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Originally posted by zodiac9 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.

I spent some time in a very well respected mastering engineers (optimum mastering,uk) the day before i was there the guy was mastering svd's grasshopper.

he was saying to me that he just does what is required. some tracks come in limited to shit (but sound awsome), and he just needs to do a little eqing. others come in sounding nice and well mixed, but need to be put through their good comp/eq/limiting to bring the track up to commercial levels and tighten things up. if you send them a track that is well mixed and sounds just how you want on your monitors, then he will perform the vital tasks needed to make the track sound how its meant to on the majority of systems.

he said you cant fix a bad mix, but i saw him able to seriously improve upon a mix where certain tracks were way too loud in the mix. things like snares that are too loud. he was also able to bring a waek snare out and make it shine.

though this place is too expensive for small labels/home released pieces, the outcomes they provide are what make a good release into a release that stands up against all the other top dollar mastered pieces.