CD Mastering engineering - what are the typical costs and merits?

ToneControl

my mate records and produces his albums in home studios, and then likes to pay a mastering engineer to polish them before they go to CD

I'm not talking about remastering from the full set of track stems,

I'm talking about someone taking the finished stereo WAV files, and tweaking EQ, compression, reverb across the mix to get the tracks to sit together well and sound ok on different hifis, car radios, etc

How hard is this, and how much should it cost?

To me it sounds a lot easier than producing and mixing each track, but some people charge quite a lot for it.

How much is it worth paying for this for a semi-pro CD which is mostly acoustic guitar and vocals? 

spark240

A good engineer can bring your tracks to life definitely, ..and it is a bit of an art I find, though often they will have a fixed set of rules and work from there 

Im always trying to tweak my Masters but I know I havent got there yet, plenty of learning and works to do, it can be quite enlightening to watch someone squeeze all those extra Db and frequencies out of your " finished " track.

However I do find even on established artist tracks I sometimes think it doesnt sound great, but maybe it does to the majority?   

Cost...well thats a tricky one, more of a lucky dip if you intend to send it over the net, 

Why not post your version here and lets take a listen?

Nerine

PROPER mastering is worth the money.

Some guy with Waves L2 isn't.

guitarfishbay

The listening environment alone for a higher end mastering engineer will A) cost a lot in both monetary and time investment and show up more than the average person will hear in a home studio, and that is before you get to the skill and experience of the engineer themselves.

With the internet you can book pretty much whoever you want these days, you can see their list of credits as a mastering engineer, and their prices.

octatonic

Two things never to skimp on are proper drum recording and mastering.

I've referred a lot of work to Andy Baldwin at Metropolis- he is relatively affordable but a total pro.

xtedmanzie

I use this please:

http://www.theairlab.com/

Likely cheaper than Metroplis, Abbey Rd etc but the results are very good and he's a very nice guy to deal with. Proper mastering studio - expensive analogue kit combined with high end digital, great monitoring etc. 

Obviously mastering results are very much down to what you supply in the first place but definitely worth it if you want your tracks to sound as professional as possible. 

thomasross20

Do you submit all the individual tracks in every song or just your finished .wav files or ... ?

thomasross20

I just read that yes, you can uplaod as wav. 

£25 per son - that'd be £250 in my case 

IvisonGuitars

Anyone used Landr? I haven't or have had any experience of it. 

Seems like a cheaper option for demos and the suchlike, not sure I'd trust it with my life's work/new album etc but worth a look??

Deijavoo

miserneil said:

Anyone used Landr? I haven't or have had any experience of it. 

Seems like a cheaper option for demos and the suchlike, not sure I'd trust it with my life's work/new album etc but worth a look??

I pondered it for demos I do with Logic Drummer and Bias etc... Just to see how good it actually was. I'd be interested to hear too.

p90fool

If I could afford it I'd definitely say it's worth it. I've just spend all weekend checking three songs across every system and format I can get my hands to make sure they work on everything, and I feel like I'm back where I started.

I'd happily pay an experienced pair of ears to sort it.

IvisonGuitars

Deijavoo said:

miserneil said:

Anyone used Landr? I haven't or have had any experience of it. 

Seems like a cheaper option for demos and the suchlike, not sure I'd trust it with my life's work/new album etc but worth a look??

I pondered it for demos I do with Logic Drummer and Bias etc... Just to see how good it actually was. I'd be interested to hear too.

Funnily enough, this was my exact thought too.

There is also Final Touch by Positive Grid on the iPad which i've used for, again, just demos but got some great results.

Catthan

I would recommend giving a go yourself first. There's plenty of material online (vids, tutorials, ebooks) to get you going and give you an appreciation of said fixed rules. 

The reason why I am saying this is because you used your friend as an example and if I'm right he actually does loads of recording and he probably uses few certain people for mastering or maybe just one guy? 

I think that's crucial as for mixing but probably more so in mastering as you want whoever is doing it to grasp and communicate what the music is about, what the overall sound in your head is etc. 

imho that's part of why proper mixing is an art form. So if you hired someone to do it for you it would worth providing him a rough example (your own mastering attempt) of where you're going with a certain piece of music.
Or, you can provide what pros refer to as reference tracks, i.e. a produced and finished song which you like the overall sound of it.

That's much simpler than having to learn how to do it yourself but it's still worth looking into it as you may find certain approaches appeal to you more. Like e.g. using of EQ and compressor vs using a multi-band compressor, how to enhance overall stereo spread, and what effect a few std approaches have. 

Last year we paid a lot of money to a pro to make us a proper demo (mix and master) only to find out in the process that we had to dictate stuff like panning, reverb etc during mixing and then the mastering was just applying a simple rough mastering plugin in pro tools which, if we knew better, would have argued against and paid some more for him to do it properly.

He was excellent, highly efficient, knowledgeable, good with the software, patient, co-operative but:

1: We didn't do anything to communicate what our "sound", "vision" and aims were for this demo (as many bands, we are not signed and don't have producers working with us to figure this out and bring it out)

2: Even if we had done more for 1, we didn't know what to ask of him, what approach we prefer, what we wanted the end result to sound like (e.g. loud & wide vs squashed and in your face). 

OTOH, I've heard demos and professional releases done in basic home studios by the artists themselves which may lack in certain quality aspects but do way better in communicating the context of the music. 

Overall, imho it's up to you effectively communicate what you want from the person you would hire and they way to do it is have an idea of what mastering is yourself and provide some reference (own attempt or ref. track).
Otherwise you may end up unhappy even if the top guy masters your music.

Danny1969

The thing is mastering isn't a magical fairy dust that sorts out all inadequacy's in the mix, if it's not mixed right then mastering won't fix it. If the mix is well balanced and top quality though a nice mastering job can take it to a totally pro sounding level. 

Most of the time the bands I work with don't have the budget for a proper mix let alone mastering so I normally slap an EQ, SSL comp and Massey 2007 limiter on the master bus and kind of mix into that so the bounce is mastered. Some stuff did go to Abbey road though and they can certainly do a better job than I can

xtedmanzie

Danny1969 said:

The thing is mastering isn't a magical fairy dust that sorts out all inadequacy's in the mix, if it's not mixed right then mastering won't fix it. If the mix is well balanced and top quality though a nice mastering job can take it to a totally pro sounding level. 

+1  I agree, you can't sort out a bad mix in mastering. 

Snap

buy a mag from Computer Music or similar on mastering first, thoroughly read it, then make your mind up.

Cirrus

The first time I took my mix to an attended mastering session in a great room with a great engineer, my jaw hit the floor. In a room like that, you can hear everything. And an experienced mastering engineer not only knows how to get the best from a mix but is an impartial set of ears and a fresh perspective who can listen to your music as your audience will. It's difficult to set a price on that.

Winny_Pooh

Mastering benefits simplified:
You have a set of professional objective ears in an accurate listening environment doing final checks and balances to improve frequency range and dynamics problems across an album.

xtedmanzie

+1 for the above post

However,  if you want to try it yourself I would say the only thing you need to to do is buy Cytomic 'The Glue' compressor plug and try some of the presets out (the mastering presets), and possibly tweak them (if you know/learn a bit about how compressors/limiters work).

http://www.cytomic.com/glue

Best $99 you'll spend. You'll at least get your tracks up to a decent volume level.

Beyond that, give it to a mastering engineer. You need really decent monitoring to get into the nitty gritty of eq-ing. And if you do try out sending to a mastering engineer, have a chat/email with them about how they want them supplied. 

John_A

I've used Landr and it's pretty good for demos, my 'mastering' is pretty basic, but sounds OK for demo use, tracks I've uploaded to Lander come back sounding probably marginally better with no effort. For demos I'd say use it, for release material then a good mastering engineer is worth paying for

ToneControl

tedmanzie said:

+1 for the above post

However,  if you want to try it yourself I would say the only thing you need to to do is buy Cytomic 'The Glue' compressor plug and try some of the presets out (the mastering presets), and possibly tweak them (if you know/learn a bit about how compressors/limiters work).

http://www.cytomic.com/glue

Best $99 you'll spend. You'll at least get your tracks up to a decent volume level.

Beyond that, give it to a mastering engineer. You need really decent monitoring to get into the nitty gritty of eq-ing. And if you do try out sending to a mastering engineer, have a chat/email with them about how they want them supplied. 

is glue the one given away as part of Ableton?

I tried it a tiny bit, not sure yet 

is it multi-band

I reckon the multi-band ones are way better than any single band comp

tbh

For many years I've used TC X3 on my mixes, and found the results to be incredibly better than the mixes I do by hand

I have always wondered what percentage of a good mastering engineer I can get out of x3 using the presets with a bit of tweaking

I've recently bought the Waves multi-band comps since I'm intending to move away from my old TDM plugins

So far have no opinions on how good they are though, but I just want to get skilled on a non-DAW-specific set of plugins