Polkasound
Well-known member
He brought up an important point... that it's art. That means there's no such thing as a best-mastered version of your song, so don't worry thinking that there is.
Whenever someone would send me one of their songs for mixing or mastering input, I would reply, "Here's what I would do with it." I'd never say, "Here's what you should do with it," because art is subjective.
A couple colleagues of mine always mixed and mastered their albums with a relatively dark tone. It was a little too dark for my taste, but everything still balanced well and none of their customers complained.
I still master my own productions using plugins like I've been doing for the last 30 years, but only recently did I figure out how to use cue sends in Cubase, making it super convenient for me to A-B reference tracks. I output the reference track on a Cue send so that it is not affected by any processing on the master bus. That has helped me considerably with my last few albums/EPs of cover songs. (If I didn't use those reference tracks, my projects would have come out a little congested in the 100hz-500hz range because I do like my mud!)
Whenever someone would send me one of their songs for mixing or mastering input, I would reply, "Here's what I would do with it." I'd never say, "Here's what you should do with it," because art is subjective.
A couple colleagues of mine always mixed and mastered their albums with a relatively dark tone. It was a little too dark for my taste, but everything still balanced well and none of their customers complained.
I still master my own productions using plugins like I've been doing for the last 30 years, but only recently did I figure out how to use cue sends in Cubase, making it super convenient for me to A-B reference tracks. I output the reference track on a Cue send so that it is not affected by any processing on the master bus. That has helped me considerably with my last few albums/EPs of cover songs. (If I didn't use those reference tracks, my projects would have come out a little congested in the 100hz-500hz range because I do like my mud!)
