news category created 5 April 2014 written by Dan Cox
posted by Mick Glossop
LinkedIn Wayne Ward has sent you a message. Date: 11/16/2010 Subject: Hi Audio mastering $15/song (first song free) Send it to me at unclelight@hotmail.com
posted by richardlightman
There are a number of cowboys (especially in the USA) offering full album mastering at $100 all in. One even offered me a 50% discount ($50) if I was a Christian. Barking up the wrong tree on that one…
posted by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer
This kind of ‘remote’ image of eMastering services devalues the fantastic relationship I and many of my colleagues have with their clients. I was recently alerted to a service that makes me rather curious about the audio world in which we live. This new service http://www.instantsongmastering.com/ has cropped up claiming it can instantly master your song for $10. Is this clever? Is this correct? Can it? We [mastering engineers] would obviously suggest that this automated approach will not stack up to the quality and care of a bespoke mastering engineer. In fact the company behind this new service pretty much admits on their FAQ page that “… an automated mastering service may not always achieve the same results as a professional…” Would you use it?
posted by teepee
I think that mastering has never been more important than it is now. I think that the time is very right for you to form the MPG Mastering Group and start promoting mastering as a necessity not a luxury.
posted by DKain2011
An automated master of a song? that just sounds like an automated volume spiker of your song to me. Now a days it’s all about volume, how louder an artist’s song is compared to another artist’s song, so, my guess is that there’s a plugin chain in a master channel comprised of a low cut filter (if they even thought about that!) a compressor set to around 2:1, hard knee, medium release knocking down 3dBs and making it up again with the make up gain, an eq preset giving the mids a boost with a wide Q, a boost on the 80 or 90Hz and the 10 to 12 KHz, finishing the “mastering chain” with a limiter with a celling anywhere between -0.3 and 0.0dB, and boosted around 8 and 9 dB. That would be my wild guess, or what I would think an automated “master” would sound like.
posted by DKain2011
I bet it sets up the eq preset depending on your choice of genre…
Well have you all seen this? https://www.landr.com/
I popped a track in it recently for fun and my God it was awful.
Still you have to ask when masters have got hotter and hotter has it ultimately devalued the Mastering process? Some pro mastering (usually client driven) ends up so very smashed just how different is it to an automated smash job?
I’m just being devils advocate here, as I know full well there is an art to trying to preserve some quality when the client is basically forcing your hand into over limiting, but I think the point has merit. As an industry are we partly self defeating on this?
Take autotune its been so abused people think thats what a vocal sounds like. I’m starting to hear things that suggest people think that harsh smashed distortion is the right thing.
Food for thought.
I have had a few clients who sent me their songs to master after they tried landr. I listened to the landr version and it was awful. Mastering is a art, you need humans to create art.
-Matty Trump
http://mixandmastermysong.com
