60's guy wrote:
If you record a song (or songs) to send to a mastering engineer and they are all at -3dB......you are NOT giving the mastering engineer enough headroom to work with.
Granted.....not any of us here has ever employed a mastering engineer (no one that I know of), but think about it this way.....every post processing (EQ, Reverb etc)......track by track....or by stereo track can have an additive dB boost to the final individual track or stereo track. Headroom can get eaten up very quickly with post processing.
I did send a record to a mastering studio once ( 13 mixes). the instruction from him was to have was to have at least -3 dB headroom. We had not been planning to make a product out of the songs, so they were all mixed "hot" in the first place ( on a 1600 ), for personal use . I had no access to nor knowledge of how to utilize brickwall limiting for the tracks in the mix or on the stereo bus, track levels were pushing the top with some spikes, as i said - the original mixes were not brickwalled but I did have some compression working on the stereo bus. It had taken me a long time to get them sounding "right" (for me). this was the first part of my "working" learning curve after i had learned how to operate the controls, read about compression and scoured the internet for help ( i was not a member here yet).
Because of one song, we had been offered some financial assistance by a business corporation to make an album dedicated to a worker (friend/relative) who had lost his life on the job. So we wanted to do a good job.
I took all the original mixes and spent hours ++ moving everything down (faders, sends, adjusting compression thresholds etc.) and got those mixes working with stereo bus peaks about -3, some of those annoying spikes still existed, but fewer. to be honest i think i left some (gentle) compression on some of the mixes i sent.
Then I spent one long day sitting in the second chair in the Mastering House (Silverbirch Productions - Toronto Ont.). There were some useful things done to those mixes - ( some spot compression on a couple of important lyrical phrases, leveling overall RMS values - by ear, not numbers), ordering , manipulating gaps, CD text etc.) .. The digital mixes were first run through a vintage 1 inch tape machine and that signal entered a digital suite where a bit of EQ setting was applied to a few sections, It went from there to a K- processor (a proprietary piece of digital gear that Bob Katz developed I think) - from there it went into a vintage tube stereo compressor ( one of 3 in his rack) and finally to a digital limiter, piece of hardware (brand ???)
End result - the mixes were, for most intents and purposes, right back to where i had them before many , many hours of readjustment. If I put them side by side the volumes were not greatly increased, the overall tone was as i had submitted them. We left with a record I am still proud of 7 years later. i just got a complement on it "listenability" on New Year's Day. While the whole process contributed to the final product, the mastering piece was not a "holy cow - what did you do to get it to sound like that?"
Knowing what i do know now, if i were setting out to make a record that i intended to have someone else master, i would do as 60s guy suggests and leave even more headroom than the -3 i worked so hard to achieve. I would more easilyachieve this by tracking at somewhat lower levels. With the gear/track counts i have i would probably stick to 16 bit still. I would not hesitate to use some brickwall limiting on individual tracks to control those spikes, I would avoid even the little bit of overall compression i left on a couple of the stereo mixes .... etc. etc.
I did learn through all this that it is possible to make mixes with "sufficient" volume on the AW as a standalone DAW. But, i would approach the path to the end goal in a more controlled fashion.
I do believe that Ralph (Hogtime) had a similar experience with some mastering on a project he created a few years back.
Was the expenditure worth it? In our case yes - some else paid and i got some guidance and experience from a seasoned pro who has many credits to his name for both indie and commercial artists. so I did benefit greatly. the project had a polished sound and look, as the same production house guided us through artwork, proof and printing, they brokered the reproduction, advised on obtaining license for the 3 cover tunes on the disc. I even left the project with a surplus Yamaha sub he had in the studio before he'd upgraded. All this - including 2000 copies of the disc - came to us for about the $5000 we had been advanced by the sponsor.
Is mastering "magic"? - definitely not - If good mixes are presented, there is little to do as far as toning. Volumes will need to be boosted for the final product if you are faithful to controlling tracking and mixing levels. but it is entirely possible to do this to a completely acceptable standard in the home studio. Witness Mac's songs as proof!!