Mastering own mixes

I don't master. I mix like I want to hear it when it's finished. If you're waiting to "make it sound better" until the end, then your mix isn't finished.

At one point I had a little home rig for mastering. I was in a different space with different speakers. That method worked, but eventually that space wasn't available to me. And with bigger projects, we'd use someone else anyway. These days I use Old Colony Mastering with a flat rate per song. I tell clients about that in advance.

I wait a bit and use multiple monitoring systems. I get more mastering work than mixing work simply because I don’t do that much to the sound in the multiband limiter era.

I really don't like mastering project I've mixed. I feel too close to them and don't quite trust my judgement. But for lower budget projects I'll do it now and again. They seem happy but I'm never really sure just how good it is. By that point I've heard them way too many times to be objective.

No matter how good the mixes are, there are bound to be differences between them and mastering can provide that balance - making sure nothing's too dark/bright compared to the rest. I can do that but a good mastering engineer will usually offer a fresh perspective and provide a focus to the album that I might miss.

When I need to do it myself, I try to get at least a few days break so I'm coming at it somewhat fresh. Having them all together in a session will tell me a lot of what needs to be done. Find the best sounding mix, tweak as needed and nudges other towards that. Usual stuff. ADPTR AB is helpful to compare to other songs (the sound, I find the RTA can be deceiving) but I have to pull from several albums to hear how my mastering is fitting in to a "mix tape/playlist" scenario, not just to one other album.

Other than level, I don't save anything for mastering. 

In reality though I'm not a golden eared god of audio so some mixes might be a bit darker/brighter than others, despite being good mixes that everyone likes. Each mix is hitting the way we all want, but maybe I just pushed too much of a certain area. Nothing major (ideally...) but there's always something that mastering can bring to the album as a whole. 

My favorite masterings are ones that don't try to impose a sound (seems a fair number of "mastering engineers" can be fairly heavy handed) and just pull everything together nicely. 

Yeah, I also kinda feel like I don't hear the song in it's full glory until it's not exported and in VLC ;p 

I reference with a mastering chain, variously turning it on and off for different purposes, but typically listening to the quasi mastered version outside the studio. If there’s no budget for mastering then it goes out as such. Whenever at all possible, it goes to mastering, and that’s Trakworx if I’m picking.

I try to always send my mixes out to mastering, but sometimes there is no budget and the client doesn't want to spend the little extra. I try to get away from the mix for a week and then use a lot of references in Metric AB. I work on tonality first and then level. If they want to be at -6dB, they might be disappointed, but I can hit -10 to -8 LUFS and still have it sound good. For me, mastering comes down to trusting what you hear. Since using Sonarworks, I haven't had the mix problems I used to have. I can finally trust what I'm hearing is what's actually going on.

Many of my clients have tried having outside mastering.

The result is - while there are many good mastering engineers - the clients have chosen the audio from my masters every time. One time we used a mastering engineer who is a bigger name guy. They went with him because he'd publicize and feature/share the record through his content channels, etc.. He didn't do that so they paid too much, liked the result less, then didn't even get the promised publicity.

The budget that my clients often have doesn't include the extra bunch for someone else at the end. I'd definitely prefer things to be mastered by a really great mastering engineer but also I'm fine with the process we've been doing. I've had too many "affordable" mastering guys mess up my artist-approved mixes (which are always sent as reasonably hot quick-masters) and blow deadlines. I mix into some light mix bus stuff, pushing that mix bus stuff a little more as the mix develops. As I get every source in to the mix and things working reasonably well together I start iteratively mastering (oftentimes it looks a little like this: light limit, EQ, compress if necessary, gentle saturation, EQ, light limit, clip for volume, limit for volume). All that automation and all those dynamics changes interact with the eventual mastering. Knowing how the mastering is going to interact with my mix moves helps me make better mix moves during mix version 1.

And then when I'm done mixing I'll bounce out an all-but-the-loudness-specific mastering version of the mix and a no-master-chain version of the mix. I take both to the mastering session I set up for the record and I have an option for if the in-mix mastering still holds and I have an option for if that needs to be completely reworked to satisfy the rest of the record in context.

Pushing into the mastering chain informs me of what is and isn't working in my mix. Plus all of the reference material I listen to is in the pretty loud range. Transients don't sound finished to me until they're tucked in appropriately so I finish my mixes while listening to my most-of-the-way-there master.

Related:

I know a Grammy nominated mastering engineer whose starting analog chain is: limit, EQ, limit, EQ, limit, EQ and then goes back in the box to clip and limit if volume is a concern. His argument is that a good mix often just needs some gentle limiting to tuck in the impacts, some EQ to shape the tone and to guide what the next processing stage sees, a limiter to shape the new peaks from the last round of EQ, a little more limiting to control those new peaks, and then the final touch to get the mix's shape right before he goes back into the box to handle loudness stuff if that sort of thing is a concern for the record. His masters sound crazy good. Most of my clients can't/don't want to afford it.

Every legit pro mastering cat I've ever sent things to & been happy with? 

They work on tone first. Then add level.

Most add level across a handful of stages...

It's cumulative not one lump but it all starts with chasing tone.

And I do feel the "too expensive" plea is total BS. There are plenty of people doing great work who aren't thousands and can master an EP for the cost of a plugin bundle. Couple hundred bucks.

My friend worked in QA at Sony in NY. They did some kind of data wrangling but they also listened to every master on Grados prior to release because every once in a while a file would be sent for manufacturing and it would be blank or jacked up.