MASTERING ENGINEERS ADVICE — Mastering Advice

When you're mastering, you want to push into limiters and compressors to get it sounding together, glued, and smashed together. That's the mindset that you've got, and you think that that's what you should be doing. The problem with that, however, is that you lose all the transients and all the sharpness in front of the track. So you don't get these sweet, punchy, dynamic sounds or keep the loudness. The way I get around that – and it's a mindset thing of how you work with compressors when you're a mastering engineer, compared to when you're recording or mixing...

When it comes to mastering, you need to be able to hear super highs and lows. And that's the main problem with using smaller speakers in a smaller room for mastering. Things will usually translate well across most speakers. But if you're mastering, you need to have full range speakers. Otherwise, you can't master because you can't hear what's going on in the low end and on at the top. Now, you might be thinking, "But you have really small speakers at the back of the room!" Those speakers are key audio speakers; they are full range speakers, even if...