Mastering home recordings.......?

BahHumbug

Apologies if there is already a thread on this subject somewhere. I didn't find it.

I've been doing bits of home recording for about 6 years now.  I don't have fabulous gear or treated rooms or whatever, but I've picked up and developed new skills and most importantly, I've enjoyed it.

However, 'mastering' remains a bit of a mystery to me.  I get the impression that it is mainly concerned with achieving a tonal balance (with EQ) and adjusting the dynamic range (with compression and limiting) - this can be for a single track, or across several tracks of an album.
But that's really as far as my knowledge goes, so can anyone enlighten me?  I guess I'm looking for clarification of the basic point of mastering, but also in what techniques, tools and strategies folks use to acheive it.

......and my interest is really from the point of learning, so "send it to a mastering engineer" is not a good answer.

ta

stratman3142

I've got a book called Mastering Audio by Bob Katz that seems to be pretty good. That's the best advice I can give.

I haven't really got my head around mastering either. I'm a bit of a philistine and mastering to me mainly consists of putting Voxengo Elephant on the master track to make it louder, plus maybe some EQing with IK Tracks CS Prog EQ 1A which gives some tracks an extra something.

I make decisions about about the mix as I go along and try to be selective about the frequency space and time space occupied by the instruments/parts so it doesn't all mush together, but I feel I need to learn more about mastering, so I'm interested in this thread as well.

Adji

Mastering is a proper black art, a lot of mastering seems very secretive.
In essence the idea is simple - Make a track sound the same regardless of how or where it is played. So making sure it sounds roughly the same on a laptop, a hi-fi, in the car, on an ipod etc.

Modern mastering is also about imparting a certain flavor or tonality / balance to the overall mix, gelling it altogether and, of course (sadly) loudness.
I recommend checking out Ian Shepherd on YouTube.

BTW, take what I say with a pinch of salt, I am FAR from a mastering engineer but recently had a few people approach asking if I would master their projects. You can do it at home to a reasonable standard and, just like mixing, it is mainly about technique and skill / art as opposed to gear.

octatonic

The entire premise of self-mastering is kinda flawed.
The main reason for mastering is a different set of ears in a different room.
If you stay in the same room with the same sets of ears then what is the point?

I've mixed a few albums now- I always get a mastering engineer involved if the budget allows it.
If it doesn't then I have a couple of engineer friends who have their own studios who help out and I've done the same for them.

Cirrus

Hope you don't mind, I wrote a thing about mastering on Reddit because everyone there kept on asking the same questions;

With the various options available in terms of mastering plugins, Landr etc and the amount of producers who are trying to mix and master their own work, it always feels like the waters are a bit muddy in terms of actually understanding what mastering is. This is my perspective as a mixer. I'm not that great at extended writing but hopefully this clears things up if you're confused;

To me, mastering is just taking all the separate finished mixes and putting them together into the final product - the master - that can then be sent to the factory to make all the copies you can sell.

That's a pretty simple definition, so I like thinking of it like that. Anything else stems from that basic goal.

The thing is, a mastering engineer will do whatever he needs to to achieve that goal. At the very least he's got to take the mixes and assemble them onto a master CD (or a vinyl master in the old days) so that the tracks all start in the right place and the gaps between the songs are appropriate.

That's pretty simple too, so I like that.

To make that master disk, the mastering engineer needs to be aware of the technical requirements of the format (ISRC codes,red book standard for CD, sample rate, bit depth, running length, or for vinyl the limitations in low end and stereo spread that are needed to make sure the needle doesn't jump out of the groove). This is all well within their remit as a mastering engineer, so that's all cool - you don't need to worry about any of it because you're paying a mastering engineer to master your mixes.

That's a bit more complicated, but I like it because when I hire a mastering engineer I can sit back and watch them do what I paid for.

Now, it just so happens that mastering engineers listen to music pretty much constantly, so they hear loads of different genres and have a very good understanding of the norms and expectations within that genre in terms of overall volume and tonal balance. They do most of their listening in their very expensive rooms with very expensive gear, so when they hear your mix they'll notice if something's a bit out of whack relative to the music they usually hear. They can use their experience and the tools at hand to process your stereo mixes to mitigate certain problems, bring the loudness into the expected range and subtly bring the stereo mix more in line tonally with what's expected from the genre. They can also use processing to make all the mixes sound like they belong together on the same CD, and control the relative volume and tone between different tracks to achieve this.

This is as far as a mastering engineer goes before I start to feel like I've messed up somewhere.

Because good mastering engineers have great sounding rooms and gear that they know intimately, and many mixers these days have sub standard gear, monitoring, recording chops and taste (I'm talking about myself here guys ) you end up in the slightly embarrassing situation where you've done a mix that you think sounds good, then you take it to the mastering studio and the mastering engineer immediately points out a bunch of issues that need resolving, and just to give some examples I've been guilty of myself I'd submit these;

annoying resonances in acoustic guitars, harsh upper midrange peaks on voices, clicks in the audio, muddy bass, overly dull or bright mixes, badly set bus compressors, and mixes that are totally out there in terms of volume between sections.

In all these cases, the mastering guy was able to do a lot of corrective work with the stereo masters, but realistically it would have been better if I'd addressed them in the mix - especially because addressing them would probably have caused a knock on effect where I made a load of other changes - but my monitoring just wasn't up to snuff for me to notice them, so I was living in happy ignorance. And while listening to your mixes on your home and car stereos etc can help you identify problems, I really think that only takes you so far. I mean, have you tried mixing on a car stereo? It's impossible, you just don't know what you're hearing.

My experience with mastering, both attended and remote sessions, has been that it's an important part of the process essentially as a quality control check and to get a fresh set of experienced ears on board. I've learned more in a single day at a good mastering room, just sitting and listening to my mixes over a £20k set of speakers while a pro talks me through his thoughts and process, than I'd learned in 6 months of blindly twisting knobs in front of my old £60 Tannoys.

Some things muddy the waters though;

• Mastering plugins. What the are they good for? They don't give you a master CD ready for replication, they don't upgrade your monitoring so you can actually hear the problems you need to solve in the first place, and they, despite what their marketing teams say, aren't smart enough to make the decisions that will enhance your mixes. All they are are a bunch of presets and a tool to make your existing mix louder, wider, and try to fit your mix into the sonic profile of an arbitrary commercial sound. Thing is, if your monitoring or lack of experience has caused you to make mistakes in the mix, what's to stop you making more mistakes as you adjust the mastering plugin?

• Automated mastering like Landr etc. Fine if you don't care about the sound of your music very much, but I'd challenge anyone to actually go and sit with a mastering engineer for a day and see the number of judgements they need to make in order to both deliver a commercially viable sound but also enhance the artistic intent of the artist. A computer just won't do that, not until the machines become self aware and exterminate us all.

• Stem mastering. Some cheaper mastering engineers offer stem mastering because they know many of their clients are going to give them bad mixes, pay them peanuts and expect to receive back fantastic sounding masters. With stems that's a bit easier because they can basically reach deeper into the mix to fix issues and finish the mix themselves. Which is fine, I guess, but I don't want my mastering engineer to mix my record; I want them to master it.

• Online distribution. If you don't intend to release a CD then part of the technical reason for mastering is null and void. At that point you need to decide if your mixes are going to benefit from the experience of a mastering engineer to make them better, which becomes a value judgement that's quite difficult - at least when you leave an 8 hour album mastering session clutching a master CD, you feel like you've paid for a THING. When you just get a stereo file emailed back to you for you to upload to soundcloud, youtube etc, all you know is that it's louder and it sounds a bit different over the same monitors you used to mix it. Is different better? If it sounds better now, why didn't you just mix it that way? It becomes a lot less well defined, though hopefully the mastering guy can talk you through what he actually did, any problems he identified, and convince you that they were worth what you paid them.

Anyway, that's what mastering is all about as far as I see it.

BahHumbug

Thanks for the replies chaps

mrleon83

Get ik laarsden console if u want a quick fix ... Or izotope ozone, use a preset then learn what everything does ...

Winny_Pooh

Old days - Preparing for the delivery format be it a lathe cutting vinyl, cd redbook etc. And doing mild eq, limiting, phase fixes to enable that.

Nowadays with Mp3 etc - objective professional set of ears to fix issues, deliver consistent volume over the sequencing and fix eq issues caused in the mixing process.

Professional mixes have very little alteration generally. 

If you mix your own music you are effectively doing some "mastering" by applying limiting & eq on the stereo bus and may not need a mastering engineer. (I didnt use one on our EP for budget reasons, examples here

) 

Its flying a bit blind however as there are many issues that may be impossible to recognise in a normal home studio monitoring situation.

DulcetJones

I don't have a lot of the expensive equipment or know how either but I can tweak EQ and adjust volume levels.  When I've reached the point where an entire album has been recorded and has to sound good from start to finish I listen to it on every set of speakers and headphones available to me and make notes as I do.  I have small computer speakers, a set of larger home stereo speakers, my car, several trucks I drive at work and a couple sets of headphones.  When it all sounds good across all of those, I'm done.  I've always wondered about the advice to buy the most expensive monitor speakers you can get because who has those in their home?

stratman3142

@Winny_Pooh ;

Well an audio clip is worth a thousand words. Loved the clips you posted. The music and sound is great on my system.

Danny1969

The point about a neutral sounding room and a fresh pairs of ears is spot on. However if you don't have that then personally I master on the mix bus while still in multitrack format because then I can hear what it going to do to my mix in terms of exaggerating verbs and squashing drums  
The last pro album mixed and mastered at my studio was also mastered at Abbey road. The Abbey road master is slightly brighter and a whisker louder, that's about it 

Cirrus

DulcetJones said:

I've always wondered about the advice to buy the most expensive monitor speakers you can get because who has those in their home?

You can't account for what everyone's playback systems are going to do to your mix. But if you can actually hear what's going on while you're mixing it, you can identify and react to problems that may or may not be audible on a different system. Sure, you can reference on lots of lesser speakers but then you're introducing a need to second guess what you're actually hearing.

My old speakers didn't reveal harsh upper mid/treble frequency resonances, so I used to turn over mixes to get mastered where the engineer had to put some narrow notches between say 2.5 and 4k to stop it sounding harsh on some systems.

They also didn't reveal subtle stuff like trying out different tape formulations on Waves' J37, and setting attack/release times was a bit of a struggle.

Upgraded my speakers, and now I can hear and react to those things. It's just about the mix being more robust out there in the world where you have no control over what it'll be played through. I find it so much easier to mix when I only have to worry about making the mix sound good to me, rather than "good to me with the proviso that I'm making allowances for the speakers".

BahHumbug

Once again, thanks for all the replies.  It strikes me that the key to professional mastering is the independent set of ears that is used to the various qualities of various genres within the commercial market.  In many respects this seems to me to be more of a professional peer review than anything else, albeit one that comes with a lot of experience and technical knowledge.  'Mastering' almost seems like a misnomer for this activity, although I can't really think of an alternative short, snappy name for it.
Anyway, as @Danny1969 says, for me as a home recordist without the budget (or commercial justification) to use a professional mastering person, it sounds like there is not much else I need to worry about beyond mixing my tracks (and checking them on as many different playback devices as possible).  If I ever get as far as releasing a number of tracks as a collection then there will be the task of making them sound like they live together, but in terms of individual tracks it really seems to be a case of just mixing them.

thermionic

Me and my friend were able to release a single about 4-5 years ago, electronic music with a lo-fi edge (we grew up recording stuff on 4-track cassette machines). It was released on 7" vinyl and we let an experienced mastering engineer handle the mastering for the vinyl versions. The iTunes/CD promo versions I mastered myself, following the advice given on an a Sound on Sound article using Logic plugins (Apple multiband compressor, Logic EQ, Exciter, Limiter - which I've kept a copy of  for future use). I can't seem to find the article now. The experienced mastering engineer listened to my versions and told me they were pretty good, which I was very pleased about. I have very limited experience and my stuff is not high-end audio by any means, but I seemed to have been able to produce a decent result based on the SoS article.

thomasross20

I've not got the time to do it properly so will pay somebody. 

I just had the moment of realisation that it's been years and I could re-record my whole album and it would sound a lot better (drums, bass, EQ, thump, timing etc) - but that would take even MORE time. Highly depressing!! 

hassleham

I agree that mastering techniques are often a well kept secret. 

A good way for you to learn would be to pay to have a couple of tracks mastered professionally and then watch/read some tutorials online about doing it yourself and see if you can get yours to sound close to or better than the pro masters.

ChrisMusic

A little light reading matter linked below, hope that helps someone.

http://music.tutsplus.com/series/mastering-you-can-do-it-yourself-premium--audio-21699

http://music.tutsplus.com/categories/mixing-mastering
171 articles on various aspects of mixing and mastering, on proprietary software, etc

Sorry @thomasross20 ~ I think they are not for you ~ at over a minute each to read and digest !  
(Sometimes it is worth the time, and enjoying the journey, your pleasure in your destination may well be increased too, just sayin')

Really excellent re-post of your Reddit article above @Cirrus  

xtedmanzie

I've found izotope ozone 7 mastering software (£300?) to be very good for the kind of thing the OP is talking about. It's the kind of software that you can click through a bunch of presets, tweak a little but not too much, and there it is - sounds louder, wider, tighter. You can dig in and tweak like mad if you want to. But of course the better your monitoring setup (inc the room) the better you can judge.

If I've got something I need to do to a higher level I send it to a pro.

wave100

If I was selling it I'd get it mastered by a pro...

octatonic

hassleham said:

I agree that mastering techniques are often a well kept secret. 

Um, no not really.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-Audio-Science-Bob-Katz/dp/0240808371

guitarfishbay

If you can't hear it you can't EQ it.

There's multiple layers to that.

First is your monitoring setup.  Many people have untreated rooms that are multi function (i.e. not just music rooms) and there are going to be things you don't hear properly in there.  If you load up some kind of sine wave plugin and slowly sweep from whatever your monitors start from to 200hz at your listening volume you'll hear some frequencies being louder and some quieter.  A pro mastering engineer is going to have a much flatter and more accurate room and that is a big part of the tools of the trade.

The second is just experience.  You have to train your ear to hear resonances in things, or when things are clashing.  Distorted electric guitars in particular often have resonances in them that impact on the clarity of the whole mix, but a lot of people just can't pick them out until they've trained their ear to do so.