Really enjoyed this reaction video from my friend Nick at Panorma Mastering. Lots of great technicals and opinions. Check it out! ruclips.net/video/DM2xd0ASztw/видео.html
“Why should I pay someone $2000 to make my music sound like shit when I can do it myself and make it sound like shit?” - Jpegmafia, multi million selling rapper / self producer
exactly. the point of hip hop is to sound like it was dubbed from a cassette that was dubbed from a radio broadcast of a poorly pressed 12". Music doesn't need to be pristine. It's supposed to make you feel something.
@@jonyoungmusic thats why pre-internet when bands would record at studios they'd have a very intimate relationship with all the engineers putting the record together. It was never meant to be an "outsourced" labor.
Dynamic range 4 or below loudness wars destruction of music. One listen fatigue redundancy - leading to music with no key changes - click tracks with child's nursery rhyme melody - wriiten be 1 of 3 "global producers' over the top. Insert pitched corrected 'artist' at this point.
You wouldn’t pay anyone any money that would make any song sound like shit that’s a weird question or statement. But if you paid a professional mastering engineer, and you know he’s good by name or by word-of-mouth like you would anything you buy I’m sure you know that you wouldn’t get close to his mix , it would sound perfect on anything you play it on. that’s how you know it on a little shitty speaker played on some shitty headphones put on some headphones play play it in a car played in a car with an exploding system. if you just started mastering or mastering for a year or two by watching a couple videos here and there guarantee, it will only sound good in your bedroom if it sounds good at all. I’m not a mass engineer I’m an artist and I had a well known mastering engineer that charges way more than $2000 per song Mix one of my songs is a favor because my family knows him that was 10 years ago. I still use that as a reference and nothing has come close to it but then again, I haven’t had anyone that good master my music.
Here's how old I am: in 1966 my songwriting partner and I paid a local music store owner to make a record for us to send to a local radio station. He recorded us on a direct-to-disc rig. We sang and played into one mic; the signal went to a needle that engraved the sound onto a lacquer-covered metal disc. Two songs, three takes: we had to throw out the disc for one botched take. A few days later we heard ourselves warbling through the air waves. It's fun to think I actually recorded in the same way Robert Johnson did!
"Every step of the record making process should always be about honoring the previous steps. Taking the vision of everyone who has touched the project before you and supporting it." This is brilliant! Every mixing and mastering engineer needs to hear this!
@@progressionspod makes so much sense! I never understood the mastering proces, every time i finish mixing my projects and its a dead end. But still didn't know what i have to do next! Thank you for explaining this!
I greatly agree with this statement. As a producer I don't usually mix or master what I produce, but I don't consider my job finished when I send the tracks to the mix engineer. So I supervise the mixing and mastering process, making sure that the vision we forged with the artist stays true to the very last step.
I am a stage lighting designer/director; this is also my philosophy. I don't make my lighting a stand-alone entity; I prefer to support the other designers' work and that of the talent on stage. ~
Involving another set of trusted (human) ears as mixer on something I’m producing or as mastering engineer on something I’m mixing is one of my FAVORITE things in music making. IMO absolutely essential part of the collaborative, creative process.
i have no training, no experience, and nearly zero exposure to the field that you're discussing. Yet the video is totally entertaining and fully watchable to the end from that point of view. in my opinion that is great content. i also really like your balanced perspective which doesnt push too hard on tropes or take too harsh of a stance. I'm fairly sure you could make ideos about anything even outside your field of expertise with this approach. well done man!
The x factor is the song. An early 60s Bob Dylan song, recorded live, with one guitar and a pitchy vocal will still be better than anything i write that's been recorded with tech 60 years in advance and mastered by the most expensive mastering engineer in the world. People listen to great songs.
A million percent this. I grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to medium wave radio stations that battled with the “snow” noise. It’s the song. It always was the song. It’s how we engage with it.
For me i got tired of spending money on other people who simply dont have the vision i have and never produce something im excited to hear. For this reason i took the time to truly learn and understand mastering from the bottom up, and for once, i m happy with what I'm hearing.
I have a similar reason - 90% of what I hear is too smashed and bright. I like the sound of music from the 70s and 80s - I like dynamic range. If I want to make my music obnoxiously loud and bright, I can do that myself for free. I'd rather make something that's not quite as loud or bright, but sounds better. So my music won't compete with the top 40 hits in terms of volume, but it was never going to anyway.
The key with mastering isn't too just send it off and let him go at it all willy Nilly. You have to provide some level of guidance that informs the engineer of what sonic direction you are trying to go in. I never send a record off and "see what he does". I always tell a mastering engineer what I'm looking for. I.e. I need this opened, transparent with some warmth and a little punch. In general, your mix should already have those characteristics. But a solid mastering engineer can preserve what is there. 👍🏿👍🏿👍🏿💯
@dpmusic21 I think what's happening is you have mixing engineers who say they also offer professional mastering. Usually, it's not professional. they're not very good at it. Adding eq, compression, saturation, tape, limiter usually ozone I could do my self. However, I have recently been using a strictly mastering engineer who uses real hardware and has a passion for mastering, and the best part he does not offer mixing. So, while I learned a lot about mastering, I am more than happy using a passionate mastering guy who is a professional
@@progressionspodSome more pedantry: before 1948, and the advent of the long playing record (LP), it was mostly *shellac* not vinyl. And more random facts: pre-1948, all music was singles only, 3 to 5 minutes per shellac record side.
@@vinylarchaeologist Also, before the advent of the long playing record, multiple singles by the same artist (or even different artists) were placed into a custom book, or "album" as they were commonly called. These multiple song collections were the origination of the "record album" we refer to today.
I use one reference track and that's it! Too many and you end up going round in circles. Sometimes the mix won't need anything bar a little bus compression and maybe a "safe" limiter. Just make it sound good to you. The only people doing level comparisons are other obsessive engineers, not listeners.
The reference track should be your track that you're mastering. That initially probably shoulds moronic but IMO if you compare yourself or the band to some one else and their song or album does that mean you just want to sound like the other artist and not yourself?
If we are talking sound quality, loudness, dynamics, highlighted frequency zones, it's different. The thing is like this: imagine you have a bunch of the songs you're referencing your track to come up on shuffle and your track is around there somewhere. You'll want to try your best to make it not sound out of place, no?
@@CaptHiltz Agreed. Clients send me reference tracks all the time and honestly, they have nothing in common with the music and have no bearing on what is possible with their mix. The only time its useful is if they send me say a track that is really 70s disco sounding and their track is some clean ableton production. Then I get the tape and Curve Bender etc as I know they want a nostalgic 70s tone usually. The funny thing is tho with those I will often send a modern subtle one that compliments the mix alongside it and most of the time they say, "you know what, now that I have heard it this way I realize I was romanticizing the vintage aesthetic and I like the modern one more."
This is a good philosophy to have - but the problem is that if your listening environment is not very very accurate then the simple truth is that it will be only you that it sounds good to. Most people invest a lot of money in gear and have little to no investment in their working environment. A pro will invest a lot of time and money in their working environment first before moving in a single piece of equipment. A proper mastering engineer will have taken that principle to the next level still.
@@rockosmos3884 Indeed. Why people think that its in any way useful to critique and enhance a track on the same tier of monitoring that it has been written on is shot sighted. Mastering is about providing a level of finished sound that the artist themselves cannot and doing it from a place of precision and accuracy.
Really enjoying this video. I'm a multi decade "tech geek" who has been developing a mastering process for a long while. AI began to offer REALISTIC fantastic possibilities starting about 7 years ago. I decided to take a different approach to soundcrafting & use AI quite differently then most of the services that were arising in the marketplace. But my process still requires a competent engineer. The end result is a process that is designed to POST-master a recording (even fix poorly mastered material). And the end sound never fails to impress when A/B compared with the source material - when the MIX was thoughtfully done. You see, an AI system should always presume that a MIX and everything in it was done with INTENT. The process of mastering is to give every part of that mix its own moment/s in the aural spotlight when it's supposed to stand out. Mastering that doesn't abide that vision can sound good or sometimes really bad; - but rarely ever as excellent as it could sound. "Excellent requires a different approach". With the process I have developed, "LOUD", is NOT a priority goal. Why? Because "LOUD" steals detail by mis-allocating bits to "loudness" when the volume control on the listener's end could simply be turned a bit higher instead. Besides, streaming services crush "loud" content down anyway. By not following herd mentality, - the process I offer ends up making sound that is just as loud when streaming - but with details & transients that outshine the masters that focused on "loud". And thanks to RUclips's fantastic licensing model, I can showcase this process using a number of popular tracks from various genres so that artists & producers can get a feel for what is possible with quality post-mastering. I have a friend who is a professional musician who is valued advisor with a background in broadcast. He summed it up by saying: "When I play the finished tracks you process in my THX capable auto sound system & turn it up; - I have an experience. It's like hearing this stuff again for the 1st time." So, thanks for your video pointing out the difference between "PAR", vs. excellence. Want to know more? Smash my !C0N...
One reason to hire someone to do the master is because if you've self produced a project, at the mastering point it can become kinda painful. You've heard that track so many times demoing, tracking, mixing...and by the time it gets to the mastering it seems to be only *then* when certain things you don't like about the previous stages become apparent, because of the different way you listen when mastering. It can be very hard sometimes to discern between those elements that really should be fixed (things that a listener might notice that are truly detrimental to the song) and things that could be - but probably shouldn't be - as all that's doing is making the mix perfect...and boring. Just been through this...song is dropping tomorrow...so a bit a break before the next round! lol
@@progressionspod The project is called Beltane, and the track I just dropped is on my YT channel. Also of course links to bandcamp etc in the details.
Aside from AI, you mentioned that DSP's have loudness normalization. With Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio on the rise, you can't just send a .wav file to someone else and have them master it. Along with the integrated loudness "cap" at -18 LUFS. I think the biggest thing regardless of what you're mastering, having a second set of ears on the project is always nice to have. It is still a skill that takes YEARS to develop, and for some, just having a good enough room for Mastering is hard to have in this economy. I love the quote "just use your ears", but also question yourself on what you're listening to. While also trying new things. Phenomenal video!!
i'll be real honest here, i use all the AI mastering tools, and have figured out which ones sounds best for me. now I wouldn't even want to pay a mastering engineer, $150, because I almost feel like he might be feeding it through these ai's also. unless i was in the room with him, or he video'd the whole process, or zoom. just being real here.
Bro, then did you actually make the track you made since everyone is apparently using AI tools now? Did you even write this comment or did you copy paste it with an AI?
@@johngddr5288 true the lines are blurring, and will even get more blurred soon, in this case i wrote that, with no chatgpt ai edits. in terms of making music with ai, i believe music is the end product, just like a restaurant serves you the dish and you eat it, you gonna ask the waitress and cook all the questions on how they made it, chopped it, every step of the process? shit you wouldn't even want to eat it if you found out.... same with music, i am sure some of your favorite all time songs have weird studio tricks or mishaps, that we would be like hey you cheated!!! anyhoot. make the end results something that resonates with the listener with or without ai
I was trying to get something about PQs and secret tracks in there, but it felt like it was too much. I definitely think cohesion across an album is huge, especially in today’s world of different mixers and producers on every track.
Great video!! The real problem is that as the decades progress, new music listeners are hearing worse and worse mastering as the norm. Therefore, what passes for "good" mastering now is crap. Great mastering requires someone who has, not only great listening and engineering skills, but good taste. That last part, "good taste" is the most elusive of all to find in a mastering engineer. Also, saying that “Louder is always better” perpetuates the problem.
Love that quote at 6:12 'mastering has never been about making changes, it's about making the right changes' Also the piece right after about honoring every previous step to support their vision
Great video. Something you touched on but maybe not emphasised enough there is the addition of a 'fresh pair of ears' that didn't spend hours /days / months on the project and have no idea of the struggles and the decisions you made as musician / mixer. I do the mastering for a small label and the thing that I find that most bands that I work with say to me as feedback is that they never thought of the things I picked up on as they spent so much time with the project that they lost objectivity. The tools are there (check out Logic 11 'session players') but the relationship between sonics and emotions are still (who knows for how long) something that machines can't figure out.
When digital came onto the scene it did not increase audio headroom. If anything, it decreased, as overs (peaks above 0dBFS) resulted in CD plants rejecting the master tape (yes they were digital encoded U-matic tapes) as they were out of spec.
That's right. I spent the first 25 years as an engineer where all albums went to vinyl. Vinyl has severe limitations that CD's and hard drives don't have and the main one being is bass. The more bass in the recording the bigger the grooves get on vinyl and you only have so much real estate on a vinyl disc so engineers would leave things like the high and low eq to the vinyl mastering engineer. The guy that made the lacquer disc and plates. Too much bass also makes radio station limiters chomp down on it and drops the level of the whole record What people today call a mastering engineer is a guy with an elaborate expensive home monitoring system that believes they know what translates better on the stereo master. The last records I mixed in my studio that were on complimation CD's and mastered in Nashville the producer said the mastering engineer told him my contributions were the only ones he didn't have to master. That's partly because I got use to mixing for vinyl record albums and radio plus I already had 40 years experience mixing. The media used today can take all the bass you can throw at it so it's more forgiving than the old days. If someone is uncertain about their mixes then mastering may be a good option if they know what they are doing.
With so-called professional mastering engineers churning out albums like Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts" and Korn's "Requiem", can anyone blame people for taking matters into their own hands?
@@RealHomeRecordingidk, i thought that _GUTS_ wasn't too bad on that front (didn't stop me from enjoying the music). don't know what happened with that korn album tho, wtf
To me (62 years old, 1960s and 1970s the greatest music decades in my mind), mastering is supposed to be about making sure that (A) all the songs on an album are consistent in volume against each other, and (B) all the songs are consistent with each other in an overall tone and sound (e.g. that you don't have one track that is bright and harsh while others are different and more dark/bottomy; you need a signature overall frequency spread throughout the album). Problem is, these days the album format doesn't really mean much anymore, so what I said above might seem almost irrelevant for a lot of people who think only in terms of releasing one track at a time. But it is in fact relevant anyway, because you need an overall sonic signature as an artist.
As a mastering engineer, I feel the need to specify what it really means in my interpretation: My take is that the role of a mastering engineer is to take the mixes and make them sound like what the musicians and producers intended when they were recording and mixing. Occasionally, this means doing nothing (or at least almost nothing). It's not about making mixes sound 'better', but often the ideas that were decided in the studio need help in order to translate to consumer reproduction equipment of all types; whether it will be played on a £25,000 high-end stereo system or through a mono Samsung mobile phone speaker, the emotive impact needs to be the same. It is also literal Engineering. There are certain things that need to be addressed that don't impact the music directly, which are purely technical aspects that need to be sorted - phase interactions, etc. Hell, I even get some things with DC-offsets that need adressing...
Love this. I’m with that 100%. It’s respecting the work done before, recognizing the vision of the team and then supporting that. Sometimes it’s doing almost nothing. Sometimes it’s the dark arts. Haha.
That's the summary for most of the digital tools we have access today. If you are in a budget, you can get away much more than in the old days. This makes making more accessible, and the sheer quantity of it being made is astounding.
mastering is also making a sequence of songs flow pace wise and sonically. That is, if people are releasing an actual album and not serial singles. I master multiple tracks from the same release together, in order, and adjust so they sound complimentary. Learned this at Golden mastering in Ventura, life changing session.
Mastering has always been a *service* to artists, not merely audio processing. It's an entirely different mode/skill of listening than in mixing. Objectivity. Context. Quality control. And you get *one* chance to hear a song for the first time.
Recent (unsolicited) feedback I received: "Great job on the track, I'm really happy with it. I used LandR as a test a few days back but your work blows their AI out of the water. It was good working with you both for the convenience and the quality."
@@jasonk125 Musicians are often very dumb when it comes to the technical part, and mastering engineers have usually been professional musicians in the past and know their way around digital audio. And it's not even about micro-iterations at the level of tenths of decibels, most musicians have no idea how to put together an adequate mix without clipping, let alone tonal balance and fine tuning.
@@gnzllr Musicians as in people who play instruments? Well obviously, that's not the same thing as being a producer. I think any decent bedroom producer should be able to mix AND master their work. And in 2024 it certainly doesn't require expensive mastering engineers to do it to a competent level. It's also part of the same skillset. What mastering even is, isn't clearly defined anymore as it once was. Now it's basically just a final effect chain on the track to bring everything together and prepare for digital release. EQ, compression and limiting aren't rocket science.
Who nominated you for a Grammy? Most people do not know that artists and engineers and... so on can nominate THEMSELVES which means that "Grammy-nominated" is a fairly meaningless title. Sounds important but a universe away from "Grammy-winning". In your description it should read "altogether", not "all together". I think mastering by a human being is what I'd choose if I were a "real" act with $. No AI for me, thanks. By the way, what hit albums or songs have you engineered or mixed? Just curious because if you are "Grammy-nominated" then one would think you must be at the top of the field. Thx!
The problem in the not too distant past was that mastering engineers/producers were demanding more money than the artists made. There is no money in music streaming so the future will be shaped by necessity.
I think thing with mastering is that previously mixing engineers were listening to the material on the tape, but the listener was listening on the vinyl or cassette tape, which are quite different media. So the goal of the mastering engineer was to ensure that transition to different media doesn’t ruin the work of the mixing engineer. But nowadays the medium for the mixing engineer and listener is mostly the same (if we don’t count conversion from wav to mp3 or aac), most of the music is no longer transitioned to physical media. So if mixing engineer is able to make final mixes loud enough, there is not much sense in having mastering engineer.
Despite the obvious issues of over limiting and excitation, I always find the real joy of mastering is in rolling off as much treble and bass as you can to get a nice dynamic range in the low mids. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is where the heart is. Not just of a song that feels good, but will play louder and brighter on different systems more easily. I no longer really devote much time to music but when I did, my best mix/masters were flukes because the track itself was great.
I spend my time helping my clients during my Mastering sessions. I listen carefully to their requests. And yes sometimes I get 3 or 4 versions until the client asks for another fine tuning. So what ?! When you love your job you don't care to spend 1h more working or go the extra mile because it's part of yourself. Be yourself, respect yourself and love what you do. The rest will follow.Yes I am old school though I have more young artists asking for Loudness "with emotion". ❤
IMO the root issue is the audience/consumer likes what they like and don't care about the quality of the music they listen to and are probably listening on low quality headphones/devices. The mixing/mastering process is important to the musician/engineer and likely no one else.
I loved pearl jam since my teenage, and obviously it started with ten and all those great songs. The moment you said louder and brighter it came to me this remaster of the album that I couldn't listen to one single song, simply because the record was too bright and compressed, "loud" and "bright".
You make a ton of good points. Here's where my take is a little (not a lot) different: - I currently self-produce my own music, mostly for budgetary reasons. In the online spaces where I hang out, as far as I can tell, almost no self-producing songwriter thinks mastering is only louder + brighter. There are endless discussions on sound selection, dynamics vs competing in the loudness wars, phase cancellation, subtleties of compression styles, etc. We want our music to sound good. - I put out about 3-4 songs a month (I do music full-time these days). If I had the money, I'd love to pay a mastering engineer, and probably a mixing engineer to do the production work, and I could focus on writing, performing, promotion, and teaching. I agree with all the benefits of having a professional master engineer in the process. But it's not even remotely in my budget. When I get a mega-hit - different story. :) For now, I try to do the best I can with my meager budget. I watch a lot of RUclips videos :). And try to apply my 50- years of playing music to the new skills of production. And the more I do self-production, the more I respect the skills of a professional. Still, I'm improving. - As you point out, the democratization of music (imperfect but definitely a thing) allows many like me to put their music online. In my youth, the people putting out records were performers who had a record contract, and the mastering engineer came with that. Today, like me, there a million musicians recording mostly in the box, at home, so it's a different customer base. - When I get the $$$ and can afford a mastering engineer, I might be a lousy customer. My process isn't strictly linear. At the 11th hour, on the 50th listen, when I think I'm done, I'll decide, emphatically, to cut out two bars, or add a second guitar in the intro. I just hear it. The process doesn't drag on forever, but it does go on for a couple weeks. Maybe some mastering engineers are cool with musical changes at the last minute (90% of my tunes), and conversely I'm cool with musical suggestions (though I may not always follow them). I would imagine those iterations would raise the cost, as well.
There was another comment somewhere in here where I said this, but the person that will care the most about your music and the final product will always be you. I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music if you feel you get the results that fit your vision. You said "in my youth" I don't know how old you are, but I'm for sure no long in my "youth". lol. I think the amount of information out there for people, and the way people coming up now are passionate about absorbing it all and doing things themselves is AMAZING. It's a resource we didn't have when I was starting out, and we also looked at learning differently. I definitely respect doing it all yourself. And I DEFINITELY respect putting 3-4 songs out a month... That's the way to break out these days. Thanks for watching!
Nice. I hope so. We've been recording our own stuff and just relying on the individual to turn up the volume knob. Mainly because it sounds better that way!
These are my observations about mastering as a professionally taught heavy metal guitarist (Musicians Institute/GIT class of 2000) for the past 28 years. My observations are what I've gained through being exposed to people who know more than me and my limited personal experience. Anyone who wishes to correct me please feel free to do so because I'm posting this comment so I can learn. 1) Mastering techniques and styles will depend upon your musical genre. I grew up recording heavy metal in the 80s/90s. A lot of people were recording demos to 4/8 track cassette tape then the all in one TASCAM/Fostex style digital console/recorders/hard drives of the late 90s and early 00s. Real pros used things like ADATs or Macs. For the hobbyist, a lot of mixing and mastering back then seemed to revolve around bouncing down to the fewest number of tracks and making sure you had a clear, loud sound that was consistent in volume from song to song on an album. Mixes, many of which were often done in real time during bouncing or mixdown to two track tape, tended to sound well balanced in terms of instrument volume but also flat. Mastering is where everything went from sounding like an amateur who knew what they were doing to professional. Mastering added depth to a mix. The video mentioned loudness and clarity as important in mastering. *In heavy metal I would also say punch and weight are important.* You want the low end to be heavy but tight at fast tempos, and the lower mid range often has to be very carefully dialed in in metal to get a good sound. So I would say mastering is also important for the low end and low mids. Avoiding unpleasant artifacts like compressor pumping on the master bus is important as well unless that is stylistically desired. 2) The trend in heavy metal since 2000 or so has been for very transparent, flat mixes. This is especially true for "modern" styles with a scooped midrange. A more vintage heavy metal sound emphasizes the upper midrange and a more colored sound generally. My thinking is the mastering techniques you use will depend upon the overall sound you are going for. Traditionally in metal people have opted for very compressed, loud mixes. In recent years people seem to be embracing more headroom and dynamics in their metal recordings, especially transitions from soft to loud points and vice versa. People seem to be willing to sacrifice a little loudness for more variation in volume. 3) Generally, it is best for the mastering engineer to need to do as little as possible because the engineers/mixers already did their job well. Small adjustments. Minimal changes. I was always taught the -6 db cut rule and anything more extreme than that is undesirable. Avoid boosting if possible. Don't make broad changes on a mastering bus. If a mastering engineer has to fix a lot of things, it's probably not going to turn out well. 4) It's more important to have knowledge than plugins. Things like multiband compressors and dynamic EQs may help amateurs, but they're not going to solve anything if the engineer doesn't know how to dial those tools in to begin with. Over relying on these tools is like using a generic preset for a good master--experienced ears will be able to tell you are faking it. 5) We live in an anti-audiohphile society thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and ear buds. Your painstaking mixing and mastering job won't be noticed as much when people are listening on subpar consumer grade devices. Additionally, we seem to want to avoid deliberately colored mixes. (T-Racks seems to come to mind for this as a plugin.) *However, as the video noted, it's in this color that our trademark sound as unique artists emerges.* Because most people aren't audiophiles, I often "mix and master" (I use that term loosely due to my ignorance) on my consumer grade 5.1 speaker system so I have a reference point for a typical setup. Nice monitors help, but if your room isn't treated in the first place, I don't think they help. Your song may sound like it has more bass and clarity through good monitors, but in a bad room or through small, cheap speakers that may not matter. So I usually try my stuff out on good monitors, then consumer grade stuff, then perhaps in the car. Another benefit of 5.1 recording heavy metal guitars is if you route multiple guitar tracks to your surround speakers you may get a heavier, more immersive sound. Quad tracked rhythm guitars are usually done hard left/right and then some off center with a reduction in volume perhaps. I have thought about doing these quad tracks with each gear coming through one of the 5.1 satellite speakers instead to see how it sounds. Recording, mixing, and mastering for 5.1 seems to be more of a thing for film scores than commercial music, but I would like to try it so that I have both a good 5.1 mix and a good traditional stereo mix if the listener isn't using a 5.1 setup. I don't know if this is possible. I would think you would lose rear fade instruments on a traditional stereo. Thanks.
Honestly, mastering is only needed for vintage stuff. With modern equipment, if you can make a recording sound awesome on the mixing stage - why master it? Don't take my word for it - ask Steven Wilson.
When the vast majority of music listeners on the most popular songs are 16 year olds, no one is really going to care about the differences between mastering techniques, AI or human.
I think when it comes in the mastering, there’s 2 things to Basie to trebly or the opposite need to be balanced before release, but on the other hand, I don’t believe that anything should be too little too soft. It’s the texture and frequencies of the song that make it original for example, some songs have a heavy kick which suits a song. Some songs have louder, high hats that suits a song, so I don’t think everything should be balanced perfectly because it becomes boring with no dynamics.
I tell you what. My friend from Uzbekistan was able to make great mastering with built-in laptop soundcard, earphones and/or Microlabs Solo and get us released in Japan on DISCS in early 2010s
Amazing video. I am a Mixing and Mastering engineer, with +1.1B streams and I couldn't agree more with you. All my sh1t masters I did on the past was when I tried to "do a lot of things". Softwares with automatic decisions like Gulfos, Ozone, Bloom, etc, tend to create a false sensation that is improving the sound, but most of the time they are ruining. Understand what's sounding good and bad and take the right decisions from there is the key to a "great quality" master. Cheers
Amen to THAT! I agree fully to every point you made. Thank you for not being afraid to call "Izotope" out as contributing to the problem. I too will NEVER hit that button!
My guess (or rather: fear) where the idea that "mastering is all about volume and brightness" comes from is, bluntly said, that many people simply don´t hear it. For me as a listener, it is definitely more the mastering than the mix that decides if I like a recording or not. As a musician who made and finished five long-playing records (both vinyl and CD) with a band, my experience is similar: Mastering is all about listening, and about decisions. We made the last three of the records with the same mixing engineer (because work and the results were great) and with the same mastering engineer (again because work and the results were great) - but, of course, they are not the same person. Moreover, the mastering engineer was never involved in the mixing process except for one or two short visits in the mixing studio. In my eyes (or should I say: ears), what makes a great mastering engineer are not so much his tools or the tricks he knows but a fresh, curious and critical ear and the ability to verbalize and communicate complex thought about sound. Our approach was usually that all band members were more or less involved in the mixing process, and then, after one or two weeks to let it seep, just I and our mastering engineer did the mastering in two or at most three intense work nights (it was the band who assigned this task to me because I tend to "listen deeply into" things).I can't imagine that the results would have been anywhere near as satisfactory with an automated or even no mastering at all. In short: Mastering is (or better: should be) far, far more than "loudness and brightness".
I stepped back a bit from wasting too much time on EQ'ing, mixing and mastering altogether. For me it's all about the music, the melodies, the harmonies. And 99% of the general audience doesn't even care much how a track is mastered, or mixed, or EQ'ed. They want good music, not necessarily good mastered-sounding music. If at all, it's just a bonus.
I had the pleasure of having a couple of projects mastered at Masterphonics in Nashville…. To date, no software has come close but I imagine it depends on what you’re looking for.
I record (track) mix and master my own music. I’ve never used ozone or AI. The whole process is part of my joy..my therapy . I want my own character sound , color , individualization. I track with outboard gear. I use mostly plugins to mix and master . They’ve come a long way. Very selective. I make sure I know them. I do not want things done for me. I do not have chains or templates. No selective settings on anything outboard. I love the art of making music. We live in a great time for technology but if others don’t find their own vibe , everything will sound the same .
Couldn’t agree more. I do think as a creative career progresses you go thru stages. One of the stages is the “sound like everybody” stage because you learn a lot from that. The tech makes that phase seem to last longer than it should these days. End goal though… make what you want and have people respect it for the fact that it’s “you”. Thanks for watching!
When I mix its a simple process 1) get song to sound great on monitor headphones 2) then 'test' mix by playing it in a car stereo with subs 3) then 'test' mix on cell phone speaker . Assuming it passed those tests, the final step is having someone else listen to it. If the fresh ears say it sounds great then its finished.
I think this is the symptom of a much deeper problem. People don’t care about the music they are making as much anymore. They aren’t saving money to get in the studio for days, or paying for someone to bring their vision to light, they aren’t learning about the process that will shape their sound, or practicing over and over until it’s just right. In mass, they just want the cheapest/fastest/easiest way to make and get music out. The purpose of making music should be about making the music, not how many corners can I cut to make this. This disparity as gotten to the point where the performance of the artist is more the editing performance of an engineer or a plugin that fixes the careless performance of someone not caring if they actually can play/sing the music being made. If artists were playing at the caliber that artists played at 40 years ago, we wouldn’t need half of these tools. The saddest thing of all of this is that the artists, who are the ones in charge of making the art, are deciding to take a backseat, and at the same time expecting the cost to decrease, and for either the engineer or ai to pick up the rest. I work with a 14 time Grammy nominated mastering engineer, who’s had 50 years in the business, who worked with Cream, Rush, Queen, The Doors, the list goes on, and when I get him to give a super friend rate of $100 a tune, folks say, “well I could just go online and to it for 10-20 bucks”. Fricken blows my mind. Wish it never went digital, it was better when it was harder to do, because they folks had to be better.
I bought ozone 11 recently because I didnt have time to wait on my mix/mastering engineer and would put on the master assistance. You guessed it, louder and brighter. Upon viewing the metering realizing how uneducated I still am on reading peaks, lufs, rms I knew it felt somewhat competitive but like Travis was getting at, does it really serve the vision of the mix/the song? The answer with master assistance is no. Thats why've committed to learning more about the skill of mastering instead of letting technology steer the art. Im not gonna let it slide when it sounds glued or bright because I know that it doesn't translate to good. When the maximizer is ducting 6 db I take a step back start backing off all the "assistance" moves so I can get closer to serving the song instead of technology giving me a one size fits all sound.
Does ozone 9 have mastering ability? All I’m looking for is the ability to make voice over recordings sound the best they can sound all by themselves. No music in the background.
Yeah Ozone is a mastering suite across the board. I'd say EQ, compression, deessing are going to be your main tools for VoiceOver work which I believe Ozone 9 has . Might have to find a de-esser outside of ozone. Most DAW's have them built in
I don't do mixing, I just do mastering for fun, but I imagine it's not cool for a mixing engineer to be unhappy with the end result when he's proud of his mix but his work is “destroyed” by the mastering process (whatever method is used). When mixing engineers and mastering engineers can work as a team and validate the final results together, even if they don't physically work together and even if they don't work for the same studio or company, I think it can help to achieve optimal results that make everyone happy and proud in the end. It's a state of mind and business model that's unfortunately not very widespread in this industry, unless the mixing and mastering processes are carried out in the same studio or by the same engineer. I wish you a wonderful day and thanks for sharing your great videos on this channel ! Kind Regards from Montreal, Canada 🙏😀🎶🎵🌠🧙♂
I think this is part of the reason that it's important for engineers, producers, mixers, and mastering engineers to know which people in their circle would be a good fit for something. I always try to offer recommendations to clients for other people that I both know are great at what they do, but also are the right fit for a project. Knowing other great people and studios is almost part of the engineers job at this point. Thanks for checking the video out!
It's funny. A friend of mine asked me what Mastering was last weekend. And I told him it was about taking the album material and making it sound cohesive, throughout the whole project. And you might make it louder and EQ it a bit, along the way, but never in a way that was harsh or grating. Honor the work that the artist and the mix engineer did...and retain the character of it. Simply "even it out" from track to track, especially if songs had been recorded in different places and/or mixed by different mix engineers. Just even it out, and make sure it still sounds like how it was meant to, and is exciting in the right ways. But do as little as possible. ;-)
This is a great topic! I think a lot of the misinformation or “bad decisions” people are making are coming from all of the “secret sauce” type of videos suggesting that certain processing methods will always work in combination with a lot of newer engineers being self taught. The internet is powerful but with less experience these “works every time” things are being misinterpreted as a copy and paste type of thing when in fact it seems the majority of them are actually reference/starting points. But too often I feel like it isn’t highlighted that all of these recommendations are what worked for the mix and song being demonstrated. Cheers!
I do my own Masters with Ozone 11 and am pleased with the results. I think the bigger discussion should be about the role of Mastering if/when Dolby Atmos takes off.
Now that’s an interesting topic! Didn’t even think about it when making this video. -18 LUFS feels like such a quiet level after decades of -6. Haha. Matching the energy and saturation of the stereo master when you’re doing the Atmos takes some thought. In the mixes I’ve done I found I had to do some processing to the individual stems as well as some creating limiting to the object busses to get the same vibe. Are you mixing Atmos at all?
@progressionspod I use Studio One which has built in Dolby Atmos. I am just starting to get into it. In reality your mix becomes your master. I use some mix buss processing for the beds and individual track processing for the objects.
@@earledaniels4539 Not sure if Atmos will stick around forever but from the mixing side, it's definitely a lot of fun to do. I set the room up last year and did a couple records. I've got a really great interview in the editing pipeline with one of the first guys to start mixing in Atmos for music. Maybe 2-3 weeks and it'll be out.
Guess what? It won't. I'm old enough to remember the SACD experiment. It will be two channel stereo until we die. I love Bob Clearmountain, but he is kidding himself, and so are you.
@@kenrader4984No, it will last. There's a lot of money being invested in it. It might not be Atmos, but any Spatial. That's the biggest problem now there's competitors. When you have Atmos mix, you can't convert it to Sony360 mix, you need to do it all over. Same stand for THX format. And the massive drawback - there's still no Spotify support for Spatial and they might even have their own format -> that's another competitor on the market. Last but not least, technelogy really develops and so the skills of engineers. You will have (Virtual) Atmos in low tier electronics.
The amount of fx, compression and tweaking we do today on our mixes... why would I add even more? I was an intern at a mastering studio, and I still dont get whats so great about it. Sure, maybe some final eq would be benificial in some cases. But my experience is that mastering engineers often slaps even more compression on songs, making them sound "dead". But thats just my opinion. I might feel this way coming from a background in playing acoustic instruments. 🤔
Fascinating topic, I noticed I would blindly apply ozone on any 'finished' track and convince myself it was the rigjt choice becuase that's the next logical step before releasing it. But since have been trying to be more intentional to the point where sometimes all I gain is 2lufs but that's all the mix needed. Quality in quality out
Mastering your own work is always super challenging. It's hard to have perspective by the time you get to that stage. But being intentional is for sure the way to go. Something like Ozone can give you an "outside opinion", but that opinion isn't always going to be in line with your vision. Thanks for watching!
same here, the bias. i hate master my own mix. in general, i really appreciate mastering engineer, it's magic there. we're mixer, overthinkers... mastering doesn't fit us😂
Mastering is not dead. In my case i mix/master my own tracks and I can tell there is a lot of QA involved. Many artists don’t want to get involved with technicalities so they delegate
Professional mastering borders on the kings new clothes territory after a certain basic standard is reached. Ai and Ai assisted home mastering can reach this standard. When you have the resources to go €2000 a track you are making two people happy, the mastering engineer and yourself, no one else will notice least of all the listeners on Spotify with earbuds. Some interesting points in the video without a doubt.✌🏽
Honestly, great video. You said the things we all need to hear. I’d say, everyone should learn the old school version of mastering, and understand why it’s so impressive when a human puts work into it tastefully. that being said, Phil speisers mastering strip is the only thing in all my years that has actually made me reconsider certain things. If I set a reference of something I love, it gets it damn close, unlike any other competitor. That being said, high end mastering with care and in support of the actual song will always win. But that’s a very specific tool that makes me reconsider my stance on these modern tools. I never liked landr AI or anything automatic. I would sometimes utilize Tokyo dawn labs nova to help gently get some of the EQ characteristics of another song through its match tool in GE edition, but other than that I actually was specialising in mastering the old way. Dutch and Dutch 8C speakers, prism titan mastering grade ad/da conversion, tens of thousands of pounds of analog gear , more than you can count, and now I’m selling my gear. Well, besides the speakers. That counts, of course 😁. But yeah. I am pleasantly surprised by the strip master match thing by Phil. Maybe technology will get close to replacing the engineers at some point. Until then, probably not yet, but it’s getting close.
Great video, and I 100% agree. The one thing I'd add is that, to me, modern mastering is both far better and far worse than in the past. To give two modern examples of artists I like: The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson sounds absolutely amazing, and Can We Please Have Fun by Kings of Leon sounds like mush when you turn up your system. OK, Kings of Leon majors in mush, it's part of the style, but ear fatigue is a real thing, and when the kick drum disappears in the mix, it's not good.
Decent mastering isn't dead it's just out of the range of what most independent artists can afford and not a lot of people offer the service with the level of experience you speak of, being able to enhance a project dynamically. If it wasn't so daunting to understand maybe more people would learn the process and there would be more affordable options.
Most listeners will recognize a "louder" mix as a better mix, hence the volume wars. No matter how good a mastering engineer is, the song itself is king, not the mastering. As musicians and people who want to sound a certain way, we can spend the money for the best mastering available. But that won't make the song itself any better for the non-engineer listeners. Very few of them listen like engineers/musicians. Blending art and science is always going to be subjective, and musicians would do well to stop worrying so much and get their songs out there in the best form they can.
The problem with everything is money being the ultimate goal. Make music that sells, not music you love. Become the kind of engineer that gets hired, not the kind you want to be.
Plugins like Izotope or Ozone don't appeal to me at all, while it never made any sense to me how you could let it generalize your music, ignoring the uniqueness of a track and ignoring the beautiful, nuanced and delicate process mastering is. Thereby mastering as a human activity, I find the icing on the cake. It in fact takes some courage to do so if you know what I mean.
Everything is stored in the mix. You can't master it better, the correct master is correct frequency response that you can see on audio spectrum like using SPAN plugin to visualze it and make sure it's correct master frequency. Compression, Dynamic, threshold and others can be also done in mix too ❤
Wonderful delivery of information, that final set of ears on a mix can be the difference that makes the difference. It’s about Quality for the listeners rather than the extra cost for me!
Yeah. Hopefully mastering is coming to an end! I'm a musician, not a physicist. I want an app that knows how best to blend instruments so that they all sound great together. It's coming.
The new Logic Mastering , ya the vocal upper midrange is very distinct but not a fan of the rest of what goes on . I love multi band compression and limiting . My new fav is F6 Waves compression/EQ . There are the two sets of speakers and the headphones to make judgement with and then my living room stereo . The client is so important in getting it right , they take it and have their task of listening to it on a bunch of systems and the comity of musicians throw in opinions . Thanks for the vid 👍
As a film composer I started out with Ozone because I was a FOMO. However it ruined my mixes and I don't touch Ozone now. Use good plugins and your ears with reference tracks.
Very interesting video. You are definitely right that everything just sounds LOUD, though not always bright I have to say, today. Loud and compressed! When you buy a CD today, it simply doesn't sound as great as a CD did 30 years ago. The new Pet Shop Boys albums is a good (or rather bad!) example. The dynamic range is 5! If it had been released let's say 35 years ago, it would have had a DR of 13 or 15. Why not, when you have a good sounding rough mix, just keep it that way on the finished product?
I’ve produced and mixed a whole project literally used a professional to master it and paid 1k but compared it to ozone 11 and honestly I preferred ozone 11 on that particular project.... ozone 11 is actually 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
I think the transfer you cited from this mastering issue to the whole process of recording a song in the future when you make use of AI processing everywhere is the most dangerous and risky place we can go to drown music at last. Individuallity is a very important part of the process and human presence is fundamental for it to happen.
I think the more AI becomes used the more people will seek out human made art. Obviously a portion of society won’t care, but art is just elevator music and wallpaper to them anyway.
The days of people buying quality audio amps to listen to music days are over. People have cheap Bluetooth speakers these days. So why try to get the best sound for your music when most people don’t even appreciate it?
Great video; I agree with all of it. My take (as an ex-mastering engineer who worked between '03 - '17): 1) Yes, you need one, a human. BUT, they've got to have a very good, acoustically-treated room or you're wasting your money. They may even be more of a 'consultant' role rather than an engineer. Anybody can apply limiting to your mix, but you really need somebody else to hear the problems you missed. The mastering person is the first person that hears your record who wasn't involved in its recording. 2) If you want it loud, ask for it to be made louder. But always do this when you get the master reference back: Insert it into the same session as your originally-submitted mixdown and A/B them with the volume of the master taken back down to match the mixdown for an accurate comparison. Then you'll really hear if it's been made 'better.' A mastering engineer who can do no better than to simply ensure something is playable (as in the days of vinyl) is still a valuable person to hire, but a mastering engineer who can actually make something really BETTER when the easy go-to tools of Louder and Brighter are taken away, is truly valuable if you can find one. 3) Good mastering can't save bad mixing. Good mixing can't save bad recording. Good recording can't save bad playing. Good playing can't save bad writing.
Agree with you on every word of this! 🙌 There was actually going to be a "bonus tip" to this video on how to know if your master is better, but once I was done it didn't make sense to be part of the video. The tip was to A/B volume matched to the mix. I do it every time I get a master back from a new engineer. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
its is lovely to hear how some producers master their music. Todd Rundgren's 'night of the carousel' is a real gem of perfect mastering. the tune is getting on a bit now but how he managed to pull it all together with such warmth is very impressive.
Loudness wars ruined music in so many ways, just so they could get the music to sound better on tiny cell phone speakers. This is driving the vinyl resurgence.
At 1:54 he confirmed I do know what mastering is. No, it will never die, it's part of the music. People still develop photos with dodgers and burners. Some even use paint and make simulated pictures!
I hate the assumption around mastering that you either hire a pro or stick on a brick wall limiter or a one button AI like we're all clueless numpties - MixbusTV the biggest arrogant offender of that one. I'm sure I'm not alone as a composer who mixes his own music and needs control of the masters (so doesn't hire out for that reason as well as budget) - to have more than a good idea of what the final master should be like. In my case I'm bringing it up to releasable loudness, decisions that were pretty much already made in mixing and production. I'm tweaking, perhaps, widening maybe. With clipping, limiting, saturation, EQ etc done creatively and artistically at track or group level, with only a glue compressor and a very light limiter alone on the master, we're already at 7-10 lufs without really trying for loudness. Personally, I don't get the 'war'. I think maybe mastering is used too much as a replacement for fixing sound decisions in production and mixing.
I completely agree with you and approach things very similarly. Like you, I mix and master my own music. And although I agree with the sentiments of this video, where I land is I'm mastering from the moment I start a song in my DAW and choose the first sound which is free. After that, I'm thinking about how everything fits in the frequency spectrum and things like that. My point is, for me, mastering is a thread from the start of the composition to the end.
Something that I couldn't fit into the video is that I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music or mixes. Ultimately, you're the one that is going to care the most. Over the last few years I've moved from the "loud ref" going to clients for mix approval just being a Pro-L2 cranked up, to actively trying different limiters, modes, settings, etc. because I want that ref to be as releasable as a master. Not just "loud." One of my pet peeves is a master coming back drastically different from the mix from an engineer that just didn't click with what we were going for. Long way of saying, I pretty much agree with you. I also definitely see the need for self-mastering as a composer. I'm sure you need stems to match, etc.
Thanks for video. It’s all great but maybe you can attach some examples of level matched songs with different mastering methods so we can hear this “drastic” differences?
Great suggestion. I'll keep that in mind for the next time I do a video like this. The differences between a good mix and master are not always "drastic" which is the point. If a mix is great, the right mastering engineer won't do something just to do something the way an algorithm might.
@@progressionspod I think if people prefer automatic mastering it can mean that it do something that people always wanted from mastering stage but cannot always obtain before due to lack of such methods. But if engineers work so much better and people can notice it without knowing who did it when good mastering engineer will always have a lot of work. Peace ✌️ I think the proper way is to just listen, test it etc
@Progressions: Success in the Music Industry we all don't buy louder or brighter if your have taste for music to have life you will keep the dynamics louder is not better nor is brighter. there will never be anything like analog ever if you respect the life in the master you will honor the dynamics and try to keep the warmth the best you can like analog
Everything music-wise is dead as long as we stick to the same old time signatures, chords, scales, modes, formulas, loops, samples and lyrical ideas. Mastering was never a one-size fits all until DAWs made everything..the same.
Very interesting and thought provoking video, well put across. I am a home recording studio hobbyist and, at heart, a musician who wants to immerse myself in learning how a wide variety of my fave songs by other artists might be recreated and/or reimagined. I started from scratch, knowing nothing about mixing, producing, or arranging. I held on to one principle, as sated simply by Beatles producer George Martin: all you need is ears. From the start I wondered exactly what the difference might be between mixing and mastering (which, as your video says, has varied in its role over the years). After all, I could treat my MASTER track (in Reaper DAW) as the place where I put plugins aimed at finalising the tracks that had been brought together from whatever plugin work I had done on those tracks. I learned the basic truth that you should not need to be fixing a bad mix by plugins on the MASTER track. I bought Ozone Advanced early on and was cheered by how much it could do to make things instantly sound much better. But I found soon after that using (favourite) individual plugins allowed my ears to get something more interesting and pleasing (to me), as well as helping me to understand what plugin might cause what to happen. As a personal discovery, I found that adding just the tiniest bit of reverb on the MASTER at the end of the chain could sometimes make the result more interesting. I was always on a modest budget so didn't own many expensive plugins (Fabfilter, Softube etc), and that no doubt limits a bit what I can achieve (as does having virtual drums/keyboards etc rather than a well mic'd studio kit being played by a real person). But, the whole fun for me is trying to get there' with only myself as collaborator (though a good friend from the band we were in 45 years ago does a lot of the bass work). In case anyone (the video creator especially) has read this far, stuff is at soundcloud.com/clana_boys (current stuff) and soundcloud.com/mobbing_it_up (earlier stuff). It can never come close to what the pros achieve but I'm proud of how far I've come since my first fumbling efforts a few years ago. in short then, maybe there's a whole large community out there like me, not pros, and not able to afford (because they do things as a hobby and earn no revenue). For that community, mastering - except what they do for themselves - is dead. But the CHALLENGE of mastering remains just as you set out in your video 👍♥ P.S. as a footnote, the stuff I do covers such a range of styles that I might need a whole network of mastering engineers to choose the best for one particular style?
Re: your question at the end… I think a great mastering engineer can do most any style, but everybody does end up niched into certain areas. So having a couple go to people that work in different spaces is a great idea.
@@progressionspod If I was serious about releasing stuff with hope of commercial success I would undoubtedly make the investment in a mastering engineer. Their skill, experience and fresh pair of ears ought to lift the result immeasurably. Back in the 1970s when I was in bands you needed a serious advance from a record deal to even go near a studio!
What even is Mastering these days? It used to be that Mastering was to achieve two goals: - consistency across songs on a record - preparing the material for playback on the most common type(s) of listening devices Today, people tend to look at it as an extension to mixing. The focus on single songs / tracks takes away the consistency goal; streaming services applying their own unpredictable processing takes away the ability to even reason about what your music will sound like in the end. So, Mastering in today's setting is indeed pointless. It cannot achieve any of the goals it is designed for.
I think most people are like me. They have watched multiple mixing/mastering engineers on youtube do their work and have seen the end results. Most of the time we do not like the results and realize we can do better. We acknowledge that there are definately engineers who can do a better job than us, but how do we find them and can we afford it? Can we afford it because we have to send the project to half a dozen people until we get good results? Or can we afford it when we do find that talented engineer and he wants $5k because that's the going rate for the best of the best?
The ROI of paying for top level services is definitely really hard to put your finger on. Is your 5k mix going to get you more streams or fans? Likely not. Could be an interesting video or article idea
I couldn't agree with this more. I've never applied an AI tool to my music and liked the result. And like most amateurs I sometimes make moves because I think I should or because something looks a certain way in the GUI. It's almost never the right thing to do. As I'm learning, I'm finding that I'm taking plugins OFF the chain not adding them. And AI just isn't ready for prime time as far as I can tell.
Well, I'm honest, I have no idea what mastering is all about. I'm a bedroom producer in my spare time. And so, I've watched a lot of RUclips videos where random guys discuss "the ultimate mastering chain in ". In the end, every of their examples became louder to almost reached clipping and distortion. First, I've tried to follow along because I could hear that my music is far quieter than others in the same genre. And it also lacked some high end. I thought that I need to throw this and that plugin on my master channel and will be good to go. The result was that - of course - my music became much louder and brighter. I've heard of parallel compression and this EQ and that plugin. What I then recognized was much more terrifying. Because those "ultimate mastering chains" cause fat low end and bright high end. What's in the middle may be buried. And so, I had another issue as some parts of my tracks were missing from that minute on I've tried to work with the "ultimate mastering chains". Long story short, in the end I came to the conclusion: I'm now working on my tracks so that every single instrument is loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to let the other instruments be heard, and - like in the Eighties - I try to give both every instrument and the whole mix enough headroom so the song can breathe. After this, I let the automatic mastering of the platform "BandLab" do some polishing. And now the songs sound much better. I still have no idea what mastering is about. And if I would plan to make a living from my music, I would pay a mastering engineer. But at the moment I'm happy with the results since I began to work on the sound like described. Some dude once told that you can take a shitty mix to a random mastering engineer and you will get a shitty mastered track. If you as a musician don't do your job and produce an amazing song, no mastering engineer on the planet can help you to get an amazing products for the people. But if you have done your job the best you can, the mastering engineer can do his job and make your song and outstanding product.
Honestly a clean ruff mix can get you by. I never heard a consumer say "Is this the master record". Honestly I believe it’s dying. Master Plan plugin when used properly goes hard. Walk away from a final mix for 2 days and come back and master your track.
Conclusion: if you don’t have the money to pay a human mastering engineer than mastering is dead. If you have the money than it’s alive. Welcome to the future of A I
This fascinates me. I sent two songs out to be digitally mastered (AI baloney). When they came back, I emailed both houses and said, "All you did was make it louder"! I like the way they sounded in my DAW better.
Someone please explain how Ozone taking X secs of your recording and then coming up with all these EQ and dynamics tweaks makes any sense at all. At least in my music, picking a different X seconds is going to come up with wildly different settings, so it just becomes a guessing game of which X seconds to use. What's the point? And "matching" to some reference track is equally dubious for the same reason. You might as well just listen to your whole recording and tweak it yourself. Ozone would be more impressive if it looked at your whole recording in total before coming up with its settings. Of course, that's much harder to do.
I am amazed, how they mixed some Hits back in the 70s, with the tech from this time, these were real masterpieces. I can only explain with real wizards working at the mixing console back then. I have the greatest respect for them. So, but then again, mastering will be of no use, if the mix is already bad :-)
Really enjoyed this reaction video from my friend Nick at Panorma Mastering. Lots of great technicals and opinions. Check it out! ruclips.net/video/DM2xd0ASztw/видео.html
“Why should I pay someone $2000 to make my music sound like shit when I can do it myself and make it sound like shit?” - Jpegmafia, multi million selling rapper / self producer
exactly. the point of hip hop is to sound like it was dubbed from a cassette that was dubbed from a radio broadcast of a poorly pressed 12". Music doesn't need to be pristine. It's supposed to make you feel something.
@@jonyoungmusic thats why pre-internet when bands would record at studios they'd have a very intimate relationship with all the engineers putting the record together. It was never meant to be an "outsourced" labor.
Dynamic range 4 or below loudness wars destruction of music. One listen fatigue redundancy - leading to music with no key changes - click tracks with child's nursery rhyme melody - wriiten be 1 of 3 "global producers' over the top. Insert pitched corrected 'artist' at this point.
@@1998mchp people like you are so funny how are you having a duchamp urinal moment over lil yachty
You wouldn’t pay anyone any money that would make any song sound like shit that’s a weird question or statement. But if you paid a professional mastering engineer, and you know he’s good by name or by word-of-mouth like you would anything you buy I’m sure you know that you wouldn’t get close to his mix , it would sound perfect on anything you play it on. that’s how you know it on a little shitty speaker played on some shitty headphones put on some headphones play play it in a car played in a car with an exploding system. if you just started mastering or mastering for a year or two by watching a couple videos here and there guarantee, it will only sound good in your bedroom if it sounds good at all. I’m not a mass engineer I’m an artist and I had a well known mastering engineer that charges way more than $2000 per song Mix one of my songs is a favor because my family knows him that was 10 years ago. I still use that as a reference and nothing has come close to it but then again, I haven’t had anyone that good master my music.
Here's how old I am: in 1966 my songwriting partner and I paid a local music store owner to make a record for us to send to a local radio station. He recorded us on a direct-to-disc rig. We sang and played into one mic; the signal went to a needle that engraved the sound onto a lacquer-covered metal disc. Two songs, three takes: we had to throw out the disc for one botched take. A few days later we heard ourselves warbling through the air waves. It's fun to think I actually recorded in the same way Robert Johnson did!
What, no Whiskey?
That’s great! 😃
That's so cool, I saw this machine during an event once (early 2000's), I'd love to have one actually.
champion sir
Share if you can locate the tracks. We had 8-track recordings go to air on the local rock stations in the early 80s. Good times.
"Every step of the record making process should always be about honoring the previous steps. Taking the vision of everyone who has touched the project before you and supporting it." This is brilliant! Every mixing and mastering engineer needs to hear this!
Thanks! Glad it resonated!
@@progressionspod makes so much sense! I never understood the mastering proces, every time i finish mixing my projects and its a dead end. But still didn't know what i have to do next! Thank you for explaining this!
I greatly agree with this statement. As a producer I don't usually mix or master what I produce, but I don't consider my job finished when I send the tracks to the mix engineer. So I supervise the mixing and mastering process, making sure that the vision we forged with the artist stays true to the very last step.
I am a stage lighting designer/director; this is also my philosophy.
I don't make my lighting a stand-alone entity; I prefer to support the other designers' work and that of the talent on stage.
~
Loved that part as well and identified with it from the experience we had at a recent project.
Involving another set of trusted (human) ears as mixer on something I’m producing or as mastering engineer on something I’m mixing is one of my FAVORITE things in music making. IMO absolutely essential part of the collaborative, creative process.
Finding someone to work with that makes a collaboration 10x instead of 2x is magic.
i have no training, no experience, and nearly zero exposure to the field that you're discussing. Yet the video is totally entertaining and fully watchable to the end from that point of view. in my opinion that is great content. i also really like your balanced perspective which doesnt push too hard on tropes or take too harsh of a stance. I'm fairly sure you could make ideos about anything even outside your field of expertise with this approach. well done man!
Appreciate it!
The x factor is the song. An early 60s Bob Dylan song, recorded live, with one guitar and a pitchy vocal will still be better than anything i write that's been recorded with tech 60 years in advance and mastered by the most expensive mastering engineer in the world. People listen to great songs.
A million percent this. I grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to medium wave radio stations that battled with the “snow” noise. It’s the song. It always was the song. It’s how we engage with it.
@@farmersmith7057 very very true. They were still good enough to tape off the radio 😄
Bs
For me i got tired of spending money on other people who simply dont have the vision i have and never produce something im excited to hear. For this reason i took the time to truly learn and understand mastering from the bottom up, and for once, i m happy with what I'm hearing.
Love it. Funny how well we can learn something when we think "f**k that, I can do that better"
I have a similar reason - 90% of what I hear is too smashed and bright. I like the sound of music from the 70s and 80s - I like dynamic range. If I want to make my music obnoxiously loud and bright, I can do that myself for free. I'd rather make something that's not quite as loud or bright, but sounds better. So my music won't compete with the top 40 hits in terms of volume, but it was never going to anyway.
@@budgetkeyboardist100%. I don’t make bricks, I make music. I like the quiet, I like the loud, I like the dynamism between the two. A hit like…life.
The key with mastering isn't too just send it off and let him go at it all willy Nilly. You have to provide some level of guidance that informs the engineer of what sonic direction you are trying to go in.
I never send a record off and "see what he does". I always tell a mastering engineer what I'm looking for. I.e. I need this opened, transparent with some warmth and a little punch.
In general, your mix should already have those characteristics. But a solid mastering engineer can preserve what is there. 👍🏿👍🏿👍🏿💯
@dpmusic21 I think what's happening is you have mixing engineers who say they also offer professional mastering. Usually, it's not professional. they're not very good at it. Adding eq, compression, saturation, tape, limiter usually ozone I could do my self. However, I have recently been using a strictly mastering engineer who uses real hardware and has a passion for mastering, and the best part he does not offer mixing.
So, while I learned a lot about mastering, I am more than happy using a passionate mastering guy who is a professional
* 02:14 - cutting is done to lacquer disc, not to vinyl. It's electroplated plated, stampers made, and then *pressed* to vinyl.
Good catch. True. I did mis-speak there.
@@progressionspodSome more pedantry: before 1948, and the advent of the long playing record (LP), it was mostly *shellac* not vinyl. And more random facts: pre-1948, all music was singles only, 3 to 5 minutes per shellac record side.
@@vinylarchaeologist Those were the days... "Over THERE...Oh Over There!" Reminds me of serving with Ulysses S. Grant...
@@vinylarchaeologist Also, before the advent of the long playing record, multiple singles by the same artist (or even different artists) were placed into a custom book, or "album" as they were commonly called. These multiple song collections were the origination of the "record album" we refer to today.
@@OWEN-CASH Thanks for mentioning that. The trivia around the origin of „album“ combines my love for music AND my love for language.
I use one reference track and that's it! Too many and you end up going round in circles. Sometimes the mix won't need anything bar a little bus compression and maybe a "safe" limiter.
Just make it sound good to you. The only people doing level comparisons are other obsessive engineers, not listeners.
The reference track should be your track that you're mastering. That initially probably shoulds moronic but IMO if you compare yourself or the band to some one else and their song or album does that mean you just want to sound like the other artist and not yourself?
If we are talking sound quality, loudness, dynamics, highlighted frequency zones, it's different. The thing is like this: imagine you have a bunch of the songs you're referencing your track to come up on shuffle and your track is around there somewhere. You'll want to try your best to make it not sound out of place, no?
@@CaptHiltz Agreed. Clients send me reference tracks all the time and honestly, they have nothing in common with the music and have no bearing on what is possible with their mix. The only time its useful is if they send me say a track that is really 70s disco sounding and their track is some clean ableton production. Then I get the tape and Curve Bender etc as I know they want a nostalgic 70s tone usually. The funny thing is tho with those I will often send a modern subtle one that compliments the mix alongside it and most of the time they say, "you know what, now that I have heard it this way I realize I was romanticizing the vintage aesthetic and I like the modern one more."
This is a good philosophy to have - but the problem is that if your listening environment is not very very accurate then the simple truth is that it will be only you that it sounds good to.
Most people invest a lot of money in gear and have little to no investment in their working environment.
A pro will invest a lot of time and money in their working environment first before moving in a single piece of equipment.
A proper mastering engineer will have taken that principle to the next level still.
@@rockosmos3884 Indeed. Why people think that its in any way useful to critique and enhance a track on the same tier of monitoring that it has been written on is shot sighted. Mastering is about providing a level of finished sound that the artist themselves cannot and doing it from a place of precision and accuracy.
Really enjoying this video. I'm a multi decade "tech geek" who has been developing a mastering process for a long while. AI began to offer REALISTIC fantastic possibilities starting about 7 years ago. I decided to take a different approach to soundcrafting & use AI quite differently then most of the services that were arising in the marketplace. But my process still requires a competent engineer. The end result is a process that is designed to POST-master a recording (even fix poorly mastered material). And the end sound never fails to impress when A/B compared with the source material - when the MIX was thoughtfully done. You see, an AI system should always presume that a MIX and everything in it was done with INTENT. The process of mastering is to give every part of that mix its own moment/s in the aural spotlight when it's supposed to stand out. Mastering that doesn't abide that vision can sound good or sometimes really bad; - but rarely ever as excellent as it could sound. "Excellent requires a different approach". With the process I have developed, "LOUD", is NOT a priority goal. Why? Because "LOUD" steals detail by mis-allocating bits to "loudness" when the volume control on the listener's end could simply be turned a bit higher instead. Besides, streaming services crush "loud" content down anyway. By not following herd mentality, - the process I offer ends up making sound that is just as loud when streaming - but with details & transients that outshine the masters that focused on "loud". And thanks to RUclips's fantastic licensing model, I can showcase this process using a number of popular tracks from various genres so that artists & producers can get a feel for what is possible with quality post-mastering. I have a friend who is a professional musician who is valued advisor with a background in broadcast. He summed it up by saying: "When I play the finished tracks you process in my THX capable auto sound system & turn it up; - I have an experience. It's like hearing this stuff again for the 1st time." So, thanks for your video pointing out the difference between "PAR", vs. excellence. Want to know more? Smash my !C0N...
One reason to hire someone to do the master is because if you've self produced a project, at the mastering point it can become kinda painful. You've heard that track so many times demoing, tracking, mixing...and by the time it gets to the mastering it seems to be only *then* when certain things you don't like about the previous stages become apparent, because of the different way you listen when mastering.
It can be very hard sometimes to discern between those elements that really should be fixed (things that a listener might notice that are truly detrimental to the song) and things that could be - but probably shouldn't be - as all that's doing is making the mix perfect...and boring.
Just been through this...song is dropping tomorrow...so a bit a break before the next round! lol
True. A fresh perspective is hard to keep when you’ve been in it for so long.
What’s your artist project name? I’ll go check it out
@@progressionspod The project is called Beltane, and the track I just dropped is on my YT channel. Also of course links to bandcamp etc in the details.
Aside from AI, you mentioned that DSP's have loudness normalization. With Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio on the rise, you can't just send a .wav file to someone else and have them master it. Along with the integrated loudness "cap" at -18 LUFS. I think the biggest thing regardless of what you're mastering, having a second set of ears on the project is always nice to have. It is still a skill that takes YEARS to develop, and for some, just having a good enough room for Mastering is hard to have in this economy.
I love the quote "just use your ears", but also question yourself on what you're listening to. While also trying new things. Phenomenal video!!
Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it.
i'll be real honest here, i use all the AI mastering tools, and have figured out which ones sounds best for me. now I wouldn't even want to pay a mastering engineer, $150, because I almost feel like he might be feeding it through these ai's also. unless i was in the room with him, or he video'd the whole process, or zoom. just being real here.
lol
Because for a real engineer it's easier to actually do it himself instead of trying out apps he has little control over
Bro, then did you actually make the track you made since everyone is apparently using AI tools now? Did you even write this comment or did you copy paste it with an AI?
@@johngddr5288 true the lines are blurring, and will even get more blurred soon, in this case i wrote that, with no chatgpt ai edits. in terms of making music with ai, i believe music is the end product, just like a restaurant serves you the dish and you eat it, you gonna ask the waitress and cook all the questions on how they made it, chopped it, every step of the process? shit you wouldn't even want to eat it if you found out.... same with music, i am sure some of your favorite all time songs have weird studio tricks or mishaps, that we would be like hey you cheated!!! anyhoot. make the end results something that resonates with the listener with or without ai
Ive been in big studios in LA where top artist record & seen engineers through ozone on the master!
When i came up, mastering involved creating cohesion across an entire album, possibly reordering tracks, and making red book cds
I was trying to get something about PQs and secret tracks in there, but it felt like it was too much.
I definitely think cohesion across an album is huge, especially in today’s world of different mixers and producers on every track.
mastering an album is still this, though.. the cohesion, mostly. making sure every song sounds like it belongs on the same record
Great video!! The real problem is that as the decades progress, new music listeners are hearing worse and worse mastering as the norm. Therefore, what passes for "good" mastering now is crap. Great mastering requires someone who has, not only great listening and engineering skills, but good taste. That last part, "good taste" is the most elusive of all to find in a mastering engineer.
Also, saying that “Louder is always better” perpetuates the problem.
Love that quote at 6:12 'mastering has never been about making changes, it's about making the right changes'
Also the piece right after about honoring every previous step to support their vision
Great video. Something you touched on but maybe not emphasised enough there is the addition of a 'fresh pair of ears' that didn't spend hours /days / months on the project and have no idea of the struggles and the decisions you made as musician / mixer. I do the mastering for a small label and the thing that I find that most bands that I work with say to me as feedback is that they never thought of the things I picked up on as they spent so much time with the project that they lost objectivity. The tools are there (check out Logic 11 'session players') but the relationship between sonics and emotions are still (who knows for how long) something that machines can't figure out.
When digital came onto the scene it did not increase audio headroom. If anything, it decreased, as overs (peaks above 0dBFS) resulted in CD plants rejecting the master tape (yes they were digital encoded U-matic tapes) as they were out of spec.
That's right. I spent the first 25 years as an engineer where all albums went to vinyl. Vinyl has severe limitations that CD's and hard drives don't have and the main one being is bass. The more bass in the recording the bigger the grooves get on vinyl and you only have so much real estate on a vinyl disc so engineers would leave things like the high and low eq to the vinyl mastering engineer. The guy that made the lacquer disc and plates. Too much bass also makes radio station limiters chomp down on it and drops the level of the whole record What people today call a mastering engineer is a guy with an elaborate expensive home monitoring system that believes they know what translates better on the stereo master. The last records I mixed in my studio that were on complimation CD's and mastered in Nashville the producer said the mastering engineer told him my contributions were the only ones he didn't have to master. That's partly because I got use to mixing for vinyl record albums and radio plus I already had 40 years experience mixing. The media used today can take all the bass you can throw at it so it's more forgiving than the old days. If someone is uncertain about their mixes then mastering may be a good option if they know what they are doing.
With so-called professional mastering engineers churning out albums like Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts" and Korn's "Requiem", can anyone blame people for taking matters into their own hands?
@@RealHomeRecordingidk, i thought that _GUTS_ wasn't too bad on that front (didn't stop me from enjoying the music).
don't know what happened with that korn album tho, wtf
This is where it truly still matters. If you want to press vinyl.
the RIAA equitization on vinyl is terrible. you must use the phono input on your record player to artificially get it back.
To me (62 years old, 1960s and 1970s the greatest music decades in my mind), mastering is supposed to be about making sure that (A) all the songs on an album are consistent in volume against each other, and (B) all the songs are consistent with each other in an overall tone and sound (e.g. that you don't have one track that is bright and harsh while others are different and more dark/bottomy; you need a signature overall frequency spread throughout the album).
Problem is, these days the album format doesn't really mean much anymore, so what I said above might seem almost irrelevant for a lot of people who think only in terms of releasing one track at a time. But it is in fact relevant anyway, because you need an overall sonic signature as an artist.
As a mastering engineer, I feel the need to specify what it really means in my interpretation: My take is that the role of a mastering engineer is to take the mixes and make them sound like what the musicians and producers intended when they were recording and mixing. Occasionally, this means doing nothing (or at least almost nothing). It's not about making mixes sound 'better', but often the ideas that were decided in the studio need help in order to translate to consumer reproduction equipment of all types; whether it will be played on a £25,000 high-end stereo system or through a mono Samsung mobile phone speaker, the emotive impact needs to be the same.
It is also literal Engineering. There are certain things that need to be addressed that don't impact the music directly, which are purely technical aspects that need to be sorted - phase interactions, etc. Hell, I even get some things with DC-offsets that need adressing...
Love this. I’m with that 100%. It’s respecting the work done before, recognizing the vision of the team and then supporting that. Sometimes it’s doing almost nothing. Sometimes it’s the dark arts. Haha.
That's the summary for most of the digital tools we have access today. If you are in a budget, you can get away much more than in the old days. This makes making more accessible, and the sheer quantity of it being made is astounding.
The quantity is astounding, the quality appalling.
It's not just louder and bright it's whether the bass and all the other elements sit nicely and you can't achieve that without a good mix and mixdown.
Louder and brighter! Yeah!! 💪🏼
The secret to success. 😂
mastering is also making a sequence of songs flow pace wise and sonically. That is, if people are releasing an actual album and not serial singles. I master multiple tracks from the same release together, in order, and adjust so they sound complimentary. Learned this at Golden mastering in Ventura, life changing session.
Mastering has always been a *service* to artists, not merely audio processing. It's an entirely different mode/skill of listening than in mixing. Objectivity. Context. Quality control. And you get *one* chance to hear a song for the first time.
Recent (unsolicited) feedback I received: "Great job on the track, I'm really happy with it. I used LandR as a test a few days back but your work blows their AI out of the water. It was good working with you both for the convenience and the quality."
@@jasonk125Exactly, mastering engineers really overvalue how important their work is
@@ennayanne from my experience "musicians" often can't even record or create a DAW track without clipping, what are you talking about?
@@jasonk125 Musicians are often very dumb when it comes to the technical part, and mastering engineers have usually been professional musicians in the past and know their way around digital audio. And it's not even about micro-iterations at the level of tenths of decibels, most musicians have no idea how to put together an adequate mix without clipping, let alone tonal balance and fine tuning.
@@gnzllr Musicians as in people who play instruments? Well obviously, that's not the same thing as being a producer.
I think any decent bedroom producer should be able to mix AND master their work. And in 2024 it certainly doesn't require expensive mastering engineers to do it to a competent level. It's also part of the same skillset. What mastering even is, isn't clearly defined anymore as it once was.
Now it's basically just a final effect chain on the track to bring everything together and prepare for digital release. EQ, compression and limiting aren't rocket science.
Who nominated you for a Grammy? Most people do not know that artists and engineers and... so on can nominate THEMSELVES which means that "Grammy-nominated" is a fairly meaningless title. Sounds important but a universe away from "Grammy-winning". In your description it should read "altogether", not "all together". I think mastering by a human being is what I'd choose if I were a "real" act with $. No AI for me, thanks. By the way, what hit albums or songs have you engineered or mixed? Just curious because if you are "Grammy-nominated" then one would think you must be at the top of the field. Thx!
The problem in the not too distant past was that mastering engineers/producers were demanding more money than the artists made.
There is no money in music streaming so the future will be shaped by necessity.
I think thing with mastering is that previously mixing engineers were listening to the material on the tape, but the listener was listening on the vinyl or cassette tape, which are quite different media. So the goal of the mastering engineer was to ensure that transition to different media doesn’t ruin the work of the mixing engineer. But nowadays the medium for the mixing engineer and listener is mostly the same (if we don’t count conversion from wav to mp3 or aac), most of the music is no longer transitioned to physical media. So if mixing engineer is able to make final mixes loud enough, there is not much sense in having mastering engineer.
"One final collaborator..." Yes! Thank you for that, a very helpful thought.
Despite the obvious issues of over limiting and excitation, I always find the real joy of mastering is in rolling off as much treble and bass as you can to get a nice dynamic range in the low mids. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is where the heart is. Not just of a song that feels good, but will play louder and brighter on different systems more easily. I no longer really devote much time to music but when I did, my best mix/masters were flukes because the track itself was great.
I spend my time helping my clients during my Mastering sessions. I listen carefully to their requests. And yes sometimes I get 3 or 4 versions until the client asks for another fine tuning. So what ?! When you love your job you don't care to spend 1h more working or go the extra mile because it's part of yourself. Be yourself, respect yourself and love what you do. The rest will follow.Yes I am old school though I have more young artists asking for Loudness "with emotion". ❤
IMO the root issue is the audience/consumer likes what they like and don't care about the quality of the music they listen to and are probably listening on low quality headphones/devices. The mixing/mastering process is important to the musician/engineer and likely no one else.
I loved pearl jam since my teenage, and obviously it started with ten and all those great songs. The moment you said louder and brighter it came to me this remaster of the album that I couldn't listen to one single song, simply because the record was too bright and compressed, "loud" and "bright".
You make a ton of good points. Here's where my take is a little (not a lot) different:
- I currently self-produce my own music, mostly for budgetary reasons. In the online spaces where I hang out, as far as I can tell, almost no self-producing songwriter thinks mastering is only louder + brighter. There are endless discussions on sound selection, dynamics vs competing in the loudness wars, phase cancellation, subtleties of compression styles, etc. We want our music to sound good.
- I put out about 3-4 songs a month (I do music full-time these days). If I had the money, I'd love to pay a mastering engineer, and probably a mixing engineer to do the production work, and I could focus on writing, performing, promotion, and teaching. I agree with all the benefits of having a professional master engineer in the process. But it's not even remotely in my budget. When I get a mega-hit - different story. :) For now, I try to do the best I can with my meager budget. I watch a lot of RUclips videos :). And try to apply my 50- years of playing music to the new skills of production. And the more I do self-production, the more I respect the skills of a professional. Still, I'm improving.
- As you point out, the democratization of music (imperfect but definitely a thing) allows many like me to put their music online. In my youth, the people putting out records were performers who had a record contract, and the mastering engineer came with that. Today, like me, there a million musicians recording mostly in the box, at home, so it's a different customer base.
- When I get the $$$ and can afford a mastering engineer, I might be a lousy customer. My process isn't strictly linear. At the 11th hour, on the 50th listen, when I think I'm done, I'll decide, emphatically, to cut out two bars, or add a second guitar in the intro. I just hear it. The process doesn't drag on forever, but it does go on for a couple weeks. Maybe some mastering engineers are cool with musical changes at the last minute (90% of my tunes), and conversely I'm cool with musical suggestions (though I may not always follow them). I would imagine those iterations would raise the cost, as well.
There was another comment somewhere in here where I said this, but the person that will care the most about your music and the final product will always be you. I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music if you feel you get the results that fit your vision.
You said "in my youth" I don't know how old you are, but I'm for sure no long in my "youth". lol. I think the amount of information out there for people, and the way people coming up now are passionate about absorbing it all and doing things themselves is AMAZING. It's a resource we didn't have when I was starting out, and we also looked at learning differently. I definitely respect doing it all yourself. And I DEFINITELY respect putting 3-4 songs out a month... That's the way to break out these days.
Thanks for watching!
Loved your take, just wanted to say that putting out 3-4 songs a month as an artist is an incredible feat and you should feel really proud of that! 🙂
Nice. I hope so. We've been recording our own stuff and just relying on the individual to turn up the volume knob. Mainly because it sounds better that way!
These are my observations about mastering as a professionally taught heavy metal guitarist (Musicians Institute/GIT class of 2000) for the past 28 years. My observations are what I've gained through being exposed to people who know more than me and my limited personal experience.
Anyone who wishes to correct me please feel free to do so because I'm posting this comment so I can learn.
1) Mastering techniques and styles will depend upon your musical genre.
I grew up recording heavy metal in the 80s/90s. A lot of people were recording demos to 4/8 track cassette tape then the all in one TASCAM/Fostex style digital console/recorders/hard drives of the late 90s and early 00s. Real pros used things like ADATs or Macs.
For the hobbyist, a lot of mixing and mastering back then seemed to revolve around bouncing down to the fewest number of tracks and making sure you had a clear, loud sound that was consistent in volume from song to song on an album. Mixes, many of which were often done in real time during bouncing or mixdown to two track tape, tended to sound well balanced in terms of instrument volume but also flat. Mastering is where everything went from sounding like an amateur who knew what they were doing to professional. Mastering added depth to a mix.
The video mentioned loudness and clarity as important in mastering. *In heavy metal I would also say punch and weight are important.* You want the low end to be heavy but tight at fast tempos, and the lower mid range often has to be very carefully dialed in in metal to get a good sound. So I would say mastering is also important for the low end and low mids. Avoiding unpleasant artifacts like compressor pumping on the master bus is important as well unless that is stylistically desired.
2) The trend in heavy metal since 2000 or so has been for very transparent, flat mixes. This is especially true for "modern" styles with a scooped midrange. A more vintage heavy metal sound emphasizes the upper midrange and a more colored sound generally. My thinking is the mastering techniques you use will depend upon the overall sound you are going for.
Traditionally in metal people have opted for very compressed, loud mixes. In recent years people seem to be embracing more headroom and dynamics in their metal recordings, especially transitions from soft to loud points and vice versa. People seem to be willing to sacrifice a little loudness for more variation in volume.
3) Generally, it is best for the mastering engineer to need to do as little as possible because the engineers/mixers already did their job well. Small adjustments. Minimal changes. I was always taught the -6 db cut rule and anything more extreme than that is undesirable. Avoid boosting if possible. Don't make broad changes on a mastering bus. If a mastering engineer has to fix a lot of things, it's probably not going to turn out well.
4) It's more important to have knowledge than plugins. Things like multiband compressors and dynamic EQs may help amateurs, but they're not going to solve anything if the engineer doesn't know how to dial those tools in to begin with. Over relying on these tools is like using a generic preset for a good master--experienced ears will be able to tell you are faking it.
5) We live in an anti-audiohphile society thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and ear buds. Your painstaking mixing and mastering job won't be noticed as much when people are listening on subpar consumer grade devices. Additionally, we seem to want to avoid deliberately colored mixes. (T-Racks seems to come to mind for this as a plugin.) *However, as the video noted, it's in this color that our trademark sound as unique artists emerges.*
Because most people aren't audiophiles, I often "mix and master" (I use that term loosely due to my ignorance) on my consumer grade 5.1 speaker system so I have a reference point for a typical setup. Nice monitors help, but if your room isn't treated in the first place, I don't think they help. Your song may sound like it has more bass and clarity through good monitors, but in a bad room or through small, cheap speakers that may not matter. So I usually try my stuff out on good monitors, then consumer grade stuff, then perhaps in the car.
Another benefit of 5.1 recording heavy metal guitars is if you route multiple guitar tracks to your surround speakers you may get a heavier, more immersive sound. Quad tracked rhythm guitars are usually done hard left/right and then some off center with a reduction in volume perhaps. I have thought about doing these quad tracks with each gear coming through one of the 5.1 satellite speakers instead to see how it sounds.
Recording, mixing, and mastering for 5.1 seems to be more of a thing for film scores than commercial music, but I would like to try it so that I have both a good 5.1 mix and a good traditional stereo mix if the listener isn't using a 5.1 setup. I don't know if this is possible. I would think you would lose rear fade instruments on a traditional stereo.
Thanks.
Honestly, mastering is only needed for vintage stuff. With modern equipment, if you can make a recording sound awesome on the mixing stage - why master it? Don't take my word for it - ask Steven Wilson.
you can even make it on the production stage. ask skrillex
When the vast majority of music listeners on the most popular songs are 16 year olds, no one is really going to care about the differences between mastering techniques, AI or human.
16 year olds care. When I was 16 the sound quality of an album had a major impact on what sub genre of hip hop I liked. But maybe that was just me.
I think when it comes in the mastering, there’s 2 things to Basie to trebly or the opposite need to be balanced before release, but on the other hand, I don’t believe that anything should be too little too soft. It’s the texture and frequencies of the song that make it original for example, some songs have a heavy kick which suits a song. Some songs have louder, high hats that suits a song, so I don’t think everything should be balanced perfectly because it becomes boring with no dynamics.
I tell you what. My friend from Uzbekistan was able to make great mastering with built-in laptop soundcard, earphones and/or Microlabs Solo and get us released in Japan on DISCS in early 2010s
Amazing video. I am a Mixing and Mastering engineer, with +1.1B streams and I couldn't agree more with you. All my sh1t masters I did on the past was when I tried to "do a lot of things". Softwares with automatic decisions like Gulfos, Ozone, Bloom, etc, tend to create a false sensation that is improving the sound, but most of the time they are ruining.
Understand what's sounding good and bad and take the right decisions from there is the key to a "great quality" master.
Cheers
Amen to THAT! I agree fully to every point you made. Thank you for not being afraid to call "Izotope" out as contributing to the problem. I too will NEVER hit that button!
My guess (or rather: fear) where the idea that "mastering is all about volume and brightness" comes from is, bluntly said, that many people simply don´t hear it. For me as a listener, it is definitely more the mastering than the mix that decides if I like a recording or not. As a musician who made and finished five long-playing records (both vinyl and CD) with a band, my experience is similar: Mastering is all about listening, and about decisions.
We made the last three of the records with the same mixing engineer (because work and the results were great) and with the same mastering engineer (again because work and the results were great) - but, of course, they are not the same person. Moreover, the mastering engineer was never involved in the mixing process except for one or two short visits in the mixing studio.
In my eyes (or should I say: ears), what makes a great mastering engineer are not so much his tools or the tricks he knows but a fresh, curious and critical ear and the ability to verbalize and communicate complex thought about sound.
Our approach was usually that all band members were more or less involved in the mixing process, and then, after one or two weeks to let it seep, just I and our mastering engineer did the mastering in two or at most three intense work nights (it was the band who assigned this task to me because I tend to "listen deeply into" things).I can't imagine that the results would have been anywhere near as satisfactory with an automated or even no mastering at all.
In short: Mastering is (or better: should be) far, far more than "loudness and brightness".
I stepped back a bit from wasting too much time on EQ'ing, mixing and mastering altogether. For me it's all about the music, the melodies, the harmonies. And 99% of the general audience doesn't even care much how a track is mastered, or mixed, or EQ'ed. They want good music, not necessarily good mastered-sounding music. If at all, it's just a bonus.
I had the pleasure of having a couple of projects mastered at Masterphonics in Nashville…. To date, no software has come close but I imagine it depends on what you’re looking for.
I record (track) mix and master my own music. I’ve never used ozone or AI. The whole process is part of my joy..my therapy . I want my own character sound , color , individualization. I track with outboard gear. I use mostly plugins to mix and master . They’ve come a long way. Very selective. I make sure I know them. I do not want things done for me. I do not have chains or templates. No selective settings on anything outboard. I love the art of making music. We live in a great time for technology but if others don’t find their own vibe , everything will sound the same .
Couldn’t agree more. I do think as a creative career progresses you go thru stages. One of the stages is the “sound like everybody” stage because you learn a lot from that. The tech makes that phase seem to last longer than it should these days. End goal though… make what you want and have people respect it for the fact that it’s “you”.
Thanks for watching!
When I mix its a simple process 1) get song to sound great on monitor headphones 2) then 'test' mix by playing it in a car stereo with subs 3) then 'test' mix on cell phone speaker .
Assuming it passed those tests, the final step is having someone else listen to it. If the fresh ears say it sounds great then its finished.
I think this is the symptom of a much deeper problem. People don’t care about the music they are making as much anymore. They aren’t saving money to get in the studio for days, or paying for someone to bring their vision to light, they aren’t learning about the process that will shape their sound, or practicing over and over until it’s just right. In mass, they just want the cheapest/fastest/easiest way to make and get music out. The purpose of making music should be about making the music, not how many corners can I cut to make this. This disparity as gotten to the point where the performance of the artist is more the editing performance of an engineer or a plugin that fixes the careless performance of someone not caring if they actually can play/sing the music being made. If artists were playing at the caliber that artists played at 40 years ago, we wouldn’t need half of these tools. The saddest thing of all of this is that the artists, who are the ones in charge of making the art, are deciding to take a backseat, and at the same time expecting the cost to decrease, and for either the engineer or ai to pick up the rest. I work with a 14 time Grammy nominated mastering engineer, who’s had 50 years in the business, who worked with Cream, Rush, Queen, The Doors, the list goes on, and when I get him to give a super friend rate of $100 a tune, folks say, “well I could just go online and to it for 10-20 bucks”. Fricken blows my mind. Wish it never went digital, it was better when it was harder to do, because they folks had to be better.
It can't die. I use 4-5 plugins to add a specific warm feel to the mix.
I bought ozone 11 recently because I didnt have time to wait on my mix/mastering engineer and would put on the master assistance. You guessed it, louder and brighter. Upon viewing the metering realizing how uneducated I still am on reading peaks, lufs, rms I knew it felt somewhat competitive but like Travis was getting at, does it really serve the vision of the mix/the song? The answer with master assistance is no. Thats why've committed to learning more about the skill of mastering instead of letting technology steer the art. Im not gonna let it slide when it sounds glued or bright because I know that it doesn't translate to good. When the maximizer is ducting 6 db I take a step back start backing off all the "assistance" moves so I can get closer to serving the song instead of technology giving me a one size fits all sound.
With ozone you absolutely have to understand what it is doing, and why, or it will give weird harsh masters. Good post
Does ozone 9 have mastering ability? All I’m looking for is the ability to make voice over recordings sound the best they can sound all by themselves. No music in the background.
Yeah Ozone is a mastering suite across the board. I'd say EQ, compression, deessing are going to be your main tools for VoiceOver work which I believe Ozone 9 has . Might have to find a de-esser outside of ozone. Most DAW's have them built in
@@mjk5254 , thank you.
yeah no cap fr
I don't do mixing, I just do mastering for fun, but I imagine it's not cool for a mixing engineer to be unhappy with the end result when he's proud of his mix but his work is “destroyed” by the mastering process (whatever method is used). When mixing engineers and mastering engineers can work as a team and validate the final results together, even if they don't physically work together and even if they don't work for the same studio or company, I think it can help to achieve optimal results that make everyone happy and proud in the end. It's a state of mind and business model that's unfortunately not very widespread in this industry, unless the mixing and mastering processes are carried out in the same studio or by the same engineer. I wish you a wonderful day and thanks for sharing your great videos on this channel ! Kind Regards from Montreal, Canada 🙏😀🎶🎵🌠🧙♂
I think this is part of the reason that it's important for engineers, producers, mixers, and mastering engineers to know which people in their circle would be a good fit for something. I always try to offer recommendations to clients for other people that I both know are great at what they do, but also are the right fit for a project. Knowing other great people and studios is almost part of the engineers job at this point.
Thanks for checking the video out!
It's funny. A friend of mine asked me what Mastering was last weekend. And I told him it was about taking the album material and making it sound cohesive, throughout the whole project. And you might make it louder and EQ it a bit, along the way, but never in a way that was harsh or grating. Honor the work that the artist and the mix engineer did...and retain the character of it. Simply "even it out" from track to track, especially if songs had been recorded in different places and/or mixed by different mix engineers. Just even it out, and make sure it still sounds like how it was meant to, and is exciting in the right ways. But do as little as possible. ;-)
Sounds like good mastering to me!
This is a great topic! I think a lot of the misinformation or “bad decisions” people are making are coming from all of the “secret sauce” type of videos suggesting that certain processing methods will always work in combination with a lot of newer engineers being self taught. The internet is powerful but with less experience these “works every time” things are being misinterpreted as a copy and paste type of thing when in fact it seems the majority of them are actually reference/starting points. But too often I feel like it isn’t highlighted that all of these recommendations are what worked for the mix and song being demonstrated. Cheers!
I do my own Masters with Ozone 11 and am pleased with the results. I think the bigger discussion should be about the role of Mastering if/when Dolby Atmos takes off.
Now that’s an interesting topic! Didn’t even think about it when making this video.
-18 LUFS feels like such a quiet level after decades of -6. Haha. Matching the energy and saturation of the stereo master when you’re doing the Atmos takes some thought. In the mixes I’ve done I found I had to do some processing to the individual stems as well as some creating limiting to the object busses to get the same vibe.
Are you mixing Atmos at all?
@progressionspod I use Studio One which has built in Dolby Atmos. I am just starting to get into it. In reality your mix becomes your master. I use some mix buss processing for the beds and individual track processing for the objects.
@@earledaniels4539 Not sure if Atmos will stick around forever but from the mixing side, it's definitely a lot of fun to do. I set the room up last year and did a couple records. I've got a really great interview in the editing pipeline with one of the first guys to start mixing in Atmos for music. Maybe 2-3 weeks and it'll be out.
Guess what? It won't. I'm old enough to remember the SACD experiment. It will be two channel stereo until we die. I love Bob Clearmountain, but he is kidding himself, and so are you.
@@kenrader4984No, it will last. There's a lot of money being invested in it. It might not be Atmos, but any Spatial. That's the biggest problem now there's competitors. When you have Atmos mix, you can't convert it to Sony360 mix, you need to do it all over. Same stand for THX format.
And the massive drawback - there's still no Spotify support for Spatial and they might even have their own format -> that's another competitor on the market.
Last but not least, technelogy really develops and so the skills of engineers. You will have (Virtual) Atmos in low tier electronics.
The amount of fx, compression and tweaking we do today on our mixes... why would I add even more? I was an intern at a mastering studio, and I still dont get whats so great about it. Sure, maybe some final eq would be benificial in some cases. But my experience is that mastering engineers often slaps even more compression on songs, making them sound "dead". But thats just my opinion. I might feel this way coming from a background in playing acoustic instruments. 🤔
Thank you for "THE MASTERING CLASS"!
Fascinating topic, I noticed I would blindly apply ozone on any 'finished' track and convince myself it was the rigjt choice becuase that's the next logical step before releasing it. But since have been trying to be more intentional to the point where sometimes all I gain is 2lufs but that's all the mix needed. Quality in quality out
Mastering your own work is always super challenging. It's hard to have perspective by the time you get to that stage. But being intentional is for sure the way to go. Something like Ozone can give you an "outside opinion", but that opinion isn't always going to be in line with your vision.
Thanks for watching!
same here, the bias. i hate master my own mix.
in general, i really appreciate mastering engineer, it's magic there. we're mixer, overthinkers... mastering doesn't fit us😂
@@progressionspod fr no cap
@@progressionspod you also have to have a good mix
Mastering is not dead. In my case i mix/master my own tracks and I can tell there is a lot of QA involved. Many artists don’t want to get involved with technicalities so they delegate
Professional mastering borders on the kings new clothes territory after a certain basic standard is reached. Ai and Ai assisted home mastering can reach this standard. When you have the resources to go €2000 a track you are making two people happy, the mastering engineer and yourself, no one else will notice least of all the listeners on Spotify with earbuds. Some interesting points in the video without a doubt.✌🏽
Honestly, great video. You said the things we all need to hear. I’d say, everyone should learn the old school version of mastering, and understand why it’s so impressive when a human puts work into it tastefully.
that being said, Phil speisers mastering strip is the only thing in all my years that has actually made me reconsider certain things. If I set a reference of something I love, it gets it damn close, unlike any other competitor.
That being said, high end mastering with care and in support of the actual song will always win. But that’s a very specific tool that makes me reconsider my stance on these modern tools. I never liked landr AI or anything automatic. I would sometimes utilize Tokyo dawn labs nova to help gently get some of the EQ characteristics of another song through its match tool in GE edition, but other than that I actually was specialising in mastering the old way. Dutch and Dutch 8C speakers, prism titan mastering grade ad/da conversion, tens of thousands of pounds of analog gear , more than you can count, and now I’m selling my gear. Well, besides the speakers. That counts, of course 😁. But yeah. I am pleasantly surprised by the strip master match thing by Phil.
Maybe technology will get close to replacing the engineers at some point. Until then, probably not yet, but it’s getting close.
Great video brother! Love learning from you! And don’t sell yourself short on mastering either, you HAVE mastered at least one “Top 40” record 😉
😂 Thanks!
Great video, and I 100% agree. The one thing I'd add is that, to me, modern mastering is both far better and far worse than in the past. To give two modern examples of artists I like: The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson sounds absolutely amazing, and Can We Please Have Fun by Kings of Leon sounds like mush when you turn up your system. OK, Kings of Leon majors in mush, it's part of the style, but ear fatigue is a real thing, and when the kick drum disappears in the mix, it's not good.
Decent mastering isn't dead it's just out of the range of what most independent artists can afford and not a lot of people offer the service with the level of experience you speak of, being able to enhance a project dynamically. If it wasn't so daunting to understand maybe more people would learn the process and there would be more affordable options.
Most listeners will recognize a "louder" mix as a better mix, hence the volume wars. No matter how good a mastering engineer is, the song itself is king, not the mastering. As musicians and people who want to sound a certain way, we can spend the money for the best mastering available. But that won't make the song itself any better for the non-engineer listeners. Very few of them listen like engineers/musicians. Blending art and science is always going to be subjective, and musicians would do well to stop worrying so much and get their songs out there in the best form they can.
The problem with everything is money being the ultimate goal.
Make music that sells, not music you love.
Become the kind of engineer that gets hired, not the kind you want to be.
Plugins like Izotope or Ozone don't appeal to me at all, while it never made any sense to me how you could let it generalize your music, ignoring the uniqueness of a track and ignoring the beautiful, nuanced and delicate process mastering is. Thereby mastering as a human activity, I find the icing on the cake. It in fact takes some courage to do so if you know what I mean.
Everything is stored in the mix. You can't master it better, the correct master is correct frequency response that you can see on audio spectrum like using SPAN plugin to visualze it and make sure it's correct master frequency. Compression, Dynamic, threshold and others can be also done in mix too ❤
You definitely can't make a bad mix great in mastering. The same way you can't make bad production great with the mix.
Wonderful delivery of information, that final set of ears on a mix can be the difference that makes the difference. It’s about Quality for the listeners rather than the extra cost for me!
Yeah. Hopefully mastering is coming to an end!
I'm a musician, not a physicist.
I want an app that knows how best to blend instruments so that they all sound great together.
It's coming.
You nailed this, man. Thank you!
Thanks for checking it out!
The new Logic Mastering , ya the vocal upper midrange is very distinct
but not a fan of the rest of what goes on .
I love multi band compression and limiting . My new fav is F6 Waves compression/EQ .
There are the two sets of speakers and the headphones to make judgement with and
then my living room stereo .
The client is so important in getting it right , they take it and have their task of listening to it
on a bunch of systems and the comity of musicians throw in opinions .
Thanks for the vid 👍
As a film composer I started out with Ozone because I was a FOMO. However it ruined my mixes and I don't touch Ozone now. Use good plugins and your ears with reference tracks.
Very interesting video. You are definitely right that everything just sounds LOUD, though not always bright I have to say, today. Loud and compressed! When you buy a CD today, it simply doesn't sound as great as a CD did 30 years ago. The new Pet Shop Boys albums is a good (or rather bad!) example. The dynamic range is 5! If it had been released let's say 35 years ago, it would have had a DR of 13 or 15. Why not, when you have a good sounding rough mix, just keep it that way on the finished product?
I’ve produced and mixed a whole project literally used a professional to master it and paid 1k but compared it to ozone 11 and honestly I preferred ozone 11 on that particular project.... ozone 11 is actually 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
I think the transfer you cited from this mastering issue to the whole process of recording a song in the future when you make use of AI processing everywhere is the most dangerous and risky place we can go to drown music at last.
Individuallity is a very important part of the process and human presence is fundamental for it to happen.
I think the more AI becomes used the more people will seek out human made art. Obviously a portion of society won’t care, but art is just elevator music and wallpaper to them anyway.
The days of people buying quality audio amps to listen to music days are over. People have cheap Bluetooth speakers these days. So why try to get the best sound for your music when most people don’t even appreciate it?
Great video; I agree with all of it. My take (as an ex-mastering engineer who worked between '03 - '17):
1) Yes, you need one, a human. BUT, they've got to have a very good, acoustically-treated room or you're wasting your money. They may even be more of a 'consultant' role rather than an engineer. Anybody can apply limiting to your mix, but you really need somebody else to hear the problems you missed. The mastering person is the first person that hears your record who wasn't involved in its recording.
2) If you want it loud, ask for it to be made louder. But always do this when you get the master reference back: Insert it into the same session as your originally-submitted mixdown and A/B them with the volume of the master taken back down to match the mixdown for an accurate comparison. Then you'll really hear if it's been made 'better.' A mastering engineer who can do no better than to simply ensure something is playable (as in the days of vinyl) is still a valuable person to hire, but a mastering engineer who can actually make something really BETTER when the easy go-to tools of Louder and Brighter are taken away, is truly valuable if you can find one.
3) Good mastering can't save bad mixing. Good mixing can't save bad recording. Good recording can't save bad playing. Good playing can't save bad writing.
Agree with you on every word of this! 🙌 There was actually going to be a "bonus tip" to this video on how to know if your master is better, but once I was done it didn't make sense to be part of the video. The tip was to A/B volume matched to the mix. I do it every time I get a master back from a new engineer.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
its is lovely to hear how some producers master their music. Todd Rundgren's 'night of the carousel' is a real gem of perfect mastering. the tune is getting on a bit now but how he managed to pull it all together with such warmth is very impressive.
Loudness wars ruined music in so many ways, just so they could get the music to sound better on tiny cell phone speakers. This is driving the vinyl resurgence.
At 1:54 he confirmed I do know what mastering is. No, it will never die, it's part of the music.
People still develop photos with dodgers and burners. Some even use paint and make simulated pictures!
I hate the assumption around mastering that you either hire a pro or stick on a brick wall limiter or a one button AI like we're all clueless numpties - MixbusTV the biggest arrogant offender of that one. I'm sure I'm not alone as a composer who mixes his own music and needs control of the masters (so doesn't hire out for that reason as well as budget) - to have more than a good idea of what the final master should be like.
In my case I'm bringing it up to releasable loudness, decisions that were pretty much already made in mixing and production. I'm tweaking, perhaps, widening maybe. With clipping, limiting, saturation, EQ etc done creatively and artistically at track or group level, with only a glue compressor and a very light limiter alone on the master, we're already at 7-10 lufs without really trying for loudness. Personally, I don't get the 'war'. I think maybe mastering is used too much as a replacement for fixing sound decisions in production and mixing.
I completely agree with you and approach things very similarly. Like you, I mix and master my own music. And although I agree with the sentiments of this video, where I land is I'm mastering from the moment I start a song in my DAW and choose the first sound which is free. After that, I'm thinking about how everything fits in the frequency spectrum and things like that. My point is, for me, mastering is a thread from the start of the composition to the end.
Something that I couldn't fit into the video is that I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music or mixes. Ultimately, you're the one that is going to care the most. Over the last few years I've moved from the "loud ref" going to clients for mix approval just being a Pro-L2 cranked up, to actively trying different limiters, modes, settings, etc. because I want that ref to be as releasable as a master. Not just "loud." One of my pet peeves is a master coming back drastically different from the mix from an engineer that just didn't click with what we were going for.
Long way of saying, I pretty much agree with you. I also definitely see the need for self-mastering as a composer. I'm sure you need stems to match, etc.
Thanks for video. It’s all great but maybe you can attach some examples of level matched songs with different mastering methods so we can hear this “drastic” differences?
Great suggestion. I'll keep that in mind for the next time I do a video like this. The differences between a good mix and master are not always "drastic" which is the point. If a mix is great, the right mastering engineer won't do something just to do something the way an algorithm might.
@@progressionspod I think if people prefer automatic mastering it can mean that it do something that people always wanted from mastering stage but cannot always obtain before due to lack of such methods. But if engineers work so much better and people can notice it without knowing who did it when good mastering engineer will always have a lot of work. Peace ✌️
I think the proper way is to just listen, test it etc
@Progressions: Success in the Music Industry we all don't buy louder or brighter if your have taste for music to have life you will keep the dynamics louder is not better nor is brighter. there will never be anything like analog ever if you respect the life in the master you will honor the dynamics and try to keep the warmth the best you can like analog
Everything music-wise is dead as long as we stick to the same old time signatures, chords, scales, modes, formulas, loops, samples and lyrical ideas. Mastering was never a one-size fits all until DAWs made everything..the same.
Very interesting and thought provoking video, well put across. I am a home recording studio hobbyist and, at heart, a musician who wants to immerse myself in learning how a wide variety of my fave songs by other artists might be recreated and/or reimagined. I started from scratch, knowing nothing about mixing, producing, or arranging. I held on to one principle, as sated simply by Beatles producer George Martin: all you need is ears. From the start I wondered exactly what the difference might be between mixing and mastering (which, as your video says, has varied in its role over the years). After all, I could treat my MASTER track (in Reaper DAW) as the place where I put plugins aimed at finalising the tracks that had been brought together from whatever plugin work I had done on those tracks. I learned the basic truth that you should not need to be fixing a bad mix by plugins on the MASTER track. I bought Ozone Advanced early on and was cheered by how much it could do to make things instantly sound much better. But I found soon after that using (favourite) individual plugins allowed my ears to get something more interesting and pleasing (to me), as well as helping me to understand what plugin might cause what to happen. As a personal discovery, I found that adding just the tiniest bit of reverb on the MASTER at the end of the chain could sometimes make the result more interesting. I was always on a modest budget so didn't own many expensive plugins (Fabfilter, Softube etc), and that no doubt limits a bit what I can achieve (as does having virtual drums/keyboards etc rather than a well mic'd studio kit being played by a real person). But, the whole fun for me is trying to get there' with only myself as collaborator (though a good friend from the band we were in 45 years ago does a lot of the bass work). In case anyone (the video creator especially) has read this far, stuff is at soundcloud.com/clana_boys (current stuff) and soundcloud.com/mobbing_it_up (earlier stuff). It can never come close to what the pros achieve but I'm proud of how far I've come since my first fumbling efforts a few years ago. in short then, maybe there's a whole large community out there like me, not pros, and not able to afford (because they do things as a hobby and earn no revenue). For that community, mastering - except what they do for themselves - is dead. But the CHALLENGE of mastering remains just as you set out in your video 👍♥ P.S. as a footnote, the stuff I do covers such a range of styles that I might need a whole network of mastering engineers to choose the best for one particular style?
Re: your question at the end… I think a great mastering engineer can do most any style, but everybody does end up niched into certain areas. So having a couple go to people that work in different spaces is a great idea.
@@progressionspod If I was serious about releasing stuff with hope of commercial success I would undoubtedly make the investment in a mastering engineer. Their skill, experience and fresh pair of ears ought to lift the result immeasurably. Back in the 1970s when I was in bands you needed a serious advance from a record deal to even go near a studio!
What even is Mastering these days?
It used to be that Mastering was to achieve two goals:
- consistency across songs on a record
- preparing the material for playback on the most common type(s) of listening devices
Today, people tend to look at it as an extension to mixing.
The focus on single songs / tracks takes away the consistency goal; streaming services applying their own unpredictable processing takes away the ability to even reason about what your music will sound like in the end.
So, Mastering in today's setting is indeed pointless. It cannot achieve any of the goals it is designed for.
I think most people are like me. They have watched multiple mixing/mastering engineers on youtube do their work and have seen the end results. Most of the time we do not like the results and realize we can do better. We acknowledge that there are definately engineers who can do a better job than us, but how do we find them and can we afford it? Can we afford it because we have to send the project to half a dozen people until we get good results? Or can we afford it when we do find that talented engineer and he wants $5k because that's the going rate for the best of the best?
The ROI of paying for top level services is definitely really hard to put your finger on. Is your 5k mix going to get you more streams or fans? Likely not. Could be an interesting video or article idea
I couldn't agree with this more. I've never applied an AI tool to my music and liked the result. And like most amateurs I sometimes make moves because I think I should or because something looks a certain way in the GUI. It's almost never the right thing to do. As I'm learning, I'm finding that I'm taking plugins OFF the chain not adding them. And AI just isn't ready for prime time as far as I can tell.
It better not be dead. after 37 years of playing music I still have a long way to go 😅
Well, I'm honest, I have no idea what mastering is all about. I'm a bedroom producer in my spare time. And so, I've watched a lot of RUclips videos where random guys discuss "the ultimate mastering chain in ". In the end, every of their examples became louder to almost reached clipping and distortion.
First, I've tried to follow along because I could hear that my music is far quieter than others in the same genre. And it also lacked some high end. I thought that I need to throw this and that plugin on my master channel and will be good to go.
The result was that - of course - my music became much louder and brighter. I've heard of parallel compression and this EQ and that plugin. What I then recognized was much more terrifying. Because those "ultimate mastering chains" cause fat low end and bright high end. What's in the middle may be buried. And so, I had another issue as some parts of my tracks were missing from that minute on I've tried to work with the "ultimate mastering chains".
Long story short, in the end I came to the conclusion: I'm now working on my tracks so that every single instrument is loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to let the other instruments be heard, and - like in the Eighties - I try to give both every instrument and the whole mix enough headroom so the song can breathe. After this, I let the automatic mastering of the platform "BandLab" do some polishing. And now the songs sound much better. I still have no idea what mastering is about. And if I would plan to make a living from my music, I would pay a mastering engineer. But at the moment I'm happy with the results since I began to work on the sound like described.
Some dude once told that you can take a shitty mix to a random mastering engineer and you will get a shitty mastered track. If you as a musician don't do your job and produce an amazing song, no mastering engineer on the planet can help you to get an amazing products for the people. But if you have done your job the best you can, the mastering engineer can do his job and make your song and outstanding product.
What I'm hearing is that getting good at mastering without ai stuff will make me an x factor and guarantee my music sounds unique
If you get great at mastering you can finish your music off exactly the way you want it to sound AND do it for other people as well!
Honestly a clean ruff mix can get you by. I never heard a consumer say "Is this the master record". Honestly I believe it’s dying. Master Plan plugin when used properly goes hard. Walk away from a final mix for 2 days and come back and master your track.
🐶 ruff
Conclusion: if you don’t have the money to pay a human mastering engineer than mastering is dead. If you have the money than it’s alive. Welcome to the future of A I
Louder is not necessarily better!
This fascinates me. I sent two songs out to be digitally mastered (AI baloney). When they came back, I emailed both houses and said, "All you did was make it louder"! I like the way they sounded in my DAW better.
Bravo. Well said chap.
Someone please explain how Ozone taking X secs of your recording and then coming up with all these EQ and dynamics tweaks makes any sense at all. At least in my music, picking a different X seconds is going to come up with wildly different settings, so it just becomes a guessing game of which X seconds to use. What's the point? And "matching" to some reference track is equally dubious for the same reason. You might as well just listen to your whole recording and tweak it yourself. Ozone would be more impressive if it looked at your whole recording in total before coming up with its settings. Of course, that's much harder to do.
I am amazed, how they mixed some Hits back in the 70s, with the tech from this time, these were real masterpieces. I can only explain with real wizards working at the mixing console back then. I have the greatest respect for them. So, but then again, mastering will be of no use, if the mix is already bad :-)
Maybe it will sound louder maybe it will sound brighter but i'm sure that the humain mastering will be more open
Always!
and maybe it doesn't *need* to sound louder or brighter. Pro mastering is also knowing what to leave out!