Hi!
me and my band mate 'might' try and do a self release type thing - we are doing all the recording and mixing ourselves but, would it be worth maybe getting it mastered proffessionaly to give it a bit of 'zing'?
i have no experience with mastering - and to be honest and a little confused as to what the process actually involves.
so.... Mastering a self released ep that no one will ever listen to, worth it?
any tips would help!
thanks!
mmm
tread carefully...
if you can get a good price then go for it.
why tread carefully?
??
>>
sometimes mastering makes the song to shiny and you decide to go back to the original anyway.... but £300 down.
thats a fair point
i'm quite up for it being mega mega shiny!
HIGH GLOSS FTW
Get it properly mastered
it'll sound really muddy and quiet otherwise! We got our whole album done for £200 quid by a friend and it was really worth it. Just look around online or try to get a recommendation from a friend. It really makes a difference to how things sound.
..
how are you recording? cubasis?
we are using
logic mainly
we got our album mastered
and it's a self released free download that almost no-one's ever going to hear, but we were well pleased with the results - it's much bigger, clearer and more alive now but not too shiny. The thing is to find a sympathetic engineer who gets what your music's about and doesn't try to compress everything to death/smooth off rough edges etc if you don't want them to.
We were lucky enough to call in a favour and get it done for free though, so if we'd been paying full whack i would probably feel differently...
Bear in mind
that if the mix is lousy to start with, mastering wont fix that. That said, if you have the classic home-demo problem of quietness, and you can't fix it, it might be worth it.
Of course, there's no reason you can't master it yourself if you know roughly what you're doing. Multiband compression, a touch of EQ and as a last resort, hard limiting with a volume boost (dirty) can work wonders.
could someone give me a
very rough guide as to what the mastering process is?
at teh moment - the stuff we have recorded so far - is coming out really nice and clean, and we are going to spend AGES mixing it to get all the levels as good as we can , i just feel like a final polish might really help
mastering
is basically tweaking EQ and compression.
It's a science unto its self.
I sat in on some mastering of our old stuff and this guy had loads of gear for tweaking different frequencies of the mix.
I'd also say , in basic terms, that mastering evens out the volume of a mix. i.e. if you were to have a quite verse and loud chorus it will even things out so that the verse doesn't sound ridiculously different in terms of volume. This is particularly important/useful for radio.
We're getting our album mastered in a couple of weeks - we feel it's kind of essential.
p.s.
if you want the contact of the guy who's doing our album pm me.
He's pretty cheap and our producer (Dave Eringa) really rates him.
Can't polish a turd ethos
Yeha get it right in the mix and you are laughing.
To be honest you can master it yourself, get a few different stereos together and play it on your ipod, the car anywhere and see what you think about the sound.
Mastering can make a track and kill it, it's the dark art. Satan mastered the last Flaming Lips lp.
Watch yourselves
and don't just compress EQ and volume boost it - it'll sound rubbish. Mastering is tricky - even the greats sometimes get it wrong. Listen to 'Californication' by RHCP. Musically, this album is obviously rubbish - however, worse is the mastering - it's fuckin' criminal! Compression, distortion, an obscene amount of clipping...the list goes on and on...
A couple of people
on this thread are offering to master tracks for free - http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=16807
If you don't like what gets done you don't have to use it, and won't have lost anything.
Definitely
get it mastered.
With the weak dollar at the moment it's definitely worth getting it done there.
One of the best in the business is a guy called John Golden, who has probably mastered many of your favourite records. Sonic Youth, Drive Like Jehu, Calexico, Superchunk etc. The care and attention he gives to it is amazing.
We got our album done by him, was $600, I imagine an EP would be drastically cheaper.
You'd be mad not to really!
link
http://www.goldenmastering.com/projects.html
Definitely don't try and do it yourself!
this is all super helpful
one more thing -
we ust a lot of electronic sources of sounds and it's massively layered with loads of untraditional sounds - um, not sure what i'm trying to say really except that we are not a guitar, drums, bass set up, do you guys think that makes a difference to who we approach, or is the science of mastering kind of ambivilant to the actuial source material - if you know what i mean.
I'd say it doesn't really matter to be honest
most people who do mastering work on a wide range of stuff - as there isn't generally enough work in one field to specialise to much.
At least that's true of my (limited) experience!
good question
I imagine there probably are mastering engineers who specialise in different fields of music.
The guy I recommended has a 6 week or so waiting list, so I'd say he'd happily recommend you someone else if he thought they'd be more appropriate to your sound.
He's a magician though, I reckon he can work with anything!