One of the most important factors of doing your own mastering is your monitoring chain. It's very important while at the same time doesn't matter much at all. If you really want to create a better monitoring situation for yourself, you just need to start with the room. There's just no way around that issue. Any amount of money spent on speakers, D/A converters, amplifiers... whatever... will be worthless unless you start with the most important thing. This is way beyond the scope of this article though since we do want to keep it simple and focus on the good stuff.
But... a great tip is this;
A very good pair of headphones for around $300-$500 that you like to listen to music on will rival the accuracy of any room and setup costing 100 times that amount or even more. For the guys saying you can't do any real work on headphones because.... I just want to say... go learn!
I've done my fair share of both mixing and mastering on headphones more than anyone would like to know and never had any complaints from doing that. The only trick is that you got to find a pair of phones that are right for YOU and you got to learn how to work on them. Simple as that. Now I've just saved you at least $50 000 bucks and numerous years of your life. Look out for my invoice in your mailbox...
Now another extremely important point about mastering is objectivity. The truth is that if the same person who mixed a project is also doing the master, it really shouldn't be called mastering since it just becomes more an advanced form of mix bus processing. Half the battle when mastering your own stuff is trying to be objective about what you have done, which is extremely hard to do. It took me about 4-5 years of continous work before I could comfortably master my own mixes to the point that very few other professionals could do it better, but it still takes me 3-4 times longer to master an album that I've mixed compared to an album I haven't mixed and that's all because of objectivity. When you try to master your own mixes you're not hearing the mix like a normal listener would since you're way too emotinally invested in what's going on for every single sound that you can almost impossibly make a correct judgement about the mixes and how they interact or translate as a whole.
So, without having a great monitoring environment that you can trust, and without being able to view a project with objective ears.. the mastering process will become sooo much harder. But since this IS the situaton most people on the forum has to struggle with, this will be our point of attack!
But... a great tip is this;
A very good pair of headphones for around $300-$500 that you like to listen to music on will rival the accuracy of any room and setup costing 100 times that amount or even more. For the guys saying you can't do any real work on headphones because.... I just want to say... go learn!
I've done my fair share of both mixing and mastering on headphones more than anyone would like to know and never had any complaints from doing that. The only trick is that you got to find a pair of phones that are right for YOU and you got to learn how to work on them. Simple as that. Now I've just saved you at least $50 000 bucks and numerous years of your life. Look out for my invoice in your mailbox...
Now another extremely important point about mastering is objectivity. The truth is that if the same person who mixed a project is also doing the master, it really shouldn't be called mastering since it just becomes more an advanced form of mix bus processing. Half the battle when mastering your own stuff is trying to be objective about what you have done, which is extremely hard to do. It took me about 4-5 years of continous work before I could comfortably master my own mixes to the point that very few other professionals could do it better, but it still takes me 3-4 times longer to master an album that I've mixed compared to an album I haven't mixed and that's all because of objectivity. When you try to master your own mixes you're not hearing the mix like a normal listener would since you're way too emotinally invested in what's going on for every single sound that you can almost impossibly make a correct judgement about the mixes and how they interact or translate as a whole.
So, without having a great monitoring environment that you can trust, and without being able to view a project with objective ears.. the mastering process will become sooo much harder. But since this IS the situaton most people on the forum has to struggle with, this will be our point of attack!
