I like to be honest on this channel, so I'll give you my honest peer on online mastering. I actually have a little bit of history with online mastering. In the early 2000s, I developed the first online mastering service, which was called E-Masters. I kind of started that whole online sending your tracks to be mastered, before all the other studios jumped in. Really, online mastering has come a long way today. But the reason why it's so good now is that so many people are working in their home studios. When I started, they weren't. Today, however, you...

I think when people start in music, they think that they can join mixing and mastering together. They can’t. They are two different mindsets, where the former is all about balancing the track while the latter is concerned on how to make it sound like a finished track. I don’t recommend being a mix mastering engineer. If you are, you’re splitting your time across two things, and you’re only going to be able to charge up to a certain amount of money for your work. After all, the kind of clients you’re dealing with then will be fairly low-endish people...

The reason why I'm talking to you about equipment is that I want to run through how you don't need all of this different equipment to do mastering or any music production. What happens for me is I never change any of my equipment unless I find something phenomenal. I have certain compressors and EQs and things that I like to use in my desks. I don't want gaps in those desks, because I'm going to want to fill that with more equipment, which will make me want to try more things. But that won't make me better at mastering....

So what sample rate should you be working out? There are different ways to look at this. There's not one rule, so let me run through all the different scenarios that I can think of where you can change the sample rate, and give you a bit of advice on that. If you're just recording vocals in and processing, then I would say keep the session at 96, because then the whole process can be done at that higher resolution. If you're a mix engineer, and you've been given tracks at 48, but you know it's going to go to...

002 People hate it when I say that there’s something wrong with their home studio or that they need to change something. Most times, that’s because they’re so attached; it’s their baby, so to speak. But when I say that, I’m not talking today about equipment or stuff like that. From my experience, the number one problem is self-discipline, or the lack thereof. The same goes for a lot of business and things that we do, but with music, it’s easier to drift because it’s an artistic endeavour. While it’s easy to keep writing or mastering, you need the self-discipline...