03-02-2009, 07:16 PM
Quote:Beatportal user, producer and mastering engineer Amit Shoham [a] has decided to share with the community some invaluable tips to make the all important process of mastering your tracks a joy for your engineer of choice.
If youâve ever had any lingering doubts about exactly what a mastering engineer will expect from your newly mixed-down productions, or indeed the exact role your engineer will play, then please, do read onâ¦
Youâve hired a great bass player to lay down a groove on your new track. Do you ask her to cut the A-string off her bass and play the bassline with only the remaining three strings? Probably not. Youâve brought in a great vocalist. Do you ask him to sing with marbles in his mouth? Thatâs crazy talk! It never fails to amaze me howâafter working long and hard on their masterpieceâtalented producers often insist on crippling their mastering engineer.
After years of honing my skills as a mastering engineer I recently began taking on mastering projects for other producers. Iâve found that almost every track I work on has one or more issues that hinder my ability to get the best possible sound.
Here are a few simple tips on how to enable your mastering engineer to do the best job possible. These tips are based on mistakes Iâve seen many producers make repeatedly (some of these mistakes Iâve made myself as a producer, before I knew better). Everything in this article is common sense, but youâd be surprised how many seasoned producers fail to follow these simple practices. Iâm going to assume here that youâre mixing down your track in a digital environment. If you mix down to analog tape, for example, the rules may be slightly differentâbut read on anyways, since most of the material here still applies.
1. Make sure youâre completely happy with your mixdown
A good mastering engineer can make a so-so mix sound pretty good, but they can make a great mix sound fantastic. If you find yourself thinking âthey can fix it in masteringâ then youâre probably not done with your mixdown yet. You could ask the mastering engineer to make that sax solo a little less raspy, but in the process of controlling the raspy sax the mastering engineer will probably have to make some compromises and lose some of the detail of the other instruments. Your track will sound better if you fix it in your mixdown.
If youâre new to music production or arenât completely confident in your skills, the best way to make sure youâre happy with your mixdown is to compare it with a few other well-produced tracks. On the same system, listen to your mixdown side-by-side with the best sounding tunes you can find. You should expect professionally mastered tracks to sound a lot louder and more present than your mixdown, since it hasnât been mastered yet. So turn down the volume on those professionally-mastered tracks before you make the comparison.
Now that youâve taken care of the volume difference, listen to the frequency balance, the clarity of the instruments, etc. In comparison to the other tunes, does it sound like some of the parts in your mix conflict with each other? Is the overall balance of frequencies right? Are any of the parts too loud or too soft?
Compression is just one of the tools at the engineerâs disposal
2. Donât try to do the mastering engineerâs job
In other words, donât use any post-processing (compression, equalization, or any other effect on the master output) when you render your final mixdown. Your mixdown may sound better to you with a little compression or with a loudness maximizer on the master output but youâre hiring a mastering engineer because they can do a better job than you of getting your mix to sound clear, detailed and loud.
Mastering engineers often spend only a short amount of time on each track. If youâve added compression or other processing, the mastering engineer may have to spend time working around what youâve done, which takes away from the time he or she spends making sure your track sounds as beautiful as possible. Donât cripple your mastering engineer! Your mixdown should not sound as loud as the already mastered tracks in your music collection. If it does sound that loud, youâre probably doing something wrongâfor example, your mixdown is probably clipping, which brings us to the next tip:
3. Avoid clipping
If the master output level meters in your digital production environment hit 0.0 dB or above, then your mixdown is clipping. Clipping distorts the audio signal. It might not sound badâin fact clipping is one of the tools that your mastering engineer may sometimes use to make your mix sound loud and crisp. So your mix may sound better to your ears with clipping than without it. But if you let your mixdown clip because you think it sounds better that way, youâve stepped into the mastering engineerâs territory. And the mastering engineer canât âundoâ the clipping. Youâll enable the mastering engineer to get a better result if you turn down the master level and render a mixdown that doesnât clip.
Clipping is a no-no
4. Render a 24-bit audio file
It may be tempting to render a 16-bit file because some media players donât play 24-bit files and some CD burning software may not support burning audio CD-Rs directly from 24-bit files. Most likely, you wonât be able to hear the difference between a 24-bit file and a 16-bit file before mastering. But when your mastering engineer turns up the volume and brings out the details in your mix, some of the extra audio material captured in the 24-bit files can make an audible difference. That difference is tiny. But you want to enable your mastering engineer to do the best job possible, right? Every little bit matters.
Note that audio CDs only support a 16-bit format. If youâve rendered a 24-bit file but are burning an audio CD from it, then the extra information in the 24-bit file is just getting thrown away in the CD burning process. So if youâre delivering a CD to your mastering engineer, itâs better to burn a data CD with the 24-bit .wav or .aiff files than to burn an audio CD.
5. No lossy compression
Donât deliver your mix to the mastering engineer using a lossy compression format such as MP3, AAC, and WMA. These file formats introduce some nasty artifacts thatâunder the right conditionsâare inaudible. A lot of DJs use 320kbps MP3s in their sets these days, and for tracks that have been properly mastered before encoding to MP3, the results are generally acceptable. However, if you use a lossy compression scheme before mastering, some of the lossy compression artifacts can become audible when your mixdown is processed with EQ and compression, etc., and even if these artifacts donât sound bad, some of the detail in your mix will be lost. Stick with uncompressed .wav or .aiff files and youâll get better results.
Thatâs it! Follow these simple practices and a good mastering engineer will be able to make your music sound present and polished.
Groove On!
http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/dont...-engineer/
