[kansascitydon]

Pardon me if this has been covered somewhere. I did see someone ask about it, but I'm particularly curious about certain aspects of your relationship with mastering.

1. You often seem to have a lot of bottom end in your records. How much do you a) rely on mastering to rein it in or b) do you have a way in which you like to push it harder than you think it needs to be there to trigger the mastering comp, or c) does it pretty much sound like that at an unmastered level?

2. How do you feel about the so-called "loudness wars"? Do you feel the great majority of records are over-loud, or do you just find it exciting... or something else?

3. How often have you lost control of a project at mastering when the label/artist/producer gets involved, and wants to make it something other than what you intended it to be?

4. Considering your use of buss compression, do you ever have mastering engineers complain about not "letting them do their job"?

None of these questions are intended to imply any kind of dislike for the mastering on any of your records. Quite the contrary, I love them. Just curious, as a mixer, how much to consider the impact mastering will/may have on what you're doing, and what the nature of your relationships with other people in the process looks like.