Nerd talk: I took a field trip last week up to LA to our buddy Dave Schiffman’s house. Dave is a killer engineer/mixer/producer who engineered Vheissu for us. He had a pretty sweet setup going at his house, including a Dangerous D Box. Hearing his setup inspired me to jump into the hotly debated world of analog summing. I’m really liking it. I found that (like many say) it’s not a magical thing where you throw your mix through and it makes it sound different. The key was actually mixing through it. I can’t explain it, but I felt that I was able push every instrument up further. Each instrument had their place and didn’t step on the other instruments. Like everyone else says, more depth, more three dimensionality. Pretty sweet. Just the monitor section on the D Box alone is insane. A huge step up from the Big Knob. ‘Twas a worthwhile investment.
Teppei
Mastering actually probably takes only a couple sessions…8-16 hours, maybe more for a high budget project, or one where the mastering engineer wants to put his “mark” on it sonically…i.e. paramore’s record, etc., which is really them taking a role of a secondary mix engineer/producer…
Anyhow, on that note, it’s sort of obscene to watch some of the big dogs with so called “golden ears” do their work. They have 20+ years of experience, which means they go in and spend MAYBE 1 studio day mastering a record, maybe a couple hours setting up the project.
The 3 month period is usually about turnaround, scheduling, booking, mailing out the master for the final OK, etc. The actual process, at 1000+ dollars a song for the major mastering engineers, takes a few days worth of work.
Point being…mastering isn’t this process where a magickal mystical wizard holes up for three months in a cave grinding and polishing ye olde Magickal Diamonde Disc of Rock, running the tapes over the Ancient Elven Fyres of Araset…sprinkling dust from freshly shook faeries ‘cross the output stage…
From http://www.musicbizacademy.com/articles/gman_mastering.htm
“Although there is no limit to the time or money that can be spent on mastering, many people in the business state that a good rule of thumb would be an average of 8-12 hours for most albums, or in the neighborhood of an hour for each song. This assumes that the CD was well recorded and no additional processing requirements are specified. Additional time will be allocated depending on the condition of the original recording, a client’s specifications and any unusual or custom needs. “
i’m starting to wonder if the record is going to be called beggars
colin’s a butthole
@benjamin blueberry
Hey i wasn’t try to be a butthole, just being silly/offering an explanation that mastering takes awhile because of schedules/booking/approvals/etc., not because it’s this laborious process that takes months, as suggested by an earlier post, there was some confusion about what mastering actually involves.
Just sayin! Don’t be a doo doo bird.
I’ve been looking at the D-Box… I’m using an ensemble right now, and was leary about stemming through the DA and using the D-Box’s onboard DA for monitoring… but, maybe it’s worth a shot. I’ll take one out on demo!
Nice one for this, I’ll be back lol!