Mastering various styles on a same CD

[jangoux]

So...

I recorded/mixed and now it is time to do the mastering for this CD. It has plenty of styles including reggae, brazilian regional music, 'amazonian hip hop', pop and some other crap. The thing is, since there are so many artists and so many different styles i am having a real hard time mastering the thing to make it sound even. For example, reggae has a lot more bass than the brazilian regional crap, so the later sounds much thinner without compensating this lack of bass but sounds muddy if I 'match' the bass frequencies. The same for the hip hop track that sounds a lot more modern/scooped than the more traditional stuff.

I really dislike mastering stuff, after recording a mixing I am so sick of most of the songs that mastering turns to be a very tiresome job for me. But since it is a part of my job, i need to figure it out . What do you guys suggest?

Ivan

 

[Plec]

Well, first I'd say that it sounds very complex and don't understand why you would choose to do a thing like that yourself. Gear and all the fun stuff aside, one of the highlights of mastering is to have another totally independent ear evaluate the work and suggest changes coming from a place very similar to how the average listener/person buying the music would listen to it.

That being said...
Don't do anything that will hurt the music!

From what you're saying there it sounds like you are trying to force a mix in a direction that it doesn't want to go and was never intended to go. When you have extremely diverse stuff that you need to fit together it's usually best to do as little as possible and just focus on making the transitions and main/lead elements of the songs flow as evenly as possible without hurting anything in the process. Try to make the individual tracks sound its very best while keeping a standardized dynamic level that you think will fit most tracks.

As always, learning when to stop is one of the hardest disciplines to master.