#161

This is one reason I’ve tended to avoid getting too heavy-handed with mastering. But I love what you’ve done here!

The trouble with getting it right in the mix is that we don’t have a booth in this here situation. There’s no recording engineer. Engineer + artist are one in the same for LCRP. And while art is something we can only learn through experience and personal exploration, engineering is something we can teach.

Anything you (and others) can share about the details of this, will most certainly help us all. Let’s help each other become better engineers! And since we’re all artists as well, we can explore it from that perspective. It’s not about what is technically “correct” or “best” but about what helps us express the nuance of our creation more effectively.

I’m going straight to you!

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#162

Thanks so much, @jlmitch5, for sharing your process. I am grateful for the generosity of the work you did and of the knowledge of how it was done.

In reading your notes, I was struck by my ignorance of my ignorance, if you will. It’s an established effect that the less we know about a thing, the harder it is to assess our ignorance of it (leading to overestimations of our knowledge). I “knew” that mastering was a whole art unto itself, but really had no sense of what that meant. Even what I know of mixing has come almost exclusively from twisting virtual knobs and mashing virtual buttons on DAWs until I heard something that sounded okay to my orchestrally trained ear. Nuances like bumping up or down by a few dB narrow bands of frequency within whole pieces in service of creating continuity within a compilation are lost on me – I’m not even sure what to listen for in that context. So your explication of your process helped me identify what I don’t know in new ways.

Or, in my case, be introduced to what engineering even means!

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#163

Echoing others’ thanks for both doing the mastering and “rambling” @jlmitch5 :slight_smile:

On the general topic, there’s a lot to digest in here:

I have found the above thread a bit stressful in that regard! :wink:

When I’m in the wrong state of mind, waves of panic run over me, like “does everything I’ve ever released sound rubbish because of my own ignorance?” But of course we could have a more @jasonw22 take on it and learn how to make our music more the thing we want it to be. (WWjasonw22D?)

On that note, a friend studying audio engineering told me his class was played Black Eyed Peas’ I Got A Feeling as an example of badly-recorded vocals. Two reactions to that: first, is that your only criticism of that song?" :wink: and, second, did this engineering problem stand in the way of millions of people loving the song?

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