Gain structure and mixing; or how to make your mixdowns sound fantastic!

[Dave S]

On 21/01/11 16:48, Romain / rXg wrote:
> However, I recall Gert (which has way more experiences than me ) telling
> to the bar that from his own point of view and experiences, it seems
> possible to master your own cd yourself ... but more i read on the
> subject more I think it s almost  impossible ( knowing that the first
> challenge is to do a correct job without being in a professional
> Mastering sound room ) etc ...

Just a quick one on that point.

Bear in mind that I've been "mastering" my own music for about five 
years or more now, and believed I was making quite a lot of progress in 
that area.  I pooh-poohed the "you can't master your own music" crowd, 
because look, here I was, doing it, and it sounded fine!

...except it didn't sound fine.  It sounded quite a long way from fine, 
but I couldn't often hear it, and even when I could, it was usually 
about six months or more after I finished a track.

I'm pretty staunchly DIY when it comes to music production, and it has 
taken me a long time to admit this, but I can now assert with confidence 
that mastering your own music is, unfortunately, a fallacy.

Sure, you can come pretty close to doing it - and maybe with good 
equipment, good ears, a reasonable amount of experience and most 
crucially *time for your ears to rest* between doing the mix and 
mastering it, your results will be in a similar ballpark to those 
achieved by a proper mastering engineer.  Perhaps if you have a second 
room with some other decent speakers that you know well, you will get 
even closer.

But, here's the catch - most of the reasons given for self-mastering 
(including the reasons I have been using myself for the last five or so 
years) are erroneous!

There is simply never a time when they are valid reasons, because 
anything you can fix by self "mastering" a track can be better fixed by 
going back to your DAW and sorting it out there in the mix.

If you can't hear a problem when mixing, then you won't hear it when 
"mastering" on the same equipment, in the same room, with the same ears 
either.

It needs someone else, and a different setup, to hear those kind of things.

Take any possible reason you could want for mastering your own tracks 
(eg. to sort out the levels, to sweeten the EQ, to adjust the stereo 
image, to apply multiband compression) and without fail, it will always 
be better to go back to your mix and fix it there.

To re-iterate: if you can't hear it when you're mixing, then you won't 
hear it when your "mastering" either, and if you CAN hear it when you're 
mixing, then you don't fix it in the "mastering", you go back and fix it 
in the mix.

 From what I can gather, the exception to this is if you want to apply 
some final limiting (eg. brickwall) to bring the overall level of the 
track up to something that is comparable with mastered tracks.  But this 
is only something you do if eg. you have a new tune which you want to 
give to a DJ to play out, before you get it mastered or whatever.  Even 
in this case, it's still best to sit on the mix for a couple of weeks 
first, and check it on a handful of different systems (ones you know 
well, if possible) to make sure you haven't made any huge errors in your 
mix.

Now of course, there is no reason you should believe me!  If anybody out 
there wants to master their own tracks, then by all means go for it, but 
I'm speaking from a little bit of bitter experience here.  There are 
plenty of tracks that I thought I'd done a good mastering job on, and 
now one year later, I realise that they don't sound anywhere near as 
good as I thought they did.

I did myself quite a huge disservice, because I didn't spend long enough 
working on my mix, and I assumed I'd made it sound fine in my 
"mastering" stage.  I will not be doing this any more, because I don't 
want to spend ages working on a track only to wreck it with a bad 
"mastering" job.  (How could I do anything other than a bad job?  I 
can't hear what I need to hear to be able to do it - by definition of 
the fact that it's my own track!)

You can get very close I'm sure, but a lot of things slip though the 
net, simply because listening to the same tracks on the same speakers 
with the same (tired) ears, knowing the tune as well as you already know 
it having spent the time writing it, is not going to tell you anything 
you didn't already know about it.

That is why you need to get someone else to do your mastering for you.

So, my answer to keeping it DIY, is that we master each other's tracks. 
  The results still aren't going to be "perfect" (mastering engineers 
have very expensive speakers, acoustically treated rooms, specialist 
gear etc.) but they are going to be considerably better (and far less 
subjective) than from mastering your tracks yourself.

Establishing working relationships like this between musicians who 
master each other's tracks (in return for the same, or just for the fun 
of it) is something I'm quite interested in trying to be a part of.

Hope my ramble provides some food for thought?  (It took a posting like 
this somewhere else - which unfortunately I can't find the link for now 
- before the point finally hit home with me.)

Cheers,

~Dave