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I'd like a mastering engineer to listen to some samples of my recordings to critique before I annoy a local mastering engineer with my tracks. These samples are older, and I now get better quality and better mixes. I just want someone to tell me if mastering can cure some of my recordings' ills. Let me know if you hear too much or too little of anything, and your suggestions would be awesome. I'd really appreciate this if anyone can help out.

The mastering facility I'm going to start using is $130 per hour, and I don't have that kind of money floating around so I want to find out what works and what doesn't in my mixes from a mastering engineers stand point before I go there and it turns out to be a waste.

The samples are in the clients page of http://www.therecordingart.com

Any help would be awesome! Thanks in advance.

Comments

Massive Mastering Thu, 09/23/2004 - 12:08

After a quick listen to a few random files, they're reasonably clean and clear, with a fairly realistic image. Nothing fancy, but certainly nothing really nasty. Maybe a bit limited or compressed here and there, but that could easily be the MP3 encoding.

Other than that, it seems as if you're falling into the "enhancement" category as opposed to the "repair" category. That's a good thing.

therecordingart Thu, 09/23/2004 - 15:38

It doesn't sound awful....I've heard a lot worse come from places with better gear....but it doesn't sound great to me. There are things that I would change in the tracking process if I could turn back the clock. Those samples are actually the first few bands I ever recorded. Although I'm mixing a lot better which improves the quality over all....I'd like to hear from experienced ears their opinions. There are probably things I don't hear that are both good and bad. I basically want to find out if these sample would show promise if mastered.

Massive Mastering Thu, 09/23/2004 - 16:12

There are some things that could be attended to... One tune for example (RBL?) has an almost constant ringing at around 400Hz - Could be the snare... And there is some tom ring that gets pretty nasty here and there.

Even though in an idea world, these would've been caught at some point, at least you captured the actual sound. It's a catch-22.

You captured the sound and allowed it to be reproduced. If the core sound was more together, that'd pretty much take care of things (as usual, my favorite "fix").

Drop me an e-mail: master[AT]massivemastering.com and I'll shoot you a URL. As much as I hate to decode an MP3, work it and encode it again (it's so nice and swishy!), I gave it a quick hit so you can get an idea of what you might wind up with (except obviously PCM data would sound much better in the end).

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