why it sounds "muddy" or "shrill". They get their mix-down information from the same place that they got their recording knowledge from and they remember that so and so said that the TRacks plug-ins rock so since this is what HE is using they should use it too. Only HE knows what he is doing and they don't. They are also monitoring on a pair of computer speakers or worse and can't understand why the mix sounds good in their studio and soooooo bad when it is played back anywhere else.

Lots of people today are playing with audio engineering and if it floats their boat great. But when they bring that material to a professional mastering person and ask to have it made into the next million seller and get upset when he or she cannot do what they want they either go to someone else or decide that they can master their material with the same TRacks plug ins and then add mastering to their list of offerings.

When I first got into mastering I thought it was all about the "sound" now it is all about the "level". Maybe someday we will go back to the "sound" but I am beginning to think that now days no one cares how it sounds just "how many" songs they can fit on their IPODs.

Hope this is not too negative but it is the truth.

[Bob Olhsson]

Let me repeat my mantra:

Mixing is about the presentation of the music and the recording.

Mastering is about the presentation of the mix!

[Ronny]

Lot of guitar players are immune to noise. They get used to 60 cycle hum from the amp, stomp boxes, single coil pu's and especially distortion type effects that have a super high noise floor. Some of the digi guitar processors that have cheap DAC's are extremely noisy. It's not the end of the world though jazzius, much of it can be at least attenuated to an acceptable level if not completly noise profiled out.

[jazzius]

So I take it you don't understand the difference between noise and distortion, Ronny?........Darius

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

Bob Olhsson wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 23:20

Let me repeat my mantra: Mixing is about the presentation of the music and the recording. Mastering is about the presentation of the mix!

Well said Bob

[Ronny]

jazzius wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 21:30

So I take it you don't understand the difference between noise and distortion, Ronny?........Darius

So, I take it that you don't know how to deal with either one?

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

Careful dont mess with Ronny

[jazzius]

Ronny wrote on Thu, 20 October 2005 06:03

jazzius wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 21:30 So I take it you don't understand the difference between noise and distortion, Ronny?........Darius So, I take it that you don't know how to deal with either one?

I don't suffer fools gladly.....where in my post did i mention "noise"?.....distortion is different from noise....noise can be removed, distortion can't.....or can it?...if so, please tell us how.......Darius

[Gold]

jazzius wrote on Thu, 20 October 2005 07:25

distortion is different from noise....noise can be removed, distortion can't.....or can it?...if so, please tell us how.......

I listened to a demo of the Cedar DeClip at the AES and I was amazed. I'm sure it won't remove hair like a bikini wax but I'll bet it can work wonders.

I have done a little of that with a waves decrackle it sort of works. Mysteriously it makes things worse when cutting lacquers while it sounds better playing the file. Sometimes I'm glad I listen to what I'm doing.

[Ronny]

jazzius wrote on Thu, 20 October 2005 07:25

Ronny wrote on Thu, 20 October 2005 06:03 jazzius wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 21:30 So I take it you don't understand the difference between noise and distortion, Ronny?........Darius So, I take it that you don't know how to deal with either one? I don't suffer fools gladly.....where in my post did i mention "noise"?.....distortion is different from noise....noise can be removed, distortion can't.....or can it?...if so, please tell us how.......Darius

Your post mentioned noise at the same place mine mentioned that I didn't know the difference between noise and distortion.


You can denoise noise, you can't dedistort distortion. However, you can remove distortion and replace it with non-distorted samples if it's short and not running through the whole timeline.

[bobkatz]

William Boyle AKA Elfy wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 12:22

Am i correct in saying that if a person/producer/band are not excited about there mix then mastering really isn't going to cut it for them. Anyway i hope this is a decent topic. I think its important that people realise the limits of mastering.

It's a very decent topic. I like to express it in terms of letter grades. Bernie Grundman has said that the best sound you will ever hear is the mix, the master can't possibly be better. I disagree; I feel that masters can have enough virtues to outweigh some of the losses in transparency.

Regardless of whether you totally agree with Bernie or not, I have to say that only under EXCEPTIONAL circumstances can I turn a B mix into an A master. The most I would usually say is a "B+". But if the B mix has certain problems that are easily cured with equalization and with no compromises (usually at the extremes of the spectrum) then it is possible to turn it into an A master.

But it is probably impossible to turn a C mix into an A master. You're dreaming. The best scenario I can imagine is a mix that needs no work at all. The most exceptional mix engineers can do that on occasion when they are not rushed. I just got an A mix from one of my colleagues who you have not yet heard of, Robert Wawoe. One song needed more work, but hey, who's perfect? Because he also provided stems as well as mixes, I was able to retweak some of the lead and chorus vocal levels on that song and give the band some poost on a climax and help turn all of his A mixes into an A+ master. The eq settings on most songs were flat! Most of the transformation was in some small dynamics areas.

This was the first master in a long time where I would say my BIGGEST contribution was in getting the spaces right between the songs and levelling the songs one to another (which is difficult if not impossible to accomplish during a mix).

This doesn't exactly answer the question "the limitations of mastering", but it puts a perspective on the topic, as in "you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse" and furthermore, you can only embellish and polish. But can you "transform"? I do believe you can transform, but only with an A mix to begin with, which can be transformed into an A+, but you have to start with an A or at least a B+.

BK

[William Boyle AKA Elfy]

bobkatz wrote on Fri, 21 October 2005 04:03

William Boyle AKA Elfy wrote on Wed, 19 October 2005 12:22 Am i correct in saying that if a person/producer/band are not excited about there mix then mastering really isn't going to cut it for them. Anyway i hope this is a decent topic. I think its important that people realise the limits of mastering. It's a very decent topic. I like to express it in terms of letter grades. Bernie Grundman has said that the best sound you will ever hear is the mix, the master can't possibly be better. I disagree; I feel that masters can have enough virtues to outweigh some of the losses in transparency. Regardless of whether you totally agree with Bernie or not, I have to say that only under EXCEPTIONAL circumstances can I turn a B mix into an A master. The most I would usually say is a "B+". But if the B mix has certain problems that are easily cured with equalization and with no compromises (usually at the extremes of the spectrum) then it is possible to turn it into an A master. But it is probably impossible to turn a C mix into an A master. You're dreaming. The best scenario I can imagine is a mix that needs no work at all. The most exceptional mix engineers can do that on occasion when they are not rushed. I just got an A mix from one of my colleagues who you have not yet heard of, Robert Wawoe. One song needed more work, but hey, who's perfect? Because he also provided stems as well as mixes, I was able to retweak some of the lead and chorus vocal levels on that song and give the band some poost on a climax and help turn all of his A mixes into an A+ master. The eq settings on most songs were flat! Most of the transformation was in some small dynamics areas. This was the first master in a long time where I would say my BIGGEST contribution was in getting the spaces right between the songs and levelling the songs one to another (which is difficult if not impossible to accomplish during a mix). This doesn't exactly answer the question "the limitations of mastering", but it puts a perspective on the topic, as in "you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse" and furthermore, you can only embellish and polish. But can you "transform"? I do believe you can transform, but only with an A mix to begin with, which can be transformed into an A+, but you have to start with an A or at least a B+. BK

Well said Bob.