Some awesome tracks there! Really love the drums on that first album session, has an oldskool hardcore breaks feel, just slowed down a bit. Right up my ally!
There's a constant pull in opposite directions of the desire to get it right and nail every detail vs the pressure to ship on time and maximise your value. 4 songs a day non stop for a month is WILD!
Nicholas - Great video! On the second project, where each song is loaded into your DAW - are all those songs NOT mastered? In other words, are you mastering all 10 songs at the same time? Or are they all mastered other than adding loudness? I dont understand. I've just never seen a whole album layed out like that. Admittedly I'm new to the game. This is a great teaching moment.
@@Stormsurf001 This is a more traditional mastering session, where the artist is making an entire album and the mastering engineer is finding a way to make the entire album cohesive and flow and is mastering it to be a single entity. It's actually kind of rare for people to make albums these days, it's more often single tracks or EPs, so it's unsurprising you may not of seen it before, but almost every single used to come in the single version and an album version back on CDs, so there was often at least two masters (sometimes more if radio mixes or official remixes were released on the CD, although they may of been mastered for CD all together), but there would be at a minimum one for the single and then the album version where the entire album was mastered together as one body of work, seperatly from any single releases, which often had their own indavidual masters outside of the album master. This was primarily because a lot of singles used to get released upfront of the full album release to build hype and drive the album sales when it came out (sometimes the main single version and the album version were even mixed differently too!).
@DaftyBoi412 Thanks so much for the perspective Dafty! Very helpful. I'm no great mixer/mastering engineer but have been working on an album and have been mastering each song individually. But I see the value in what Nicholas is doing in the video, so that all the songs in the collection have a similar sound. Yeah, nowadays it seems everyone just releases singles, or drops a few songs at a time to streaming services and really stretches out the release process. For my purposes, because each song in my collection requires so much separate processing, I think I'll partially master them individually to get them to the 95% mark, then do like what Nicholas is doing and create a new project with all songs concatenated to get the final 5% of fairy dust, plus maximizing. I just can't imagine how much automation would be required for clipping (using Nicholas's clipping strategy) eq, compression, special processing, without doing the heavy lifting on a track by track basis. But that's probably because I'm a beginner ha ha! That said, I am using the same mastering template for each song. I think thats what Nicholas is doing, with just tiny tweaks from song to song. But it's not exactly clear in the video whats going on under the covers. Guess I'll just play with this concept and see what happens. All this is super educational and really useful! I can't say enough how thankful I am for everyone's willingness to share info. Thanks for your patience and understanding 🙏
@@Stormsurf001 If I'm not mistaken each track has it's own seperate mastering chain on that track, and he's mastering them indavidualy but with the album layed out in such a way where it's easy to jump back and forth and nip and tuck things so it all works as one , there might be something on the stereo out bus, but I think that'd make things harder rather than easier if doing any heavy lifting there, and if there is any processing that they are all running through, it's only being tickled by it (but I don't think there is other than maybe a final brick wall limiter/clipper just as a precaution and dithering or something along them lines). You'll have to ask Nick though to be sure, as I'm only gathering what Info I can from watching the vid, and from my own personal experiences (and everyone has their own little ways they do certain things that works for them). 😉👍
@DaftyBoi412 Ah - that makes perfect sense now! So each song is on its own track in the DAW, with the mastering plugins in the standard plugin slots for the track. So assuming 10 tracks, your mastering template would be duplicated 10 times. I'll go zoom in on the video when he screen shares his DAW and see if I can see that. Thanks again. And in this way one can then jump song to song easily and validate no big swings in final volume, timbre and texture. Epic and brilliant!
So all the artist had to do in the first story was turn the song down, And they didn’t know how to do that so you sent out a quieter -14LUFS version? That’s mind boggling
Ultimately yes, but the artists isn't aware normalisation is turned off, they simply, play one song, not overloading system (-14 normalised) then audio raw at full scale and it blows out the system.
Misrakes happen, and not all musicians are technically minded. It's part of the reason they hire people like us to begin with! Especially if they are from the days of CDs or before, when a certain volume on the amp meant a certain level of peak power, and you could compare the loudness of any source material. Where as now days a lot of online content is actually peaking like -12 or even more down the dbfs scale, so when you play a properly mastered file on a system set for that volume it can be so loud it overdrivers the amp and speakers, and could catch someone out if they wern't expecting it.
Love your work ! and yes, the album Mindscape is gorgeous 🔥
Some awesome tracks there! Really love the drums on that first album session, has an oldskool hardcore breaks feel, just slowed down a bit. Right up my ally!
Yeah it's an amazing album
There's a constant pull in opposite directions of the desire to get it right and nail every detail vs the pressure to ship on time and maximise your value. 4 songs a day non stop for a month is WILD!
love this man 😊 appreciate this channel a lot
I was thinking the same thing while watching this video. Love this man and his channel 😃
I appreciate you mate! Keep up the awesome work!
Nicholas - Great video! On the second project, where each song is loaded into your DAW - are all those songs NOT mastered? In other words, are you mastering all 10 songs at the same time? Or are they all mastered other than adding loudness? I dont understand. I've just never seen a whole album layed out like that. Admittedly I'm new to the game. This is a great teaching moment.
Hey Storm,
Those songs were NOT mastered, that is my album mastering session!
@@Stormsurf001 This is a more traditional mastering session, where the artist is making an entire album and the mastering engineer is finding a way to make the entire album cohesive and flow and is mastering it to be a single entity.
It's actually kind of rare for people to make albums these days, it's more often single tracks or EPs, so it's unsurprising you may not of seen it before, but almost every single used to come in the single version and an album version back on CDs, so there was often at least two masters (sometimes more if radio mixes or official remixes were released on the CD, although they may of been mastered for CD all together), but there would be at a minimum one for the single and then the album version where the entire album was mastered together as one body of work, seperatly from any single releases, which often had their own indavidual masters outside of the album master. This was primarily because a lot of singles used to get released upfront of the full album release to build hype and drive the album sales when it came out (sometimes the main single version and the album version were even mixed differently too!).
@DaftyBoi412 Thanks so much for the perspective Dafty! Very helpful. I'm no great mixer/mastering engineer but have been working on an album and have been mastering each song individually. But I see the value in what Nicholas is doing in the video, so that all the songs in the collection have a similar sound. Yeah, nowadays it seems everyone just releases singles, or drops a few songs at a time to streaming services and really stretches out the release process. For my purposes, because each song in my collection requires so much separate processing, I think I'll partially master them individually to get them to the 95% mark, then do like what Nicholas is doing and create a new project with all songs concatenated to get the final 5% of fairy dust, plus maximizing. I just can't imagine how much automation would be required for clipping (using Nicholas's clipping strategy) eq, compression, special processing, without doing the heavy lifting on a track by track basis. But that's probably because I'm a beginner ha ha! That said, I am using the same mastering template for each song. I think thats what Nicholas is doing, with just tiny tweaks from song to song. But it's not exactly clear in the video whats going on under the covers. Guess I'll just play with this concept and see what happens. All this is super educational and really useful! I can't say enough how thankful I am for everyone's willingness to share info. Thanks for your patience and understanding 🙏
@@Stormsurf001 If I'm not mistaken each track has it's own seperate mastering chain on that track, and he's mastering them indavidualy but with the album layed out in such a way where it's easy to jump back and forth and nip and tuck things so it all works as one , there might be something on the stereo out bus, but I think that'd make things harder rather than easier if doing any heavy lifting there, and if there is any processing that they are all running through, it's only being tickled by it (but I don't think there is other than maybe a final brick wall limiter/clipper just as a precaution and dithering or something along them lines).
You'll have to ask Nick though to be sure, as I'm only gathering what Info I can from watching the vid, and from my own personal experiences (and everyone has their own little ways they do certain things that works for them). 😉👍
@DaftyBoi412 Ah - that makes perfect sense now! So each song is on its own track in the DAW, with the mastering plugins in the standard plugin slots for the track. So assuming 10 tracks, your mastering template would be duplicated 10 times. I'll go zoom in on the video when he screen shares his DAW and see if I can see that. Thanks again. And in this way one can then jump song to song easily and validate no big swings in final volume, timbre and texture. Epic and brilliant!
So all the artist had to do in the first story was turn the song down, And they didn’t know how to do that so you sent out a quieter -14LUFS version? That’s mind boggling
Ultimately yes, but the artists isn't aware normalisation is turned off, they simply, play one song, not overloading system (-14 normalised) then audio raw at full scale and it blows out the system.
Misrakes happen, and not all musicians are technically minded. It's part of the reason they hire people like us to begin with! Especially if they are from the days of CDs or before, when a certain volume on the amp meant a certain level of peak power, and you could compare the loudness of any source material. Where as now days a lot of online content is actually peaking like -12 or even more down the dbfs scale, so when you play a properly mastered file on a system set for that volume it can be so loud it overdrivers the amp and speakers, and could catch someone out if they wern't expecting it.
Wow, damn. I mean in the past video you said that your average price was around 800$, so you made 113X that value in 1 month? Holly cheetos.
🤣🤣🤣 yeah that sounds 100 % realistic
$800 is my mixing rate not mastering rate, mastering rate is $150.
Sorry for pocket watching and congratulations for such a busy month. 🤣🤣
@@nashse7en All G ! Thanks brother!
You should really just learn sign language, give your arms something to do 😂
Dig the channel.