Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - BBE Sonic Maximizer
View Single Post
Old 6th January 2009   #26
bob katz
Mastering
 
Joined: Mar 2006
Posts: 3,099

Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ ALX View Post

What Im saying here is that If I have a particular texture in mind is it right to use the BBE in mastering?
If you're mix is as "perfect" as you can make it. And you go to a mastering house that has high quality monitoring and acoustics and you all decide that a little spice is a good thing, and you add the BBE to the chain in a manner where it will preserve the transparency of the source and only add it's "goodness" then I would certainly not object. I would suggest using a high resolution mastering-quality mixer (summing box) to mix in the BBE effect, not the BBE's "wet/dry" mixer since the box is simply not a high-quality piece of gear in the first place.

Let's examine your premise:

There are mixes which are very nicely polished and seem to be perfect and which through demonstration on the mastering side may benefit from the addition of some kind of distortion in the mastering session. (Which can come from any processor, either intentional or simply part of the chain).

But then, there are those mixes which are not quite perfect, which you are not quite happy with. Really, these mixes should be worked on the mix side until you are happy. Because the act of adding something on the mastering side supposedly to obtain character, texture, or whatever effect----may affect or imbalance some other aspect of this less than perfect mix and the cure may not prove better than the disease. Get your mix sounding the way you are looking for if at all possible.

The only exceptions would be when you have doubts and are adding bus processes (like a tape simulator, or even a bus compressor or the BBE) to "enhance" your mix after you made it. If your monitoring is very high resolution and you know what you're doing and you've been working with a mastering engineer for a long time, then go ahead and do it because you feel comfortable. But when in doubt, please provide two versions to be ironed out at the mastering house.
__________________
Bob Katz DIGITAL DOMAIN http://www.digido.com
"There are two kinds of fools. One says-this is old and therefore good. The other says-this is new and therefore better."

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
bob katz is offline   Reply With Quote