Acoustics

[african65]

Apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere in this forum.
Presumably, everyone one here posting in the hole all have perfect setups at home? I mean, all this detailed (and very interesting) discussion about m/s compression, dynamic EQ'ing, mastering plugins and what have you - isn't it all rather academic without having a perfect setup at home with regards monitor type, positioning, room shape and acoustic treatment?
Of course you could knock out a track at home on a shonky setup with crappy monitors and a total disregard for acoustics and then pass it to Voidloss for mastering and I'm sure he'd make it sound excellent. What I'm asking is, is there any point even considering attempting home mastering without a proper studio / monitoring environment? And how many are lucky enough to have this at home?

[sam]

A fair amount of what you're calling academic comes down to having an adequate setup and knowing it very well. In my last place I was lucky enough to have a decent room which sounded excellent but it still took hundreds of hours over years worth of listening before I could even start to pick out details. I think before you can hear what you're after you have to listen and concentrate hard on what you're doing.

If you have a fairly decent set of monitors find the ideal spot and volume in your room and have some discipline and the more effort you put in the more nuance you'll hear.

But home mastering on bad gear is fine I guess, but you're not really mastering because it's only for your particular room and speakers and it wont be transferable.

[AMorant]

You dont need to spend a huge amount of money treating your room, check through this forum for some great tips. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php

[melville]

True the acoustic environment you work in matters a great deal, but as has been said, if you know your room well enough it doesn't stop you getting great results. And to further prove this point, nobody working as a mastering engineer for less than a few hundred pounds a day has a perfect room either! If they did, they'd be charging a lot more and working with the big boys. Fact is most studios out there that consider themselves "professional" with a treated room have far from ideal acoustic spaces to work in. A ton of foam tiles and bass traps doesn't create a perfect acoustic space. It takes a lot more than that. I'm not knocking anyone with these comments. I've heard great mixes and mastered tracks from plenty of people without the ideal room for it. Point I'm trying to make is the room and the gear aren't the most important thing. It's the ears and the person they're attached to that's the most important thing.

[african65]

Understood. Interesting and encouraging to hear.

[african65]

cheers for the link also, great site

[Lost to the Void]

Apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere in this forum.
Presumably, everyone one here posting in the hole all have perfect setups at home? I mean, all this detailed (and very interesting) discussion about m/s compression, dynamic EQ'ing, mastering plugins and what have you - isn't it all rather academic without having a perfect setup at home with regards monitor type, positioning, room shape and acoustic treatment?
Of course you could knock out a track at home on a shonky setup with crappy monitors and a total disregard for acoustics and then pass it to Voidloss for mastering and I'm sure he'd make it sound excellent. What I'm asking is, is there any point even considering attempting home mastering without a proper studio / monitoring environment? And how many are lucky enough to have this at home?

Yes and no.
Production and mastering isn`t just about having the right equipment and setup. It is the person as well.
I`ve heard amazing productions from some rough setups.
It helps to know and understand your environment well. To know your gear well, whatever it may may, and understand how everything translates.
Accuracy improves with better, more detailed monitors, better room treatment, better converters and so on, but you can do great things with a very basic setup if you just learn it well.
It`s all down to ear time, the longer you spend working on the THE SAME setup (and the more audio experience you have), the better you understand it, especially if you do a lot of referencing. Understanding how and why professionally made stuff sounds on your system will do wonders.

When it comes to mastering yes, you are dealing with fine tuning, so you need to have your ears, and your equipment dialed in for the ability to assess, create and work in fine detail/hi-fidelity.
But half the purpose of mastering is to get an objective, emotionally removed, professional assessment of the technical sound aspect of your music, so doing it yourself is sorta missing the point.

Experience is such a critical factor.
One of the things I get asked or called up about when teaching, or mixing down for someone is "how do you get to that result so fast? how do you know what to do straight away?" etc
My answer is just that I have done it a lot, for years, and it takes years of fucking up to get to the point where you just know exactly what to do.

There is no real short cut to learning how to listen. It takes time.

But in a nutshell, don`t get too caught up in the infinite mountain of studio perfection. You need to focus as much on your self perfection (in audio terms).
Learn your gear and learn your room. You should be wielding your gear with the precision of a watchmaker.

[msl]

No such thing as a perfect room mate. Just a matter of knowing your monitors (over years).

The solution is to get your mix as good as you can then send it out for mastering. I've always said self mastering is like cutting your own hair.

[chekka]

i cut my own hair!!

but i dont try to self master. just get the mix as good as possible and leave it up to a pro / label

[Patriek]

I cut my own hair to

[african65]

My missus cuts my hair and she does a pretty good job. She'd be rubbish at finishing one of my tracks though...
Thanks for the replies to this, it was stressing me out a bit. Will take the good advice on board and get to know my room and monitors (old passive Reveals) inside out.
One thing - (probably another topic) whats the score when the low end of a track various so wildly as soon as I move my bonce out of the 'sweet spot'?

[chekka]

a number 1?

[sam]

Hey african, it could be standing waves that cause your bass levels to vary in different parts of your room.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave

Maybe try turning your monitors down and move them off center and away from corners and walls if you can.

Try and find a standard level to listen and produce at so you can learn how things sound from a consistent reference point. Without that it's like trying to measure something accurately but using a ruler which shows different values every time you use it. You need standardization to accurately observe correlation.