17 Jan
2011
17 Jan
'11
11:20 p.m.
On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 14:11 -0800, Ken Restivo wrote:
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.
Having said that, when a world class mix engineer does a mix, the
mastering engineer doesn't have to do much, as someone pointed out. But
unless someone like Dave Reitzas or Ed Cherney is mixing your tracks,
take it to a qualified mastering house. Even those guys take their
mixes to guys like Bob Ludwig. Running your mix through a Farichild 670
isn't going to hurt it. :-)
Ricardus...
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 03:38:48PM +0100, J?rn
Nettingsmeier wrote:
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. 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.