The majority of my work is mastering work, which I enjoy. However, I’m seeing a trend which I want to address. Many artists have small budgets, which I can certainly appreciate, being an independent artist myself. A lot of these bands (appropriately) attempt to minimize the amount of money that they spend on a recording. It does seem logical, then, to do as much of it themselves as possible, and to hand it off to a professional mastering engineer to “finish”. But what they may not realize is that the recording/mix is 90% of the sound, and the mastering job is 10%.
It used to be that in order to make a recording, a band needed to book studio time. Even up through the late 90′s, it was impossible to make a recording on a home computer. Pro Tools had already been around for a while, but it required specialized, expensive hardware found only in professional recording studios. In 1999, when I was putting together what became my first solo album, I was assembling an album from a variety of formats: cassette 4-track, 1/2″ 8-track reel-to-reel, and a Roland digital 8-track which used ZIP disks as a storage mechanism. I mixed into a Soundblaster sound card on my PC, and wrote CDs with an expensive SCSI CD burner. I was the only person I knew that owned a burner. The act of creating a Red Book Audio CD was complicated and very error-prone. The mixes I got weren’t amazing. I owned one compressor and I’d never used a plugin. Maybe I was just lucky, but the mixes were certainly “good enough”, and my method of writing and recording would not have been possible to implement in a recording studio situation. I spent a lot of time learning how to engineer music because I enjoyed it and I had a natural talent for it. I was comfortable with some of the more technical aspects of the process. On top of it all, I never really imagined that any of my songs would ever be released, so it didn’t really matter how it turned out. I was doing it all for fun.
Nowadays, you can purchase a complete computer recording studio for $1000…every computer comes with a built-in CD burner and you can easily create CDs with iTunes. The effect that this has caused is that it has put a lot of talented engineers and amazing studios out of business, and that a lot of terrible sounding records are being made. I’m all for empowering artists, and certainly, the same DIY spirit that a lot of bands have today is the same spirit that lead me to explore the possibilities of recording…but a lot of folks are attempting to release self-produced music before they have the experience to get quality results, or even to judge their results appropriately. Often, I receive mixes to master where I hear a good band…the songs and arrangements sound great! But a poor recording or a bad mix acts as an obstacle to enjoying the music.
Mastering is the process of polishing up a group of mixes and presenting them as a collective musical statement. The engineer will adjust a track’s EQ and dynamics individually and within the context of the whole record. If you’re unhappy with the mix before you send it to mastering, you’ll be unhappy with the result. The mix is your record. When you send a mix to the mastering engineer, you should be sending your 100% finished track. If you’re unable to tell whether a mix is any good or not, compare it to one of your favorite records within that genre. If you still can’t tell if you have a quality mix, that’s a red flag that possibly someone else should be in charge of this aspect of the production.
Communicate with your mastering engineer. Ask him for feedback on your mixes. If you can’t understand his feedback, or don’t know how to actually address the problems he has brought up, that’s another red flag that you need a mixing engineer. A mastering engineer can’t “rescue” a terrible mix. They can bring a B+ mix up to an A-.
If you care about your music, I suggest hiring professionals to record and mix as well as master it. It will turn out better, and you’ll be able to focus on the musical aspects of your project. You’re creating an important document of your art. If you’re lucky, your music will outlive you. At the very least, you should aim to create something you’ll still want to listen to 20 years down the line.
