Hi, this is a blog I've started about 3 weeks ago, it focuses around explaining mastering as well as going into mastering technique, general mix technique as well:-
I'm trying to keep it fairly open to suggestions, opinions etc so if there's anything you think may be good for me to add or have any questions feel free to either contact through the site or in this thread or by PM
I like the style of the loudness obstacles article - just listing problems with simple explanations. A lot of the time with articles like that, you end up plowing through prose to get to the point, with important bits dotted all around.
It would be interesting to see a kind of paired, in depth article that goes into the details of some of the points raised from a more general science perspective. Like the point where you talk about not having enough high end, maybe go into Fletcher-Munson stuff. But having that information in the same article would really detract from it's punchiness and simplicity. Just an idea, in case you ever have nothing else you want to write about!
mastering is the dark art developed over the centuries by the illuminati audio engineers so they can plant subliminal mind control frequencies into our works of art (and also make it louder so that frequencies in question are more efficient)
In the world of music you have the artist who makes the music. Usually, they send their music to get mixed by a Mixing Engineer who then mixes their music, balancing all the levels of the track, eq, etc. Then they'll send it to a Mastering Engineer who pretty much fine tunes the track.
Mixing Engineers are like Doctors, they know a lot of stuff but not as much as a Surgeon.
Mastering Engineers are like Surgeons. They have decades of experience in fine tuning music and giving the artist exactly what they want.
to the people answering the question: it's not a question intended for the forum, it's the name of Jon's blog. He's passing along useful mastering tips for those of us who want to learn.
And they've been quite helpful so far, I must say.
Jon: what equipment are you using in your studio, as far as monitors, audio interface, headphones, etc. go?
mastering is often massaging the audio so it sounds better on contemporary playback systems of the desired audience which may be different than the playback systems of the musicians/recorders/studios.
for this reason, it's important to know the target end-user playback storage medium and playback tools.
