Quote:
Originally Posted by FBM  Hi peeder, I agree a 100% with your post. But there are Mastering Engineers who master with the bus tracks.
Look at him: Robert Babicz about mastering audio on Vimeo
I'm not a mastering engineer but it's seems much easier to me to have
those tracks to master or not?! Because then you can realy correct something.
Greetings David |
Well it all depends. If someone doesn't know what they're doing, and the mastering engineer does, then certainly it's possible to take crap off on the mix and have the mastering engineer try to make chicken salad from it.
But what I feel is that too much online production advice centers on helping clueless newbies avoid excessive damage to their material. The problem with that is the advice becomes dogma that binds people, and they find it difficult to impossible to grow out of.
Everyone out there has their biases and their formulas that work for them. But many of those formulas are based on mistaken observations. Someone is clipping a bus processor on all their mixes, without realizing it, and they decide to lower their tracking level. This stops the bus processor from clipping and they wrongly conclude they were tracking too hot. They then screech at the top of their lungs that everyone should track lower when all they ever needed to do was pull the master fader in front of the bus down a couple db. By tracking lower as a religion, they just prevented themselves from enjoying tons of analog mojo from their outboard...
There is cause and effect galore, and it's hard to measure what is success and what isn't. If you look to advice from others, you're always tempted to use their credits list as a truth quotient for their advice. But in fact I've read many false statements from people with incredible credits lists, and credits are often not so much a matter of skill as they are of human relationships.
So the best thing to do is be skeptical of everything you read and hear, and try to understand each piece of equipment on its own merits and flaws. Use test tones and RTAs and things to understand gain staging. Place most of your focus and money on being able to hear minute differences. (And put no money on things that don't actually make a difference.)
Just about everything can work in mixing, if you can learn it. For instance, multiband compression doesn't have to squash any life out of anything...in fact it can be incredible and indispensable virtually anywhere. It's just a touch too complex for some people (apparently Mr. Babicz among them) to really master how to use it. Since most people in this business have healthy egos (the more successful the larger often), oh, it can't be THEM who don't understand the processor, it HAS TO BE THE GEAR'S FAULT.
No it usually isn't the gear's fault.
