It's very commonplace to believe that great mastering can not happen without the best gear. This is a myth that just needs to go away. The thing you need to remember is that mastering is as much about music as any other part of the process. No matter what gear you have, it's all out the door unless you make the right musical choices with them. That's why anyone with a very musical ear will be able to do a better mastering job using the internal processing in any workstation compared to someone who just has a lot of cool gear and isn't as interested in creating something very musical with it. This is equally true of guitar players and drummers of course... 
The placebo effect in mastering is HUGE, since the most direct result of mastering is getting stuff loud. We all know this, and to a degree we all hate it. You can never disregard the fact that hearing something being played back half a db louder than another version will automatically make you hear things that aren't there to begin with. You will almost always, no matter who you are, think that the louder version just sounds better.
My rule of thumb when doing any master is that I need to think that the master sounds better being played back at a slightly softer level than the mix ,and still think it sounds better like that for the result to be truly valid. It's ten times harder, but If you cannot do that you've not created a good master yet for yourself or your client.
The subject of mastering focuses 90% on the sound part of the process, and this is usually the most important and fun part, but it's a shame to neglect all the other cool things you can do in mastering with creative PQ coding and spaces between tracks and cool transitions in order to take a project to the next level. Even though this master class will focus in large part on sound and workflow, we will not forget these other cool features that make an album a masterpiece and not just a collection of songs.
The Panic Room, Mastering Class 101 #2: Monitoring & Objectivity
The Panic Room, Mastering Class 101 #3: Basic Principles
The placebo effect in mastering is HUGE, since the most direct result of mastering is getting stuff loud. We all know this, and to a degree we all hate it. You can never disregard the fact that hearing something being played back half a db louder than another version will automatically make you hear things that aren't there to begin with. You will almost always, no matter who you are, think that the louder version just sounds better.
My rule of thumb when doing any master is that I need to think that the master sounds better being played back at a slightly softer level than the mix ,and still think it sounds better like that for the result to be truly valid. It's ten times harder, but If you cannot do that you've not created a good master yet for yourself or your client.
The subject of mastering focuses 90% on the sound part of the process, and this is usually the most important and fun part, but it's a shame to neglect all the other cool things you can do in mastering with creative PQ coding and spaces between tracks and cool transitions in order to take a project to the next level. Even though this master class will focus in large part on sound and workflow, we will not forget these other cool features that make an album a masterpiece and not just a collection of songs.
The Panic Room, Mastering Class 101 #2: Monitoring & Objectivity
The Panic Room, Mastering Class 101 #3: Basic Principles
