Stoner/DOOM Bassists thread part 36 - Old School Death Metal Wannabes

[Lazarus.Bird]

So... what about having the recording engineer do the mixing? Or should that be separate too?

I just read this: http://musicians.about.com/od/musici...ngormaster.htm

I'm still confused as hell.

[Ancient Tone]

Originally Posted by Lazarus.Bird

Are you guys referring to mastering as everything done after recording, or are you considering mixing and mastering two separate processes?

Mixing and mastering are two completely different processes. Mixing is taking all the individual tracks and combing them into a single mixed stereo track, usually with the gain set at -1 to -2db, it is then sent of for mastering which is the process of taking that stereo track and "polishing" it, bringing it up to a standardized volume, putting a leveler on it to prevent clipping, maybe some compression and eq if necessary to balance out the frequencies, ETC, ETc.... Recording and mixing are usually done by the same person, mastering done by someone completely different.

[Corey Y]

Originally Posted by Lazarus.Bird

Thanks for the advice Corey. Definitely something to keep in mind. I don't think he gave me a recording-only price. I'll have to ask.

In your opinion, what's the difference between mixing and mastering? I always thought mastering was the easy part... kind of a "we want these pieces put together to form this puzzle, and we wrote these songs so we know what that puzzle looks like" kind of thing. What am I missing?

They're sort of related, in some fundamental ways, but they serve different purposes, with different end goals in mind. Mixing is the assembling of the individual parts, in order to fully creatively realize the song. Levels, panning, eq, compression, effects and all of that. You can mix tracks a lot of different ways to get very different sounding songs from the same individual parts. Mastering is collecting all those individual completed songs and fully realizing them into an album and beyond the creative portions, making them ready for a commercial format. The biggest and most obvious portion of that is increasing the volume and even that is not nearly as simple as it seems. All you have to do is look back to all the discussions over the "loudness wars" to see examples of that, there's a lot of different ways to master that some people love or hate. Beyond that mastering engineers also fix a lot of problems that the mixing engineer misses, although that is more of an unfortunately reality of the job than a fundamental requirement. All those previous discussion of gain staging figure very prominently into this subject. There's probably hundreds of articles online discussing the nature and importance of mastering, I would do a search and read some of them. I posted in a thread in the recording sub-forum about this subject within the past few months as well. It's becoming kind of a fad for people to do their own mastering or having one person do everything, because DAWs have limiters with presets in them and they can just plug one in to the master bus and raise the volume up. It also makes a lot of recording/mixing engineers lazy and sloppy about their gain staging, since they don't have to be accountable to a separate mastering engineer for the product they're handing over to be mastered (the mastering engineer will be happy to tell you just how f*cked up a job is, believe me). It's the equivalent of hiring one person to do everything on a remodel for your house. You will probably save money, you might get everything done adequately, but you won't have everything done as well as it could be if you hired someone who specialized in each task. There are a lot of mastering engineers out there that have reasonable rates and it's worth the cost. If you can't afford to mix and master, wait a little bit longer and save up a little more money, seriously. The clips I post on soundcloud, I do a quick and dirty basic mastering job on, but when I record albums I pay a professional mastering engineer.

[mc_muench]

After some stalking on Toastfuzz's previous posts, I present the link for the $27 15"

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/55-2953

I feel this needs to be stickyed in this thread, for oh **** I blew a 15" and am poor moments...lets hope I'm not saying that though.

[Lazarus.Bird]

Cool, thanks for the input guys. Really helped clear some things up for me.

So the guy who we are thinking of recording with seems like a great guy who knows his stuff. Would you consider a good path to take to have him record and mix, and then find someone to do the mastering?

[Corey Y]

Originally Posted by Lazarus.Bird

So... what about having the recording engineer do the mixing? Or should that be separate too?

I just read this: http://musicians.about.com/od/musici...ngormaster.htm

I'm still confused as hell.

Recording and mixing, it can go either way. Depends on the approach and style. Some people like to record everything very dry, either very flat sounding or with a lot of different voiced microphones, then do a lot of EQ and compression in mixing. Some people like to record in a live room, with lots of bleed between sources, capture a live performance and do very minimal mixing. They're different processes, neither is right or wrong. If I were recording something for someone else to mix, I would probably use a very different process than something else I was producing and mixing myself. Since I would already know the desired end result when placing the microphones and tracking everything. A recording engineer that doesn't mix the end result is usually going to try to be providing the best tools for the mixing engineer to take it in whatever direction the producer wants.

Refer to the stock TapeOp forum answer: "It depends"

Originally Posted by Lazarus.Bird

Cool, thanks for the input guys. Really helped clear some things up for me.

So the guy who we are thinking of recording with seems like a great guy who knows his stuff. Would you consider a good path to take to have him record and mix, and then find someone to do the mastering?

That would be a good way to go.

[Jason Hall]

Originally Posted by mc_muench

After some stalking on Toastfuzz's previous posts, I present the link for the $27 15"

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/55-2953

I feel this needs to be stickyed in this thread, for oh **** I blew a 15" and am poor moments...lets hope I'm not saying that though.

Nice, thanks! I'll get started on that project soon. I'll post on how it turns out.

[thombo]

Though it's secondary, mastering seems like a good time to get some clout. I realize that it sounds lame, but really, I suspect that most of us get more excited when I see that someone like Sanford Parker, Aaron Harris, or Toshi Kasai had something to do with an album. Having a "name" on your album assures a certain level of quality.

[mc_muench]

No prob, just helpin a fellow SS Doomer out!


SS > tubes!!!!

[Toastfuzz]

Originally Posted by mc_muench

After some stalking on Toastfuzz's previous posts, I present the link for the $27 15"

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/55-2953

I feel this needs to be stickyed in this thread, for oh **** I blew a 15" and am poor moments...lets hope I'm not saying that though.

Let me just re-iterate here that I've only had 1 opportunity to try these out, and it was through an unfamiliar amp and without my pedalboard. I wish I could tell you what they sounded like being pumped by my Grey Stache and Acoustic 370, but I haven't been able to try em yet.

[Tractorr]

Having mixed many albums and worked with a guy who was a wonderful mastering engineer, I would say one of the most important things you can do is bring a CD of an album you would like your album to sound somewhat like.

It is really hard to explain in words what you want something to sound like. You don't know how many times I was trying to mix an album and when the band finally played me something they liked seemed almost completely opposite of what I was thinking. I don't know where you are recording or how into they are but your point of reference and their point of reference would be VERY different.

As far as mastering goes, one thing to take into account is don't get all psyched about volume level. Ever noticed how most records today seem like they are much louder than they were a few years ago? That is because of albums being compressed to crap. Go back and listen to the good Soundgarden albums. Those albums sound so good because they have dynamics. Severely limited audio fools a lot of people at first because you hear it and think "Yeah loud is awesome!" but over time you might not feel that way as it is fatiguing to the ear. In other words, unless you think your album is going on the radio tell the mastering engineer that you are less concerned about volume and more concerned about it sounding good. If you want it louder there is a knob on your stereo for that and don't we all know how to turn up the volume

[JoeVictim]

Originally Posted by mc_muench

After some stalking on Toastfuzz's previous posts, I present the link for the $27 15"

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/55-2953

I feel this needs to be stickyed in this thread, for oh **** I blew a 15" and am poor moments...lets hope I'm not saying that though.

Sweet! I have been threatening another 2-15". We'll just have to wait to see how x-mas goes for my gear acquisitions. Could possibly pick one up for the old Omni I have. Could be something good for sound reinforcement at the practice space... stupid money, I hate and love you at the same time.


Corey, still rocking that banner you made for the band. Thanks again. I get a lot of compliments on it and then have to explain to people how we know each other. lol.

[Ancient Tone]

Originally Posted by Lazarus.Bird

Cool, thanks for the input guys. Really helped clear some things up for me.

So the guy who we are thinking of recording with seems like a great guy who knows his stuff. Would you consider a good path to take to have him record and mix, and then find someone to do the mastering?

That sounds like a great plan to me.

[Jason Hall]

Originally Posted by Toastfuzz

Let me just re-iterate here that I've only had 1 opportunity to try these out, and it was through an unfamiliar amp and without my pedalboard. I wish I could tell you what they sounded like being pumped by my Grey Stache and Acoustic 370, but I haven't been able to try em yet.

Guess I'm the guinea pig then. It'll sound better than the big empty hole does right now.

[Corey Y]

Originally Posted by JoeVictim

Corey, still rocking that banner you made for the band. Thanks again. I get a lot of compliments on it and then have to explain to people how we know each other. lol.

Cool, I'm glad you're getting good use out of it.

INNERNET FRENNNSSS!! GURP...

My stock line to my wife for those conversation is usually "someone from one of my forums".

[Lazarus.Bird]

Kinda cool female-fronted stoner rock Alunah http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F_GKM6cXY8

[bassboysam]

Originally Posted by Tractorr

Having mixed many albums and worked with a guy who was a wonderful mastering engineer, I would say one of the most important things you can do is bring a CD of an album you would like your album to sound somewhat like.

It is really hard to explain in words what you want something to sound like. You don't know how many times I was trying to mix an album and when the band finally played me something they liked seemed almost completely opposite of what I was thinking. I don't know where you are recording or how into they are but your point of reference and their point of reference would be VERY different.

As far as mastering goes, one thing to take into account is don't get all psyched about volume level. Ever noticed how most records today seem like they are much louder than they were a few years ago? That is because of albums being compressed to crap. Go back and listen to the good Soundgarden albums. Those albums sound so good because they have dynamics. Severely limited audio fools a lot of people at first because you hear it and think "Yeah loud is awesome!" but over time you might not feel that way as it is fatiguing to the ear. In other words, unless you think your album is going on the radio tell the mastering engineer that you are less concerned about volume and more concerned about it sounding good. If you want it louder there is a knob on your stereo for that and don't we all know how to turn up the volume

totally agree with this, we had a hard time explaining what we wanted, then we showed them a couple albums and things went much smoother.

as for compression, I love to hear dynamic recordings, we used virtually no compression on our last album while recording, mixing and mastering and in my opinion it doesn't sound too quiet....so I'm not sure how loud are people wanting to get, that's what the volume knob on your stereo is for.

[DethByDoom]

Late. But… our 3 piece stage layout is bass stack like 2ft from drummer so he can feel it. Guitar behind or aimed at drummer. P.a. only runs kick and vox. Monitors have a little kick but mostly loud vox so drummer can hear.

And me and the misses just been doing Netflix and Hulu. Cable is way overpriced.

[father of fires]

I want Down level compression on my next album. **** dynamics!

[Toastfuzz]

Originally Posted by jasohall

Guess I'm the guinea pig then. It'll sound better than the big empty hole does right now.

Thats essentially why I bought them. I had 3 options: load my cab with JBLs or Magma drivers that were made to fit the Sunn, but that cost tons of cash for vintage/brittle drivers, buy some random expensive drivers and hope/gamble that they were a good fit, or buy the cheapest drivers I could find that could take some power and see what happened. Really pumped to see what they sound like with my real rig pushin em.