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Originally posted by kitphillips I agree, Its really not neccesary to spend money on mastering, if the label wants it done better then they can pay, but paying for mastering yourself is stupid. There is so much arrogance about this topic, contrary to popular belief, you don't need a great monitoring environment to master well, just a wide range system and a decent pair of ears works fine. It does take a while, but some of the tracks I've spent that time on years ago still sound good to me on any system today. I was mixing them on a Teac stereo at the time. In the old days of the rock industry, then mastering was a big deal, you had to worry about the idiosyncracies of vinyl, and you couldn't ever go back and mix and master again, once it was on tape, you were committed. But these days, a track often gets a remix and remaster after a few years, you don't need to worry about needles skipping the groove 9/10 times, and if you turn around in a year and discover that your mastering was crap, go and do it again! Each track is preserved along with all your automation, its not like you've mixed down to stereo and can't get the original 20 tracks back. Redo it and call it the '08 remake! People who go on about mastering are missing the point, mastering is about making sure the track will sound good on most peoples systems, not some audiophilic 20 000 grand system. And most of the time the best mastering IS an L3 plugin and a hi pass at 40 Hertz, putting more rubbish on a track won't make it any better, it'll almost always make it worse. And it doesn't matter if your paying someone $100 to do it

i promise you wont get a track sounding as finished with your methods. the good mastering studios use £20,000 monitoring systems so they can hear what needs to be adjusted for the track to work on the majority of shitty systems. master using bad monitors and you wont hear what you are adjusting.

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Originally posted by CReddick You're out of your mind. Waves plug-ins are used extensively in every high-end studio I can think of... When you have guys like Roger Nichols employing them in his sessions, you know you're not f*ing around.

Waves are used everywhere because they have become standard, not because they are good. You can use them in your project in one studio, take it to another studio, and be guaranteed the other studio will have all the same plugins.

Not that they arent pretty good, but they're not amazing. Ive heard the new Waves API stuff is quite good though.

Oh and I dont know much about Roger Nichols, but I know he bought out Elemental Audio, upped the prices of all their VSTs and renamed them all to sound really shit, and has descriptions on his website describing how he spent years developing them even though he never even touched them before he bought them out, imho he's an idiot...

Edit: Actually, reading stuff like this on his website, maybe Im wrong about him, lots of people were pretty annoyed with what he did to Elemental Audio though, although now the website and descriptions he has for all the plugins seem a lot better. The names are still crap though

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Originally posted by richg101 i promise you wont get a track sounding as finished with your methods. the good mastering studios use £20,000 monitoring systems so they can hear what needs to be adjusted for the track to work on the majority of shitty systems. master using bad monitors and you wont hear what you are adjusting.

It doesn't have to be that expensive at all.. One of the largest companties in dance mastering in holland has a more expensive studio than the 20.000 pounds, but not if only looking at the monitoring system.

It does almost all radio/tv dance compilations here, used to master the entire armada catalog (not sure if they still do), still does an awfull lot for big artists as armin van buuren, the asot cd's, armada/cloud9 compilations, Markus Schuls, Johan Gielen, DJ Jean, Roog, Deepack, Leon Bolier, Sensation 2005, Marco V (etc,etc,etc)... Conclusion: the monitoring really doesn't have to be that expensive to be good for mastering. However some guys need or prefer it to be .

There's even some other guy that had an engineer work on his acoustics. He's able to provide quality masters/mixes on Behringer truths. Now that is just a 400$ set of speakers right there.

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If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier

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Originally posted by richg101 i promise you wont get a track sounding as finished with your methods. the good mastering studios use �20,000 monitoring systems so they can hear what needs to be adjusted for the track to work on the majority of shitty systems. master using bad monitors and you wont hear what you are adjusting.

A lot of the time I seem to forget the purpose of mastering. I had a friend of mine master my tracks one time, I don't think he knew what he was doing. I think he was trying to sweeten my tracks, instead of making them sound good on every type of system. It is definately something that takes a lot of experience to get right. Getting a track to sound good on everything from little cheap walkman headphones to boombox speakers.

Do mastering engineers always deal with bringing up the volume of the track, using limiters and such? I suppose a good engineer can do this without affecting the volume of any of the instruments in the track. It seems to me maybe the artist should do the limiting, so no volumes are affected. I did a remix for a friend of mine, and he is releasing his original and my remix on Bonzai. He told me to leave the track alone, no limiting, no normalizing. Apparently Bonzai does all the mastering. Be interesting to see what my remix sounds like with pro mastering.

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Originally posted by richg101 i promise you wont get a track sounding as finished with your methods. the good mastering studios use £20,000 monitoring systems so they can hear what needs to be adjusted for the track to work on the majority of shitty systems. master using bad monitors and you wont hear what you are adjusting.

I won't judge my results against other's, but I promise you that I DO get results that I'm happy with. There are many areas that I feel affect a track more than mastering, I prefer to spend time and money on them. Kopi has the point that if you have the money you may as well do it, even if it only improves your track a tiny bit, and I think thats fair enough. I'm waiting to see what Kopi's mastering guy's like as to my final judgement on the value of mastering though.

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You're out of your mind. Waves plug-ins are used extensively in every high-end studio I can think of... When you have guys like Roger Nichols employing them in his sessions, you know you're not f*ing around.

Oh well, if Roger Nichols is using them they must be great Seriously, I was using waves plugins for everything, and then gave up on them and moved to sonalksis, which are 1000X better IMO. Don't assume somethings good because someone famous uses it. I still use the waves L3 occasionally, but I don't touch their EQs, reverbs or compressors (basically the bread and butter effects) because I find them deeply uninspiring. Sonalksis are beautiful though, I recommend everyone using waves gives them a try...

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Yes, we understood what you are saying. What we are saying to the original poster is, if you are willing to spend the money on mastering, then do so. I'm sure we all have money for mastering, the point is, is it worth it or not. Will the return be worth it. If you are willing to take the loss, then great. Perhaps you will make the money back, perhaps you won't, maybe you'll break even. If producing is just a hobby for you, and you are willing to spend money on it without gaining anything back, that's fine too. Finally, we are saying (to the original poster) don't worry about mastering so much, just come up with some music that moves people. To the original question again, I believe a rare gem of a hit will rise to the surface, materstered or not. A record label is looking for good tunes, good songwriters, not mastering. A proper label should be mastering their artist's tracks anyway to ensure quality control.

I think I agree with you here, this is pretty much what I was trying to say, that the label should deal with this stuff for you and at any rate, a truly worthy song will rise above any mastering.

Like I said though, I'm going to wait for the results of my first professionally mastered track...

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Originally posted by CReddick You're out of your mind. Waves plug-ins are used extensively in every high-end studio I can think of... When you have guys like Roger Nichols employing them in his sessions, you know you're not f*ing around.

Like everyone else above me has said... Waves seriously are NOT as good as people think. They are RIDICULOUSLY over priced for what they are. Back in the day they were the cream of the crop, but everything else has come a long way since then and the Waves bundles haven't really changed one bit.

Voxengo, Sonalksis, WaveArts and Sonnox are where it's at IMO.

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Originally posted by kitphillips I won't judge my results against other's, but I promise you that I DO get results that I'm happy with. There are many areas that I feel affect a track more than mastering, I prefer to spend time and money on them. Kopi has the point that if you have the money you may as well do it, even if it only improves your track a tiny bit, and I think thats fair enough. I'm waiting to see what Kopi's mastering guy's like as to my final judgement on the value of mastering though. Oh well, if Roger Nichols is using them they must be great Seriously, I was using waves plugins for everything, and then gave up on them and moved to sonalksis, which are 1000X better IMO. Don't assume somethings good because someone famous uses it. I still use the waves L3 occasionally, but I don't touch their EQs, reverbs or compressors (basically the bread and butter effects) because I find them deeply uninspiring. Sonalksis are beautiful though, I recommend everyone using waves gives them a try... I think I agree with you here, this is pretty much what I was trying to say, that the label should deal with this stuff for you and at any rate, a truly worthy song will rise above any mastering. Like I said though, I'm going to wait for the results of my first professionally mastered track...

are those tracks on your soundclick page a representation of the work you are happy with ?

And as far as alot of people's view on mastering , well i suppose it doesn't seem that important nor will it ever be because you won't ever leave the amateur music network which you belong to. You think people pay for mastering because its fun and all professional sounding ?

Again stop relating the quality you get as if it is anywhere near professional standards. And by professional i don't mean your shitty online release or your 200 run vynil.

And finally , i'm not sure where you guys shop but waves isn't that much more expensive than other leading vst developpers. The sonalksis plugins cost around 300 US . And that is for just one plugin.

Last edited by RichieV on Nov-04-2007 at 08:12

You know what, I just deleted this post, because your being daft and offensive. Quite frankly I can't be stuffed dealing with people who are acting as arrogantly as you Rich, sorry.

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How was i being offensive ?

My only comment to you was a question. The other comments were to people in general that have a certain view which i explained. If you feel like those comments described yourself and somehow took offense, well that isn't my problem.

The reason i asked about your work is that to me , your level of mixing and production , well it has a long way to go. THis isn't a judgement because i have no idea how long you have been doing it , and really it doesn't matter at all because being good isn't some sort of requirement to make music. I find that you come across a little too confident and i think this attitude will just make the learning process longer. I think the more you realise you need to work on things and really open yourself up to the possiblity that your music isn't all that and a bag of chips, you will get better quicker. I 've been doing music for way too long and i still feel like a know nothing.

As far as the other comments , i'm not arguing that people should be getting everything mastered. I'm just telling the people that say they master on 200$ thruths in their bedroom and think they get good results to kinda just shut up.

Mastering is just another form of quality control. IF you want to sell a product and be proud of the product that represents your work and you know you will be making a return , good mastering is a no brainer.

And as far as your comment that i am arrogant. I really don't think i am. I'm just a little sick of retards thinking they know it all and preach like they've been mixing platinum records for the last 40 years.

Last edited by RichieV on Nov-04-2007 at 08:44

(off topic, can I just say, ignore lists are fantastic things, they really clean up forums)

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Originally posted by RichieV are those tracks on your soundclick page a representation of the work you are happy with ?