This is how I go forward with my music - the real story from November 2017 and towards the album release but it took Volume 2 to get the whole way there. Creating, editing and mixing music is a complicated effort but loads of fun.
For all you who wa...
This summer is so hot and I am taking time to enjoy swimming which means not so much writing/mixing,. But today I plan to get a lot of mixing done. Before that, I want to complete this blogpost about mastering. It is a big issue for us indies because it costs so much but is so vital to getting a professional album result that can compete with all the others out there.
Mastering is the final "cooking down of the soup" mix to get that amazing audio"flavour"we love on the radio.
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As each day passes, I am getting closer to being done with the mixing part of the Change My Mind project. Now I'm starting to look at my options for mastering. Money, or the lack thereof is forcing me to start to look into doing it myself - something I was hoping I would not have to do. (Oh, to have the funds to be able to send my songs off to a professional studio.) I just long to get this album done. In one way or another this will get done. (Grit mentality!) The question is: Who should do the mastering? A professional mastering studio, a robot mastering service or me, myself? It is worth comparing alternatives and the YouTube audio engineering gurus are not in agreement on this either.
Some say that mastering is not that difficult for an indie musician to learn - mixing is about 95% of the job while mastering is the remaining 5%. (A tough 5% at that.) So, if I have come this far and have learned so much about mixing, I figure that I can learn mastering as well...after a few more years of mixing. It's just that it is so scary when you've never done it before. The question is, can I do it with the room, the headphones, the monitors and programs/plugins that IO already have? No, not yet but maybe you can.
This post reviews the options for mastering that we indies have and looks at the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Keep in mind that I haven't mastered yet. I am just summarising all the stuff that I needed to think about before I made a decision on who was going to master my debut album, Change My Mind.
Cost/Quality/Time
Every indie musician has the project triangle to weigh in when it comes to mastering, (cost, quality, resource triangle). Robots are always fastest, professional mastering studios are most often the best and you are always the cheapest alternative. There are many options and it is good to take some time and think about what will work best for you.
Robot or personal mastering? How I came to a decision about who was going to master my album. As I considered my alternatives, I listened to Ian Shepherd's podcasts about mastering on Soundcloud. I watched videos about mastering and took notes. I looked into and took price quotes from various studios. I weighed professional mastering against robot mastering and threw the robot option out because an album has to flow from one song to another in an intricate way. (I don't think I'll get that flow unless all the songs are mastered by the same real person in one project).
