Though I have been present at a mastering session and I could hear what was happening. I was an almost mystical experience, I heard the differences by wasn't sure how the decisions were being made. How about a step by step of a typical mastering session with thought processes included. Example: How do you KNOW there is not enough bass? How long to make a fade-out or in? I realize "typical" is a vague word but you know what I mean.

Thanks
Randy Brown

I'm running similar equipment and spend a lot of time mastering. Mostly cleaning up recordings, fixing level drop out, eq, limiting and compression stuff. Trying to get the best levels and the lowest signal to noise possible.

It helps to have good equipment and good monitors and to know how to use it and when to not use it. I think mastering is more of an artform than a lot of folks realize. Plus it helps to have another pair of ears to listen to the music.

Well, I don't really claim what I do is "REAL" mastering, but I am setting up a mastering room, once I convince George Augspurger to design it for me for free. I have Ed May's custom designed JBL speaker system out of his house (WITHIN 2 dB from 27 Hz to 22 kHz), and I'll need some more gear, but at least I'll be able to do a 1/2 way decent job on projects coming out of here.

The hardest thing to do is master your own work. I'm currently starting to master my own bands project. I performed parts, recorded and mixed it. I was listening to the mixes and working with some EQs and compression. The hard part is that I've been so involved in this that I can't take that step back necessary to master this thing. We don't have budget to hire someone else. I think I'll try to get an engineer friend of mine to sit in and at least listen while I work or maybe he'll do it gratis or barter. All I know is when I've mastered other people's projects I haven't had this problem of constantly second guessing myself.