Anyone here experienced with mastering?

[feedingear]

reference reference reference. a good master cannot save a bad mix. mastering is kind of like adding icing on the cake. you can use it to clear up some weaker elements of a mix, and to enhance the good stuff, as well as to give the track a coherent colour (across an entire record).

To give you a VERY brief and simple rundown, most track masters will include EQ (very gentle enhancements or shaping), eq to look for any resonant freqs missed or disguised by the mixing environment, possibly mid side processing depending on the track type and requirements with their own compression and eq settings and comparative level balance. Returning from MS you may then apply more compression - simple, multiband, as well as parallel compression can all be set up at once. again, its usually very gentle and minimal processing done at every point in the chain. Then you might do a bit of outboard processing through analog gear to try and colour the sound by introducing 2nd and 3rd harmonics, and then finish off with a limiter/dither if 16bits required.

Thats a bastardised version of what happens, but if you follow that chain on a finished wave of your own tracks you might start to see how you can enhance/correct a mix with mastering.

[Barnelby]

Yeah, I've always understood that mastering was more of a subtle aftertouch.


grs I'm not sure what you meant when you said this:

Using the eq and limiter to keep the mix as loud and roughly eq'ed as target.
Then if the main bus eq has a huge boost in the 500hz range then in my mix I need to target instruments that would benefit with a boost in 500hz and give it to them and then take it out of the main bus.

K hang on....are you saying that once I put an EQ on the main bus and discover that it sounds good with a 500hz boost, that I then need to go back and make the boost happen within the actual instruments' EQ? I think that is right.

Speaking of which.

When I am EQing and compressing multiple tracks....is there ever a time when I should group together several tracks that might have the same sonic qualities...say some high hat sounds and a really high lead or pad....and bus them to a single channel and apply compression/EQ on that channel...or should EVERY channel have its own individual EQ and compression?

thanks!