Is Mastering A Myth?

#1

New interview by Shawn Reynaldo who runs the First Floor newsletter. Food for thought if you’re a producer/label running type. Article’s only up for another day n a bit so jump on it!

#2

on soundcloud this has been going on for years. because that music is never covered by the european circle, this is now a conversation lol. if RA covered future bass and trap back in 2015, this would never be a point of discussion now because of how obvious it is that mixing and mastering are part of the compositional proccess. experimental twitter is years behind in production talk compared to the cringy wannabe flume producers

#3

That’s a great read, and interesting subject. As it’s been mentioned, if you know what you’re doing and have the skills, a good mix won’t necessarily need mastering. But it kinda means that you’ve done the mastering yourself.

#4

Ha ha, oh Flume and his legion of followers… but yeah totally agree, I tend to make those decisions as I make a track and it means way less headaches and fix ups at the end. I aim for at worst just little tweaks after I’ve lived with something for a bit.

#5

I think in this day and age there’s enough little techniques you can apply as you make you can kinda get away without a whole heap of post-processing. Nothing like a little bit of multiband dynamics on a drum buss I always say!

#6

I mean it’s not that hard to learn enough technical knowledge and buy a few nice plugs (decent limiter, mastering eq, transparent comp and a solid meter, metric AB helps too (logic even comes with most of those, except the EQ)) and have a crack. And no one will really notice if soundcloud etc is your end goal. As with everything these days, efficiency (incl. financial) is the end goal. At some point external mastering is more efficient, but if you’re in the bedroom, why spend the cash if you can get close?

Ofc stay tf away from diy vinyl mastering…

#7

Oh man, I’ve heard some utter trainwreck diy vinyl masters :frowning: that’s when you defs hand over to someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. And yeah, you can totally get kit relatively cheap or even free these days. Totally pays to expand your skill set as much as possible imo. Is good for the brain :slightly_smiling_face: