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Nice work man! I grabbed a copy, I think Harbor is definitely the standout track of the bunch. Honestly the songs where you focused more on creating a good vocal melody are the ones that seem like they come out the best, it's kind of a shame that Faded Rose and Riptide are so short because they have some cool vocal parts that seem like they could have been expanded on. Not trying to be a jerk though, but I should probably say something - the mastering sucks. I'm not sure if you requested the style you got or if the engineer you used is just really terrified of limiting, but your tracks came out incredibly soft, especially considering that some of them are straightforward rock. Pull some tracks back into your DAW and watch the RMS on your meter, and compare it to some other songs that you like, I tried it with a few and yours average a good 4-5dB lower on parts with comparable dynamics. It's not the end of the world since the mixes are decent, but usually you're paying your mastering engineer partially because he's got very expensive dynamics processors that have a sound which compliments your tracks. Those dynamics processors don't actually do anything if you don't let them work though, there's no point in running a track through a $5k Manley limiter if you're not going to hit the threshold on it; might as well just whatever brickwall VST came with your DAW, it'll have the same effect. Dude missed some pretty bad problem frequencies in the low-mids too, which isn't a style thing and more of a basic requirement as a mastering engineer, maybe he's scared of multiband compressors too? I like your album, but that guy is NOT worth whatever you paid him. Even if it was free, I think I'd rather master my own stuff.
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Sep 6, 2014 03:57
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 16:41 |
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Hmm, my guess is that he's the kind of mastering engineer who got into it because he had "golden ears" and wanted to geek out over audiophile stuff. If one of your tracks actually peaks lower after mastering than before that means he screwed up his gainstaging at some point; basically when you're mastering and you receive an unmastered track that peaks near 0dBFS (which is ideally what you'd submit when mixing in digital) you need to bring it down to a working level if you're going to take it into analog gear to give you some headroom to work with. Afterwards you generally push it into a limiter that should limit its output to 0dBFS again (or probably -0.1dBFS to avoid intersample clips) and the end result is an overall louder track when considering RMS. Do you know what limiter he used at the end of his chain? I can see from the pictures on his site that he's got a Variable Mu which is probably doing the heavy lifting for dynamics, also a Red 3 (not sure why since he's already got a Variable Mu and another limiter there), some kind of para EQ, and some cream-colored things I don't recognize. If he's trying to do all his limiting in the analog domain for some reason it's possible that he's paranoid about clipping, since there's no such thing as a true analog lookahead brickwall. Most mastering engineers will do a lot of dynamics processing in analog and then hit a digital limiter at the end, the guy I've worked with before uses the Waves L2 hardware version for example. Looking at Ballpoint Pencil, it doesn't even peak at 0dBFS ever, and the highest peak in the song was off-balance between left and right so you can tell that it wasn't hitting a stereo limiter there. Maybe he really felt like that track wanted to be quieter than the rest of the album stylistically, but that's pretty drat quiet. Personally I'd go back and bring some tracks from other groups that you know, ones in a similar style and at the volume you want, and have him try to match the RMS levels at least. He should know how to do that, it's the whole point of mastering, and regardless of what type of mix you get going in it's still totally doable to get the levels you want using a multiband. Don't be shy about it either, the guy's got some good gear but he's definitely not as big-time as he makes himself out to be. His site is kinda shady, he's got a bunch of major artists listed but he doesn't list any specific releases that he's credited as mastering engineer on, because he wasn't - I ran through some discogs and he's not credited with any Elliott Smith or John Vanderslice releases, so I'm assuming he's just got them up there because he was involved with one of the studios that did. Those were two that seemed plausible, I know the guy wasn't mastering Prince or Snoop Dogg. If you look him up on Allmusic his credits are very different, the only release he's got that I noticed off the bat was The Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts. It's well mastered and also noticeably louder than your tracks, even for something that you'd expect to be a bit quieter for the instrumentation, so he's clearly capable of pushing harder into a limiter, you just have to make sure he knows that's what you want. Your stuff is rock music with distorted guitars, it can and should get gritty and broken up at points. If you want I can do a rough remaster of one of your tracks and send it to you to give you an idea of what should be possible from your engineer, the stuff I do is probably more pop-oriented than you want but you can get a clearer picture of what your tracks can sound like.
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Sep 6, 2014 22:08
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I sent you an email through Bandcamp's contact form with a remastered track.
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Sep 7, 2014 06:06
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