I never touch the track once its finished. Imo it should be made and produced to the standard you want to sell it at. What i mean here is, i do all the production and mastering in the project "Never" on the wav itself. Obviously if you can't do that then mastering is in order. I wouldn't say compressing a track was mastering it. I was always led to believe the Master is just the "Final" mix of the track, doesnt mean to say you have to have applied dozens of EQ.
Registered: Oct 2003 Posts: 18333 - Threads: 791 Location: South Croydon
Quote:
IRIDIUM wrote on 30-05-2009 05:54 PM
I never touch the track once its finished. Imo it should be made and produced to the standard you want to sell it at. What i mean here is, i do all the production and mastering in the project "Never" on the wav itself. Obviously if you can't do that then mastering is in order. I wouldn't say compressing a track was mastering it. I was always led to believe the Master is just the "Final" mix of the track, doesnt mean to say you have to have applied dozens of EQ.
Mastering is the process of adding a chain of FX to a finished track. This almost always includes multi-band compression and limiting and may also include EQ, spectral/spatial enhancement and other loudness/maximising effects.
It is generally recommended that tracks are mastered separately from the original production by a different person in a different studio. This is not always possible and I master all my own material with FX slotted into the master output channel.
As for leaving headroom it's no biggie as any production package worth bothering with uses floating point calculatyions to create additional headroom above 0dB during mixing (the output can't go above 0dB of course.)
Sometimes i edit the final mix as wav, but not for compression or EQ compensation. To me, if your needing to use EQ on a finished Wav, you either have not used any to begin with or not used it right? I don't know a whole lot about mastering. But i'm led to believe that producers make their tracks and take them to engineers to be cleaned, at least that is how it has been portrayed to me anyway, Music mag's etc.
Read 1 engineer story on a Lilly Allan track (although i think that was from scratch, not a mastering job), the guy using Logic 8 showed how he did things and what he used.
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27-05-2009 10:26 AM
HF Production teem boss. winnAr, etc.
