The Mastering Show #14 - Distortion (The good, the bad and the ugly)

It’s been a while since we had a Q&A episode, so - here it is ! In this show we discuss: * Can a spectrum analyser make up for poor monitoring ? * Is allowing peak levels up to -0.1 wrong ? * Do s...

15 Feb 201948min

We’ve all heard it - “the music is in the mid-range”. But what does that mean, exactly ? And if it’s true, is there anything we can do about it in mastering ? We’ve talked about bass and high freque...

15 Jan 201956min

…comes great responsibility. And mastering engineers need to accept that. If you take on the challenge of mastering someone’s music, you also accept a huge amount of responsibility for that music, an...

7 Des 20181h 26min

It’s a question we get all the time: what do you do when the mixes you receive are more… “challenged" than you might ideally like ? How much can you fix in mastering if you really need to, and how muc...

12 Nov 201850min

Everyone wants that glorious, sweet, silky-smooth top end in their masters - but how do you get it ? How do you stop things sounding harsh, tinny and brittle ? And even if the high frequencies do soun...

12 Okt 20181h 8min

As you know, we think normalization is a Good Thing. But many people disagree. And often that’s because it’s not perfect yet - not by a long shot. In this episode we explain some of the quirks, bugs a...

23 Sep 201848min

We all want great low end - deep, fat, solid and punchy. But it can be one of the hardest things to get right - especially knowing how much of it is needed. Too much bass can sound boomy, flabby, mudd...

4 Jul 201859min

All the online streaming services play music back at roughly -14 LUFS, so that’s the level we should aim for when we’re mastering, right ? Wrong. That may sound strange, given how much we’ve talked a...

8 Jun 201833min