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 you’ve 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 on…

You’ve 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. You’ve brought in a great vocalist. Do you ask him to sing with marbles in his mouth? That’s crazy talk! It never fails to amaze me how—after working long and hard on their masterpiece—talented 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. I’ve 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 I’ve seen many producers make repeatedly (some of these mistakes I’ve made myself as a producer, before I knew better). Everything in this article is common sense, but you’d be surprised how many seasoned producers fail to follow these simple practices. I’m going to assume here that you’re mixing down your track in a digital environment. If you mix down to analog tape, for example, the rules may be slightly different—but read on anyways, since most of the material here still applies.
1. Make sure you’re 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 “they can fix it in mastering” then you’re 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 you’re new to music production or aren’t completely confident in your skills, the best way to make sure you’re 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 hasn’t been mastered yet. So turn down the volume on those professionally-mastered tracks before you make the comparison.

Now that you’ve 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 engineer’s disposal

2. Don’t try to do the mastering engineer’s job

In other words, don’t 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 you’re 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 you’ve added compression or other processing, the mastering engineer may have to spend time working around what you’ve done, which takes away from the time he or she spends making sure your track sounds as beautiful as possible. Don’t 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, you’re probably doing something wrong—for 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 bad—in 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, you’ve stepped into the mastering engineer’s territory. And the mastering engineer can’t ‘undo’ the clipping. You’ll enable the mastering engineer to get a better result if you turn down the master level and render a mixdown that doesn’t 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 don’t play 24-bit files and some CD burning software may not support burning audio CD-Rs directly from 24-bit files. Most likely, you won’t 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 you’ve 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 you’re delivering a CD to your mastering engineer, it’s better to burn a data CD with the 24-bit .wav or .aiff files than to burn an audio CD.
5. No lossy compression

Don’t 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 that—under the right conditions—are 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 don’t sound bad, some of the detail in your mix will be lost. Stick with uncompressed .wav or .aiff files and you’ll get better results.

That’s 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.camelaudio.com/news.php?nID=132

Been somewhat interested in this thing, going to check out the demo.

Anyone else heard reviews about it?

http://bit.ly/gJLVs

Have a great mix comp of him from Hacienda classics.

Been using the GB stuff a lot, really recommend it. Looking forward to checking this new pack out:

http://bit.ly/18pKaa

I'm officially settled in London now, NW2. If anyone is interested in meeting up or doing some engineering sessions get in touch.

Also thanks for the patience of everyone waiting for work to be completed over the month of February. Things should be running smoothly from here on out.

In ableton I love how easy it is to cut and paste time. i would use this a lot to to cut in empty bars to make space to change or add to the arrangement.

Does anyone know how or if I can do this in Logic 7, and also is it possible in 8?

I've been a fan of Sendspace for a while but they've now started to use automatic forwarding to pages with ads which is annoying. Have considered using a paid scheme. Does anyone know if there is a paid services where people uploading to you as well as downloading can benefit or does it only work one way?

feed back is good.

http://www.reverbnation.com/sattvaananda

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18339

Is anyone aware of some kind of a controller (either special-made mouse or separate unit) that's made to work with most of the popular music making programs? (or hell, even just for one) Like something with some knobs, buttons, sliders, etc....to make the work flow quicker? Essentially, it would come with it's own program that can interface with the music making program; and you could assign the knobs and buttons to whatever function you want in the program.

Not a midi controller. Something that would control the program itself. Say for example, you want to raise the volume on track 6, instead of moving your mouse pointer over to it and slowly moving your mouse up....you can just use the controller knob to 'manually' do it. (I find that sometimes when you go to adjust things, your mouse goes haywire and rather than +1 in volume, it gets jacked up to the uppermost limit! Or sometimes it's almost impossible to go up by small amounts in some cases)

Hope that's a clear enough explanation.

Thanks

Glenn