Is Mastering Dead?
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- čas přidán 17. 06. 2024
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Travis discusses how the democratization of technology and an oversimplified view of the mastering process is threatening to ruin it all together.
In this episode you'll learn,
- How Technology is Rapidly Changing Mastering
- A Quick History of Mastering
- What the True Value of Mastering Is
- Should You Be Paying for Mastering
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00:00 Intro
01:56 A Brief History of Mastering
03:37 What the Problem Is
06:11 What Mastering is REALLY About
#musicpodcast #musicindustry #mastering #recordingstudio - Hudba
Really enjoyed this reaction video from my friend Nick at Panorma Mastering. Lots of great technicals and opinions. Check it out! czcams.com/video/DM2xd0ASztw/video.html
“Why should I pay someone $2000 to make my music sound like shit when I can do it myself and make it sound like shit?” - Jpegmafia, multi million selling rapper / self producer
exactly. the point of hip hop is to sound like it was dubbed from a cassette that was dubbed from a radio broadcast of a poorly pressed 12". Music doesn't need to be pristine. It's supposed to make you feel something.
@@jonyoungmusic thats why pre-internet when bands would record at studios they'd have a very intimate relationship with all the engineers putting the record together. It was never meant to be an "outsourced" labor.
Dynamic range 4 or below loudness wars destruction of music. One listen fatigue redundancy - leading to music with no key changes - click tracks with child's nursery rhyme melody - wriiten be 1 of 3 "global producers' over the top. Insert pitched corrected 'artist' at this point.
@@1998mchp people like you are so funny how are you having a duchamp urinal moment over lil yachty
You wouldn’t pay anyone any money that would make any song sound like shit that’s a weird question or statement. But if you paid a professional mastering engineer, and you know he’s good by name or by word-of-mouth like you would anything you buy I’m sure you know that you wouldn’t get close to his mix , it would sound perfect on anything you play it on. that’s how you know it on a little shitty speaker played on some shitty headphones put on some headphones play play it in a car played in a car with an exploding system. if you just started mastering or mastering for a year or two by watching a couple videos here and there guarantee, it will only sound good in your bedroom if it sounds good at all. I’m not a mass engineer I’m an artist and I had a well known mastering engineer that charges way more than $2000 per song Mix one of my songs is a favor because my family knows him that was 10 years ago. I still use that as a reference and nothing has come close to it but then again, I haven’t had anyone that good master my music.
Here's how old I am: in 1966 my songwriting partner and I paid a local music store owner to make a record for us to send to a local radio station. He recorded us on a direct-to-disc rig. We sang and played into one mic; the signal went to a needle that engraved the sound onto a lacquer-covered metal disc. Two songs, three takes: we had to throw out the disc for one botched take. A few days later we heard ourselves warbling through the air waves. It's fun to think I actually recorded in the same way Robert Johnson did!
What, no Whiskey?
That’s great! 😃
"Every step of the record making process should always be about honoring the previous steps. Taking the vision of everyone who has touched the project before you and supporting it." This is brilliant! Every mixing and mastering engineer needs to hear this!
Thanks! Glad it resonated!
@@progressionspod makes so much sense! I never understood the mastering proces, every time i finish mixing my projects and its a dead end. But still didn't know what i have to do next! Thank you for explaining this!
I greatly agree with this statement. As a producer I don't usually mix or master what I produce, but I don't consider my job finished when I send the tracks to the mix engineer. So I supervise the mixing and mastering process, making sure that the vision we forged with the artist stays true to the very last step.
I am a stage lighting designer/director; this is also my philosophy.
I don't make my lighting a stand-alone entity; I prefer to support the other designers' work and that of the talent on stage.
~
Loved that part as well and identified with it from the experience we had at a recent project.
Involving another set of trusted (human) ears as mixer on something I’m producing or as mastering engineer on something I’m mixing is one of my FAVORITE things in music making. IMO absolutely essential part of the collaborative, creative process.
Finding someone to work with that makes a collaboration 10x instead of 2x is magic.
i'll be real honest here, i use all the AI mastering tools, and have figured out which ones sounds best for me. now I wouldn't even want to pay a mastering engineer, $150, because I almost feel like he might be feeding it through these ai's also. unless i was in the room with him, or he video'd the whole process, or zoom. just being real here.
lol
Because for a real engineer it's easier to actually do it himself instead of trying out apps he has little control over
Bro, then did you actually make the track you made since everyone is apparently using AI tools now? Did you even write this comment or did you copy paste it with an AI?
@@johngddr5288 true the lines are blurring, and will even get more blurred soon, in this case i wrote that, with no chatgpt ai edits. in terms of making music with ai, i believe music is the end product, just like a restaurant serves you the dish and you eat it, you gonna ask the waitress and cook all the questions on how they made it, chopped it, every step of the process? shit you wouldn't even want to eat it if you found out.... same with music, i am sure some of your favorite all time songs have weird studio tricks or mishaps, that we would be like hey you cheated!!! anyhoot. make the end results something that resonates with the listener with or without ai
Ive been in big studios in LA where top artist record & seen engineers through ozone on the master!
* 02:14 - cutting is done to lacquer disc, not to vinyl. It's electroplated plated, stampers made, and then *pressed* to vinyl.
Good catch. True. I did mis-speak there.
@@progressionspodSome more pedantry: before 1948, and the advent of the long playing record (LP), it was mostly *shellac* not vinyl. And more random facts: pre-1948, all music was singles only, 3 to 5 minutes per shellac record side.
@@vinylarchaeologist Those were the days... "Over THERE...Oh Over There!" Reminds me of serving with Ulysses S. Grant...
@@vinylarchaeologist Also, before the advent of the long playing record, multiple singles by the same artist (or even different artists) were placed into a custom book, or "album" as they were commonly called. These multiple song collections were the origination of the "record album" we refer to today.
@@OWEN-CASH Thanks for mentioning that. The trivia around the origin of „album“ combines my love for music AND my love for language.
Mastering has always been a *service* to artists, not merely audio processing. It's an entirely different mode/skill of listening than in mixing. Objectivity. Context. Quality control. And you get *one* chance to hear a song for the first time.
Recent (unsolicited) feedback I received: "Great job on the track, I'm really happy with it. I used LandR as a test a few days back but your work blows their AI out of the water. It was good working with you both for the convenience and the quality."
This is false. Mastering was originally audio processing so that the final product fit the medium. Engineers were used to take a tape recording and create the master to make the vinyl or cassette such that the EQ curve fit the machine it was to be played back on.
When music went digital, mastering engineers were afraid they would be out of a job, so they convinced the rest of us that they were somehow an integral step in making a digital recording into a digital recording.🤣🤣 Sorry, but mastering engineers are simply unnecessary today.
@@jasonk125Exactly, mastering engineers really overvalue how important their work is
i have no training, no experience, and nearly zero exposure to the field that you're discussing. Yet the video is totally entertaining and fully watchable to the end from that point of view. in my opinion that is great content. i also really like your balanced perspective which doesnt push too hard on tropes or take too harsh of a stance. I'm fairly sure you could make ideos about anything even outside your field of expertise with this approach. well done man!
Appreciate it!
The x factor is the song. An early 60s Bob Dylan song, recorded live, with one guitar and a pitchy vocal will still be better than anything i write that's been recorded with tech 60 years in advance and mastered by the most expensive mastering engineer in the world. People listen to great songs.
A million percent this. I grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to medium wave radio stations that battled with the “snow” noise. It’s the song. It always was the song. It’s how we engage with it.
@@farmersmith7057 very very true. They were still good enough to tape off the radio 😄
I use one reference track and that's it! Too many and you end up going round in circles. Sometimes the mix won't need anything bar a little bus compression and maybe a "safe" limiter.
Just make it sound good to you. The only people doing level comparisons are other obsessive engineers, not listeners.
The reference track should be your track that you're mastering. That initially probably shoulds moronic but IMO if you compare yourself or the band to some one else and their song or album does that mean you just want to sound like the other artist and not yourself?
If we are talking sound quality, loudness, dynamics, highlighted frequency zones, it's different. The thing is like this: imagine you have a bunch of the songs you're referencing your track to come up on shuffle and your track is around there somewhere. You'll want to try your best to make it not sound out of place, no?
@@CaptHiltz Agreed. Clients send me reference tracks all the time and honestly, they have nothing in common with the music and have no bearing on what is possible with their mix. The only time its useful is if they send me say a track that is really 70s disco sounding and their track is some clean ableton production. Then I get the tape and Curve Bender etc as I know they want a nostalgic 70s tone usually. The funny thing is tho with those I will often send a modern subtle one that compliments the mix alongside it and most of the time they say, "you know what, now that I have heard it this way I realize I was romanticizing the vintage aesthetic and I like the modern one more."
This is a good philosophy to have - but the problem is that if your listening environment is not very very accurate then the simple truth is that it will be only you that it sounds good to.
Most people invest a lot of money in gear and have little to no investment in their working environment.
A pro will invest a lot of time and money in their working environment first before moving in a single piece of equipment.
A proper mastering engineer will have taken that principle to the next level still.
@@rockosmos3884 Indeed. Why people think that its in any way useful to critique and enhance a track on the same tier of monitoring that it has been written on is shot sighted. Mastering is about providing a level of finished sound that the artist themselves cannot and doing it from a place of precision and accuracy.
Wonderful delivery of information, that final set of ears on a mix can be the difference that makes the difference. It’s about Quality for the listeners rather than the extra cost for me!
One reason to hire someone to do the master is because if you've self produced a project, at the mastering point it can become kinda painful. You've heard that track so many times demoing, tracking, mixing...and by the time it gets to the mastering it seems to be only *then* when certain things you don't like about the previous stages become apparent, because of the different way you listen when mastering.
It can be very hard sometimes to discern between those elements that really should be fixed (things that a listener might notice that are truly detrimental to the song) and things that could be - but probably shouldn't be - as all that's doing is making the mix perfect...and boring.
Just been through this...song is dropping tomorrow...so a bit a break before the next round! lol
True. A fresh perspective is hard to keep when you’ve been in it for so long.
What’s your artist project name? I’ll go check it out
@@progressionspod The project is called Beltane, and the track I just dropped is on my YT channel. Also of course links to bandcamp etc in the details.
Great video!! The real problem is that as the decades progress, new music listeners are hearing worse and worse mastering as the norm. Therefore, what passes for "good" mastering now is crap. Great mastering requires someone who has, not only great listening and engineering skills, but good taste. That last part, "good taste" is the most elusive of all to find in a mastering engineer.
Also, saying that “Louder is always better” perpetuates the problem.
When digital came onto the scene it did not increase audio headroom. If anything, it decreased, as overs (peaks above 0dBFS) resulted in CD plants rejecting the master tape (yes they were digital encoded U-matic tapes) as they were out of spec.
Honestly a clean ruff mix can get you by. I never heard a consumer say "Is this the master record". Honestly I believe it’s dying. Master Plan plugin when used properly goes hard. Walk away from a final mix for 2 days and come back and master your track.
Hi, what mic and how did you process your vocal on this track? It sounds spectacular!...it does sound like it's ran thru some kind of tuber amp unit or some lovely item that has really made your voice sound great!....what was it?
That's the summary for most of the digital tools we have access today. If you are in a budget, you can get away much more than in the old days. This makes making more accessible, and the sheer quantity of it being made is astounding.
Great video. Something you touched on but maybe not emphasised enough there is the addition of a 'fresh pair of ears' that didn't spend hours /days / months on the project and have no idea of the struggles and the decisions you made as musician / mixer. I do the mastering for a small label and the thing that I find that most bands that I work with say to me as feedback is that they never thought of the things I picked up on as they spent so much time with the project that they lost objectivity. The tools are there (check out Logic 11 'session players') but the relationship between sonics and emotions are still (who knows for how long) something that machines can't figure out.
For me i got tired of spending money on other people who simply dont have the vision i have and never produce something im excited to hear. For this reason i took the time to truly learn and understand mastering from the bottom up, and for once, i m happy with what I'm hearing.
Love it. Funny how well we can learn something when we think "f**k that, I can do that better"
I have a similar reason - 90% of what I hear is too smashed and bright. I like the sound of music from the 70s and 80s - I like dynamic range. If I want to make my music obnoxiously loud and bright, I can do that myself for free. I'd rather make something that's not quite as loud or bright, but sounds better. So my music won't compete with the top 40 hits in terms of volume, but it was never going to anyway.
@@budgetkeyboardist100%. I don’t make bricks, I make music. I like the quiet, I like the loud, I like the dynamism between the two. A hit like…life.
The key with mastering isn't too just send it off and let him go at it all willy Nilly. You have to provide some level of guidance that informs the engineer of what sonic direction you are trying to go in.
I never send a record off and "see what he does". I always tell a mastering engineer what I'm looking for. I.e. I need this opened, transparent with some warmth and a little punch.
In general, your mix should already have those characteristics. But a solid mastering engineer can preserve what is there. 👍🏿👍🏿👍🏿💯
@dpmusic21 I think what's happening is you have mixing engineers who say they also offer professional mastering. Usually, it's not professional. they're not very good at it. Adding eq, compression, saturation, tape, limiter usually ozone I could do my self. However, I have recently been using a strictly mastering engineer who uses real hardware and has a passion for mastering, and the best part he does not offer mixing.
So, while I learned a lot about mastering, I am more than happy using a passionate mastering guy who is a professional
This really needed to be said! Great video.
Thanks! glad you dug it!
Love that quote at 6:12 'mastering has never been about making changes, it's about making the right changes'
Also the piece right after about honoring every previous step to support their vision
Very interesting video, great info. Thanks for sharing.
Nicely done. Clear, concise and informative.
When i came up, mastering involved creating cohesion across an entire album, possibly reordering tracks, and making red book cds
I was trying to get something about PQs and secret tracks in there, but it felt like it was too much.
I definitely think cohesion across an album is huge, especially in today’s world of different mixers and producers on every track.
mastering an album is still this, though.. the cohesion, mostly. making sure every song sounds like it belongs on the same record
Amazing video and value in your content! Little off-topic: may I know what camera setup you're using in this video? Loving the bokeh effect!
Thanks! The camera is actually just an iPhone 14 in cinematic mode. One large main diffused light and one side light. And just a little color correction.
That's right. I spent the first 25 years as an engineer where all albums went to vinyl. Vinyl has severe limitations that CD's and hard drives don't have and the main one being is bass. The more bass in the recording the bigger the grooves get on vinyl and you only have so much real estate on a vinyl disc so engineers would leave things like the high and low eq to the vinyl mastering engineer. The guy that made the lacquer disc and plates. Too much bass also makes radio station limiters chomp down on it and drops the level of the whole record What people today call a mastering engineer is a guy with an elaborate expensive home monitoring system that believes they know what translates better on the stereo master. The last records I mixed in my studio that were on complimation CD's and mastered in Nashville the producer said the mastering engineer told him my contributions were the only ones he didn't have to master. That's partly because I got use to mixing for vinyl record albums and radio plus I already had 40 years experience mixing. The media used today can take all the bass you can throw at it so it's more forgiving than the old days. If someone is uncertain about their mixes then mastering may be a good option if they know what they are doing.
With so-called professional mastering engineers churning out albums like Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts" and Korn's "Requiem", can anyone blame people for taking matters into their own hands?
@@RealHomeRecordingidk, i thought that _GUTS_ wasn't too bad on that front (didn't stop me from enjoying the music).
don't know what happened with that korn album tho, wtf
This is where it truly still matters. If you want to press vinyl.
It's not just louder and bright it's whether the bass and all the other elements sit nicely and you can't achieve that without a good mix and mixdown.
Louder and brighter! Yeah!! 💪🏼
The secret to success. 😂
When the vast majority of music listeners on the most popular songs are 16 year olds, no one is really going to care about the differences between mastering techniques, AI or human.
16 year olds care. When I was 16 the sound quality of an album had a major impact on what sub genre of hip hop I liked. But maybe that was just me.
"One final collaborator..." Yes! Thank you for that, a very helpful thought.
This is a great topic! I think a lot of the misinformation or “bad decisions” people are making are coming from all of the “secret sauce” type of videos suggesting that certain processing methods will always work in combination with a lot of newer engineers being self taught. The internet is powerful but with less experience these “works every time” things are being misinterpreted as a copy and paste type of thing when in fact it seems the majority of them are actually reference/starting points. But too often I feel like it isn’t highlighted that all of these recommendations are what worked for the mix and song being demonstrated. Cheers!
Great video brother! Love learning from you! And don’t sell yourself short on mastering either, you HAVE mastered at least one “Top 40” record 😉
😂 Thanks!
Awesome video, dude! You're a legend!!
Thank you for this video. This really caught my interest.
Consider doing a video on A.I mastering contra "oldschool" mastering. Would like to hear your thought on that!
Well done!
I loved pearl jam since my teenage, and obviously it started with ten and all those great songs. The moment you said louder and brighter it came to me this remaster of the album that I couldn't listen to one single song, simply because the record was too bright and compressed, "loud" and "bright".
Great video
I appreciate it!
Maybe it will sound louder maybe it will sound brighter but i'm sure that the humain mastering will be more open
Always!
and maybe it doesn't *need* to sound louder or brighter. Pro mastering is also knowing what to leave out!
Despite the obvious issues of over limiting and excitation, I always find the real joy of mastering is in rolling off as much treble and bass as you can to get a nice dynamic range in the low mids. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is where the heart is. Not just of a song that feels good, but will play louder and brighter on different systems more easily. I no longer really devote much time to music but when I did, my best mix/masters were flukes because the track itself was great.
Amazing video. I am a Mixing and Mastering engineer, with +1.1B streams and I couldn't agree more with you. All my sh1t masters I did on the past was when I tried to "do a lot of things". Softwares with automatic decisions like Gulfos, Ozone, Bloom, etc, tend to create a false sensation that is improving the sound, but most of the time they are ruining.
Understand what's sounding good and bad and take the right decisions from there is the key to a "great quality" master.
Cheers
It wasn't until a few months ago after producing electronic music for 10+ years as a hobby I understood the importance of mastering and mixing. I've since invested hundreds of hours into learning about the relationship of sounds in the audio spectrum and have seen great improvement in the overall sound of my tracks nowadays.
Thank you for the information!
Aside from AI, you mentioned that DSP's have loudness normalization. With Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio on the rise, you can't just send a .wav file to someone else and have them master it. Along with the integrated loudness "cap" at -18 LUFS. I think the biggest thing regardless of what you're mastering, having a second set of ears on the project is always nice to have. It is still a skill that takes YEARS to develop, and for some, just having a good enough room for Mastering is hard to have in this economy.
I love the quote "just use your ears", but also question yourself on what you're listening to. While also trying new things. Phenomenal video!!
Fascinating topic, I noticed I would blindly apply ozone on any 'finished' track and convince myself it was the rigjt choice becuase that's the next logical step before releasing it. But since have been trying to be more intentional to the point where sometimes all I gain is 2lufs but that's all the mix needed. Quality in quality out
Mastering your own work is always super challenging. It's hard to have perspective by the time you get to that stage. But being intentional is for sure the way to go. Something like Ozone can give you an "outside opinion", but that opinion isn't always going to be in line with your vision.
Thanks for watching!
same here, the bias. i hate master my own mix.
in general, i really appreciate mastering engineer, it's magic there. we're mixer, overthinkers... mastering doesn't fit us😂
@@progressionspod fr no cap
@@progressionspod you also have to have a good mix
Honestly, mastering is only needed for vintage stuff. With modern equipment, if you can make a recording sound awesome on the mixing stage - why master it? Don't take my word for it - ask Steven Wilson.
you can even make it on the production stage. ask skrillex
I started making music this year. This vid is so exciting to watch, I had to stop to get my breath back. Well, I'm old.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching. And welcome to the music adventure!
its is lovely to hear how some producers master their music. Todd Rundgren's 'night of the carousel' is a real gem of perfect mastering. the tune is getting on a bit now but how he managed to pull it all together with such warmth is very impressive.
The new Logic Mastering , ya the vocal upper midrange is very distinct
but not a fan of the rest of what goes on .
I love multi band compression and limiting . My new fav is F6 Waves compression/EQ .
There are the two sets of speakers and the headphones to make judgement with and
then my living room stereo .
The client is so important in getting it right , they take it and have their task of listening to it
on a bunch of systems and the comity of musicians throw in opinions .
Thanks for the vid 👍
A voice of balance, and reason....Excellent video!
Thanks for checking it out!
Hell yeah brother 🔥
Thanks dude!
Some really good points here. I think the main prob is what is seen as the playback platform. Used to be “sit and listen’ on a dedicated playback system. Now tye biz knows it’s most often a phone with minimal playback quality and occasionally earbuds or headphones. Also it’s singles-based so getting that cohesive album sound isn’t as crucial. As an aside did you try the LANDR plugin? Way more versatile. Thanks again! 👏🏻
I did not try the LANDR plug in, I’ll check it out sometime. Thanks for watching!
Very interesting video. You are definitely right that everything just sounds LOUD, though not always bright I have to say, today. Loud and compressed! When you buy a CD today, it simply doesn't sound as great as a CD did 30 years ago. The new Pet Shop Boys albums is a good (or rather bad!) example. The dynamic range is 5! If it had been released let's say 35 years ago, it would have had a DR of 13 or 15. Why not, when you have a good sounding rough mix, just keep it that way on the finished product?
Sir this was so helpful and interesting. Thank you for the knowledge. 🙏🏻💝
Glad you enjoyed it!
The problem in the not too distant past was that mastering engineers/producers were demanding more money than the artists made.
There is no money in music streaming so the future will be shaped by necessity.
I bought ozone 11 recently because I didnt have time to wait on my mix/mastering engineer and would put on the master assistance. You guessed it, louder and brighter. Upon viewing the metering realizing how uneducated I still am on reading peaks, lufs, rms I knew it felt somewhat competitive but like Travis was getting at, does it really serve the vision of the mix/the song? The answer with master assistance is no. Thats why've committed to learning more about the skill of mastering instead of letting technology steer the art. Im not gonna let it slide when it sounds glued or bright because I know that it doesn't translate to good. When the maximizer is ducting 6 db I take a step back start backing off all the "assistance" moves so I can get closer to serving the song instead of technology giving me a one size fits all sound.
With ozone you absolutely have to understand what it is doing, and why, or it will give weird harsh masters. Good post
Does ozone 9 have mastering ability? All I’m looking for is the ability to make voice over recordings sound the best they can sound all by themselves. No music in the background.
Yeah Ozone is a mastering suite across the board. I'd say EQ, compression, deessing are going to be your main tools for VoiceOver work which I believe Ozone 9 has . Might have to find a de-esser outside of ozone. Most DAW's have them built in
@@mjk5254 , thank you.
yeah no cap fr
Who nominated you for a Grammy? Most people do not know that artists and engineers and... so on can nominate THEMSELVES which means that "Grammy-nominated" is a fairly meaningless title. Sounds important but a universe away from "Grammy-winning". In your description it should read "altogether", not "all together". I think mastering by a human being is what I'd choose if I were a "real" act with $. No AI for me, thanks. By the way, what hit albums or songs have you engineered or mixed? Just curious because if you are "Grammy-nominated" then one would think you must be at the top of the field. Thx!
I had the pleasure of having a couple of projects mastered at Masterphonics in Nashville…. To date, no software has come close but I imagine it depends on what you’re looking for.
I hate the assumption around mastering that you either hire a pro or stick on a brick wall limiter or a one button AI like we're all clueless numpties - MixbusTV the biggest arrogant offender of that one. I'm sure I'm not alone as a composer who mixes his own music and needs control of the masters (so doesn't hire out for that reason as well as budget) - to have more than a good idea of what the final master should be like.
In my case I'm bringing it up to releasable loudness, decisions that were pretty much already made in mixing and production. I'm tweaking, perhaps, widening maybe. With clipping, limiting, saturation, EQ etc done creatively and artistically at track or group level, with only a glue compressor and a very light limiter alone on the master, we're already at 7-10 lufs without really trying for loudness. Personally, I don't get the 'war'. I think maybe mastering is used too much as a replacement for fixing sound decisions in production and mixing.
I completely agree with you and approach things very similarly. Like you, I mix and master my own music. And although I agree with the sentiments of this video, where I land is I'm mastering from the moment I start a song in my DAW and choose the first sound which is free. After that, I'm thinking about how everything fits in the frequency spectrum and things like that. My point is, for me, mastering is a thread from the start of the composition to the end.
Something that I couldn't fit into the video is that I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music or mixes. Ultimately, you're the one that is going to care the most. Over the last few years I've moved from the "loud ref" going to clients for mix approval just being a Pro-L2 cranked up, to actively trying different limiters, modes, settings, etc. because I want that ref to be as releasable as a master. Not just "loud." One of my pet peeves is a master coming back drastically different from the mix from an engineer that just didn't click with what we were going for.
Long way of saying, I pretty much agree with you. I also definitely see the need for self-mastering as a composer. I'm sure you need stems to match, etc.
The amount of fx, compression and tweaking we do today on our mixes... why would I add even more? I was an intern at a mastering studio, and I still dont get whats so great about it. Sure, maybe some final eq would be benificial in some cases. But my experience is that mastering engineers often slaps even more compression on songs, making them sound "dead". But thats just my opinion. I might feel this way coming from a background in playing acoustic instruments. 🤔
You nailed this, man. Thank you!
Thanks for checking it out!
Great points . I have used the AI mastering for some tracks and most are louder and more crisp . I choose not to sometimes depending on the individual track . Love the vid . - subscribed .
Thanks for the sub! Glad you enjoyed it!
I think thing with mastering is that previously mixing engineers were listening to the material on the tape, but the listener was listening on the vinyl or cassette tape, which are quite different media. So the goal of the mastering engineer was to ensure that transition to different media doesn’t ruin the work of the mixing engineer. But nowadays the medium for the mixing engineer and listener is mostly the same (if we don’t count conversion from wav to mp3 or aac), most of the music is no longer transitioned to physical media. So if mixing engineer is able to make final mixes loud enough, there is not much sense in having mastering engineer.
Don't feel bad, I never heard of those 2 mastering engineers you mentioned.
Very interesting and thought provoking video, well put across. I am a home recording studio hobbyist and, at heart, a musician who wants to immerse myself in learning how a wide variety of my fave songs by other artists might be recreated and/or reimagined. I started from scratch, knowing nothing about mixing, producing, or arranging. I held on to one principle, as sated simply by Beatles producer George Martin: all you need is ears. From the start I wondered exactly what the difference might be between mixing and mastering (which, as your video says, has varied in its role over the years). After all, I could treat my MASTER track (in Reaper DAW) as the place where I put plugins aimed at finalising the tracks that had been brought together from whatever plugin work I had done on those tracks. I learned the basic truth that you should not need to be fixing a bad mix by plugins on the MASTER track. I bought Ozone Advanced early on and was cheered by how much it could do to make things instantly sound much better. But I found soon after that using (favourite) individual plugins allowed my ears to get something more interesting and pleasing (to me), as well as helping me to understand what plugin might cause what to happen. As a personal discovery, I found that adding just the tiniest bit of reverb on the MASTER at the end of the chain could sometimes make the result more interesting. I was always on a modest budget so didn't own many expensive plugins (Fabfilter, Softube etc), and that no doubt limits a bit what I can achieve (as does having virtual drums/keyboards etc rather than a well mic'd studio kit being played by a real person). But, the whole fun for me is trying to get there' with only myself as collaborator (though a good friend from the band we were in 45 years ago does a lot of the bass work). In case anyone (the video creator especially) has read this far, stuff is at soundcloud.com/clana_boys (current stuff) and soundcloud.com/mobbing_it_up (earlier stuff). It can never come close to what the pros achieve but I'm proud of how far I've come since my first fumbling efforts a few years ago. in short then, maybe there's a whole large community out there like me, not pros, and not able to afford (because they do things as a hobby and earn no revenue). For that community, mastering - except what they do for themselves - is dead. But the CHALLENGE of mastering remains just as you set out in your video 👍♥ P.S. as a footnote, the stuff I do covers such a range of styles that I might need a whole network of mastering engineers to choose the best for one particular style?
Re: your question at the end… I think a great mastering engineer can do most any style, but everybody does end up niched into certain areas. So having a couple go to people that work in different spaces is a great idea.
@@progressionspod If I was serious about releasing stuff with hope of commercial success I would undoubtedly make the investment in a mastering engineer. Their skill, experience and fresh pair of ears ought to lift the result immeasurably. Back in the 1970s when I was in bands you needed a serious advance from a record deal to even go near a studio!
Great information and presentation!
Thanks! Appreciate it!
Thank you for "THE MASTERING CLASS"!
Wow awesome video and explanation
so this is why a lot of new music today sounds so damn bright and shouty?
Honestly, great video. You said the things we all need to hear. I’d say, everyone should learn the old school version of mastering, and understand why it’s so impressive when a human puts work into it tastefully.
that being said, Phil speisers mastering strip is the only thing in all my years that has actually made me reconsider certain things. If I set a reference of something I love, it gets it damn close, unlike any other competitor.
That being said, high end mastering with care and in support of the actual song will always win. But that’s a very specific tool that makes me reconsider my stance on these modern tools. I never liked landr AI or anything automatic. I would sometimes utilize Tokyo dawn labs nova to help gently get some of the EQ characteristics of another song through its match tool in GE edition, but other than that I actually was specialising in mastering the old way. Dutch and Dutch 8C speakers, prism titan mastering grade ad/da conversion, tens of thousands of pounds of analog gear , more than you can count, and now I’m selling my gear. Well, besides the speakers. That counts, of course 😁. But yeah. I am pleasantly surprised by the strip master match thing by Phil.
Maybe technology will get close to replacing the engineers at some point. Until then, probably not yet, but it’s getting close.
IMO the root issue is the audience/consumer likes what they like and don't care about the quality of the music they listen to and are probably listening on low quality headphones/devices. The mixing/mastering process is important to the musician/engineer and likely no one else.
...'well thought and said - thanks.
Amen to THAT! I agree fully to every point you made. Thank you for not being afraid to call "Izotope" out as contributing to the problem. I too will NEVER hit that button!
The days of people buying quality audio amps to listen to music days are over. People have cheap Bluetooth speakers these days. So why try to get the best sound for your music when most people don’t even appreciate it?
Thoughtfully explained, thanks.
I appreciate it!
Interesting thoughts, subscribed
Thanks! Glad you dug it!
I'm from NYC which has many , many old school "mastering engineers". They never want to talk to the client to discuss sonic goals, they simply want you to drop off your files, go home and wait for the magic result. So what they do is much the same as the genre imitating AI tools.
Someone please explain how Ozone taking X secs of your recording and then coming up with all these EQ and dynamics tweaks makes any sense at all. At least in my music, picking a different X seconds is going to come up with wildly different settings, so it just becomes a guessing game of which X seconds to use. What's the point? And "matching" to some reference track is equally dubious for the same reason. You might as well just listen to your whole recording and tweak it yourself. Ozone would be more impressive if it looked at your whole recording in total before coming up with its settings. Of course, that's much harder to do.
0:29 - That's okay, I've never heard of 'Manny' or 'CLA' either! :)
Well exposed and explained. Ty like given !
Thanks for checking it out!
Great 👍 video. I’ve subscribed.
🙏 Thanks for the sub! If you're an audio podcast person there's a whole back catalog of interviews over in that space.
@@progressionspod You’re welcome 😉
Thanks for video. It’s all great but maybe you can attach some examples of level matched songs with different mastering methods so we can hear this “drastic” differences?
Great suggestion. I'll keep that in mind for the next time I do a video like this. The differences between a good mix and master are not always "drastic" which is the point. If a mix is great, the right mastering engineer won't do something just to do something the way an algorithm might.
@@progressionspod I think if people prefer automatic mastering it can mean that it do something that people always wanted from mastering stage but cannot always obtain before due to lack of such methods. But if engineers work so much better and people can notice it without knowing who did it when good mastering engineer will always have a lot of work. Peace ✌️
I think the proper way is to just listen, test it etc
Everything music-wise is dead as long as we stick to the same old time signatures, chords, scales, modes, formulas, loops, samples and lyrical ideas. Mastering was never a one-size fits all until DAWs made everything..the same.
A band whose album I'm waiting for next month has been pre-releasing single tracks. Even the 24-48 FLAC files show up as DR4 or even DR3 in DROffline MKII. It's nuts.
Dope fam
Appreciate it!
I've always "mastered" my own beats. Was considering Landr. But prefer using my DAW.
I think most people are like me. They have watched multiple mixing/mastering engineers on youtube do their work and have seen the end results. Most of the time we do not like the results and realize we can do better. We acknowledge that there are definately engineers who can do a better job than us, but how do we find them and can we afford it? Can we afford it because we have to send the project to half a dozen people until we get good results? Or can we afford it when we do find that talented engineer and he wants $5k because that's the going rate for the best of the best?
The ROI of paying for top level services is definitely really hard to put your finger on. Is your 5k mix going to get you more streams or fans? Likely not. Could be an interesting video or article idea
Thank you!
Well, I'm honest, I have no idea what mastering is all about. I'm a bedroom producer in my spare time. And so, I've watched a lot of CZcams videos where random guys discuss "the ultimate mastering chain in ". In the end, every of their examples became louder to almost reached clipping and distortion.
First, I've tried to follow along because I could hear that my music is far quieter than others in the same genre. And it also lacked some high end. I thought that I need to throw this and that plugin on my master channel and will be good to go.
The result was that - of course - my music became much louder and brighter. I've heard of parallel compression and this EQ and that plugin. What I then recognized was much more terrifying. Because those "ultimate mastering chains" cause fat low end and bright high end. What's in the middle may be buried. And so, I had another issue as some parts of my tracks were missing from that minute on I've tried to work with the "ultimate mastering chains".
Long story short, in the end I came to the conclusion: I'm now working on my tracks so that every single instrument is loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to let the other instruments be heard, and - like in the Eighties - I try to give both every instrument and the whole mix enough headroom so the song can breathe. After this, I let the automatic mastering of the platform "BandLab" do some polishing. And now the songs sound much better. I still have no idea what mastering is about. And if I would plan to make a living from my music, I would pay a mastering engineer. But at the moment I'm happy with the results since I began to work on the sound like described.
Some dude once told that you can take a shitty mix to a random mastering engineer and you will get a shitty mastered track. If you as a musician don't do your job and produce an amazing song, no mastering engineer on the planet can help you to get an amazing products for the people. But if you have done your job the best you can, the mastering engineer can do his job and make your song and outstanding product.
Great video, and I 100% agree. The one thing I'd add is that, to me, modern mastering is both far better and far worse than in the past. To give two modern examples of artists I like: The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson sounds absolutely amazing, and Can We Please Have Fun by Kings of Leon sounds like mush when you turn up your system. OK, Kings of Leon majors in mush, it's part of the style, but ear fatigue is a real thing, and when the kick drum disappears in the mix, it's not good.
Everything is stored in the mix. You can't master it better, the correct master is correct frequency response that you can see on audio spectrum like using SPAN plugin to visualze it and make sure it's correct master frequency. Compression, Dynamic, threshold and others can be also done in mix too ❤
You definitely can't make a bad mix great in mastering. The same way you can't make bad production great with the mix.
I record (track) mix and master my own music. I’ve never used ozone or AI. The whole process is part of my joy..my therapy . I want my own character sound , color , individualization. I track with outboard gear. I use mostly plugins to mix and master . They’ve come a long way. Very selective. I make sure I know them. I do not want things done for me. I do not have chains or templates. No selective settings on anything outboard. I love the art of making music. We live in a great time for technology but if others don’t find their own vibe , everything will sound the same .
Couldn’t agree more. I do think as a creative career progresses you go thru stages. One of the stages is the “sound like everybody” stage because you learn a lot from that. The tech makes that phase seem to last longer than it should these days. End goal though… make what you want and have people respect it for the fact that it’s “you”.
Thanks for watching!
When I mix its a simple process 1) get song to sound great on monitor headphones 2) then 'test' mix by playing it in a car stereo with subs 3) then 'test' mix on cell phone speaker .
Assuming it passed those tests, the final step is having someone else listen to it. If the fresh ears say it sounds great then its finished.
These days, anybody with ears can master on their home computer.
You make a ton of good points. Here's where my take is a little (not a lot) different:
- I currently self-produce my own music, mostly for budgetary reasons. In the online spaces where I hang out, as far as I can tell, almost no self-producing songwriter thinks mastering is only louder + brighter. There are endless discussions on sound selection, dynamics vs competing in the loudness wars, phase cancellation, subtleties of compression styles, etc. We want our music to sound good.
- I put out about 3-4 songs a month (I do music full-time these days). If I had the money, I'd love to pay a mastering engineer, and probably a mixing engineer to do the production work, and I could focus on writing, performing, promotion, and teaching. I agree with all the benefits of having a professional master engineer in the process. But it's not even remotely in my budget. When I get a mega-hit - different story. :) For now, I try to do the best I can with my meager budget. I watch a lot of CZcams videos :). And try to apply my 50- years of playing music to the new skills of production. And the more I do self-production, the more I respect the skills of a professional. Still, I'm improving.
- As you point out, the democratization of music (imperfect but definitely a thing) allows many like me to put their music online. In my youth, the people putting out records were performers who had a record contract, and the mastering engineer came with that. Today, like me, there a million musicians recording mostly in the box, at home, so it's a different customer base.
- When I get the $$$ and can afford a mastering engineer, I might be a lousy customer. My process isn't strictly linear. At the 11th hour, on the 50th listen, when I think I'm done, I'll decide, emphatically, to cut out two bars, or add a second guitar in the intro. I just hear it. The process doesn't drag on forever, but it does go on for a couple weeks. Maybe some mastering engineers are cool with musical changes at the last minute (90% of my tunes), and conversely I'm cool with musical suggestions (though I may not always follow them). I would imagine those iterations would raise the cost, as well.
There was another comment somewhere in here where I said this, but the person that will care the most about your music and the final product will always be you. I don't think there's anything wrong with mastering your own music if you feel you get the results that fit your vision.
You said "in my youth" I don't know how old you are, but I'm for sure no long in my "youth". lol. I think the amount of information out there for people, and the way people coming up now are passionate about absorbing it all and doing things themselves is AMAZING. It's a resource we didn't have when I was starting out, and we also looked at learning differently. I definitely respect doing it all yourself. And I DEFINITELY respect putting 3-4 songs out a month... That's the way to break out these days.
Thanks for watching!
Loved your take, just wanted to say that putting out 3-4 songs a month as an artist is an incredible feat and you should feel really proud of that! 🙂
Bravo. Well said chap.
Most listeners will recognize a "louder" mix as a better mix, hence the volume wars. No matter how good a mastering engineer is, the song itself is king, not the mastering. As musicians and people who want to sound a certain way, we can spend the money for the best mastering available. But that won't make the song itself any better for the non-engineer listeners. Very few of them listen like engineers/musicians. Blending art and science is always going to be subjective, and musicians would do well to stop worrying so much and get their songs out there in the best form they can.
It better not be dead. after 37 years of playing music I still have a long way to go 😅
Mastering is not dead. In my case i mix/master my own tracks and I can tell there is a lot of QA involved. Many artists don’t want to get involved with technicalities so they delegate
Yes, it's toast and has been for quite a few years. I'm hearing very good results from Ozone 11. Besides, people are used to listening through earpods on a smartphone. I don't know any non-musicians who can tell the difference between a mastered track and an unmastered one. They just know one sounds "louder". That's all they hear. They don't even notice the difference between tracks on what we used to call "an album". I stopped being an old man shouting at clouds and telling kids to "get off my lawn" over a decade ago. Most people really don't care.
As a film composer I started out with Ozone because I was a FOMO. However it ruined my mixes and I don't touch Ozone now. Use good plugins and your ears with reference tracks.