Hi..someone pointed me to this board
I plan on paying to get my tracks mastered in the future but i'm just curious as to what exactly you do when you master. Basically so far i've just mixed, eq'ed and added slight compression to my tracks. I haven't experimented with limiting and maximizing and I really don't want to get into the whole mastering thing, takes me long enough as is to finish a track. I'm wondering what else I can do to help the masterer do a better job before I send it out. What formats do they take your music in, wave files? each effect and instrument piece seperatly or just the whole thing at once? Just want to get a better understanding of what the process is. thx for any replies
Comments
The overall goal of mastering is to get all songs to have a simi
The overall goal of mastering is to get all songs to have a similar tone and level. Taking a bunch of tracks and turning them into one cohesive work. Often it includes helping an artist decide song order and spacing between songs. If you worked on your whole project as 24 bit, then it would be nice to have 24 bit mixes as AIFF or WAV. The mastering could all be done as 24 bit and only dithered down to 16 bit as production masters are made.
Michael’s right. If you know ahead of time where you will be mastering, it’s great for both you and us (MEs) to know what to expect. Also, you can usually get some feedback from the mastering studio if you send them a sample mix to evaluate. This can help you refine your mixes and end up with a better product.
ok thanks for the replies. I'd probably most likely have to find
ok thanks for the replies. I'd probably most likely have to find an ME that could do it without me being there, can't afford to travel and i'm way out in the sticks. That and would give me a demo like if I sent them a track and they master it or part of it then let me hear the results. Would any of you be interested in that? I would like to hear samples from different masterer's to figure out who I'd like to get to master all my tracks when i'm done. Thought i'd see anyway, let me know if interested then I can send a track to your emails and you can give me a sample of what you can do.
You should consult with your mastering engineer ahead of time if
You should consult with your mastering engineer ahead of time if possible to find out what they prefer. If that's not possible, you can cover yourself by printing the mixes as you think they should be, then print them taking everything off the 2-bus. You can also run an instrumental and acappella too, just to be on the safe side. burn an audio cd and a cd rom of the files. If the ME can take the audio files, then he will.