18 Jan
2011
18 Jan
'11
12:20 a.m.
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:49:20 -0800
Ken Restivo <ken(a)restivo.org> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 05:20:15PM -0500, Ricardus
Vincente wrote:
curious: mix engineers suck but mastering engineers don't and they even
know how to mix better than mix engineers.
what's the reason? Maybe that mixing is being done by self taught
people while mastering no?
renato
On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 14:11 -0800, Ken Restivo
wrote:
Yep. I guess that's what mastering engineers spend most of their time
doing: fixing bad mixes.
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:31:41PM +0100,
fons(a)kokkinizita.net
wrote:
Unfortunately most mix engineers suck. That's why you need a real
mastering engineer to fix your mixes. Taking the tracks back to a
guy with tin ears isn't going to help.
Most people making records today are inexperienced and doing it at
home. On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 03:38:48PM +0100, J?rn
Nettingsmeier
wrote:
> don't forget the most important aspect of mastering: a second
> pair of ears, in a very good listening room.
Correct.
> take that out of the equation, and all that's left of
> mastering is some parametric eq and (if you must) multiband
> compression.
And I wonder why these shouldn't be done when mixing instead.
In the 'old days' EQ and compression was required to adapt a
mix to the limits of the distribution medium (vinyl in most
cases). No such problem exists today. Why on earth should you
re-EQ a mix ? If the mixing engineer did a good job (by
carefully EQ-ing individual tracks), what chance do you have to
improve this by acting on the mixed signal ? If he didn't, the
way to correct for this is to redo the mix. Same for
compression, it's much more effective and less intrusive when
done on single tracks.
For the record, I hate mastering and compressed loudness-war
mixes. I enjoy making use of the dynamic range of 16-bit (or
more) audio. And, I also put the mastering (multiband
compression, really) stuff in the chain while mixing, one of the
wonderful things about JACK. It's just an insert on the master
bus in Ardour for me, and my exported mixes are mastered.
However, today's popular music must contend with limitations of
the listener's equipment, just as it did in the days of
turntables and six-peices-of-particle-board-and-an-8-inch-speaker
turntable/stereo combinations. The limitations are different and
so therefore are the solutions and workarounds.
Today, people listen to music on iPods and truly wretched laptop
speakers in noisy environments. And everything else they listen
to is compressed out the wazoo. So when my lightly-compressed
mixes come up on shuffle, they are inaudible, not just in
comparison to other professionally-mastered mixes, but against
the background noise they're competing with.
So, next time around, I'm putting my mixes thorugh NAMA and
squashing the holy hell out of them, until they sound like
whatever the major labels are pooting out these days.