08/05/2016
The next mastering tip I want to give has to do with monitoring / listening, which can be quite subjective depending who you talk to.
Can you master in headphones? Can you master on M-Audio / Yamaha / KRK / etc.. monitors costing between $150 and $350 each instead of actual mastering grade monitors? Can you master in your untreated or partially treated bedroom?
The answer for the above questions is, yes you can. But should you? That is a debatable question.
The thing I see over and over is that dreaded phrase you hear everyone say. "It sounds fine to me" or "It sounds great on my monitors", etc.. you get the picture.
The problem has to do with your ears. Yeah, it probably does sound great to you, but you are being influenced by your monitors, the room they are in, their position, their angle, your position and believe it or not, your desk and lcd displays and more.
So in the case above, you cant really trust your ears. So what should you trust? I will get to that soon.
The second problem I see is people like to throw the term "flat" around. Do you really know what flat sounds like? Because i can tell you the first time i heard it, i was under the impression that the bottom end was lacking and the top end was not nice and shiny. I was constantly over-compensating and my mixdowns / masters sound wayyy too bottom heavy and top heavy on other systems. This is because most if not all consumer grade monitoring embellishes in the lower end and top end to make it sound "better", hey, there is another one of those subjective meanings heh
So now to the point. You are not sure if you can trust your monitoring, you might not know what flat really sounds like, so what is there to do for the best possible results? Well the only thing you can do is hire a real mastering engineer. Not the answer you wanted right? Sorry about that, but its true.
If you cant afford it or just dont believe in it, sure you can still do it yourself. You just have to come to terms with the fact that you might not get the absolute best possible results. So if you can deal with that, lets continue.
So in the case of doing it yourself. The best possible advice i can give is to use reference tracks. I know i know, you have heard it a million times. The key to using a reference track when mastering is to be able to flip between your master and the reference track instantly without volume being a factor. You can do this with the tool i mentioned in my previous post, MeldaProductions MCompare. At the click of a button you can audition your premaster, another button to audition your mastered version and another button to audition your reference track, all at the same volume.
The things you want to try and match to the reference track is the frequency balance and the stereo width for the most part. If you flip between your master and the pro master and you feel like the pro master lacks a ton of bottom end, its more likely that you just have too much. This is frequently a problem with people who master their own tracks that they produced.
So at the end of the day, use reference tracks if you feel you cant trust your monitors and if that is not working out for you either, hey, we are always here to help :)
