Reply To: Mastering chain

[nhamielParticipant]

The Dangerous Music stuff is amazing. Top notch. As a matter of fact there is a video coming out soon of my studio and the Dangerous Compressor. I have to check back in with them and find out where that's at.

Another thing I'll mention about mastering that may not seem obvious and is certainly important if you are in the box mastering as well is do not use just one program to master. If you are doing real mastering work it's important that you make sure everything went well during a render. You always want to open the work in another program and check. Audio program DAWs have odd behaviors with plugins. Sometimes they won't render all or even some of the parts properly and it may be hard to just tell by ear alone.

Here is an example, I did a master on a single the other day. Got everything sounding how I wanted and rendered it. I opened it in another program to check it and what I found was that I was getting clipped samples due to overages. Even though the previous program was reporting all was well and that ISPs were getting caught, when it was rendered that did not appear to be the case. So something happened during the rendering process where the limiter was not catching those ISPs. Software is much more quirky than hardware so it's always important to test your assumptions.

This is something I don't see talked about very often but is hugely important.