He's a nice guy and only charges $50 per song for mastering.

Ouch.

Wow. A mastering guy who does not listen.
But well, if he is nice... :-D
600 USD is not cheap enough if you have a result that is a well done acoustic recording destroyed by "WTF did you do???".
If money really was the issue, for acoustic duo they might have been much better off to just ask you to normalize the tracks and be done with it. None is better than bad in this case. Most probably they would have got a better result using automated mastering like LANDR...
(Which i tested on another track, and with a result much better than my first try with this. This one really wasn't bad at all for a machine doing this instantly. It's hit and miss.)

Sorry it's $600 AUD (Australian Dollars) which is around $450 US or about $33 US per song.

I'm aware many musicians are struggling financially (isn't everyone these days?) but to pay for studio time, good mics, preamps, decent acoustics etc. and then compromise the whole thing at the very end when it comes to the mastering is a shame.

UPDATE: After being asked for our opinion of the mastering by the client (we gave it) the client acknowledged they also had concerns about the sound and were basically seeing if our opinion confirmed their misgivings. It did. So now I guess we wait to see if their guy will either have another shot at remastering their album, or give them their money back.

Personally I'm hoping for the latter so it won't leave the client out of pocket and I have little doubt the client will now be willing to send it to our usual mastering guy instead.

Still it seems high quality mastering facilities, like decent recording studios with great sounding rooms, are disappearing fast as bedroom based DAW studios, equipped with pirated mastering plugins suites downloaded from Torrent sites undercut the professionals with 20 plus years of experience, properly treated rooms and a quarter of a million dollars worth of high-end mastering gear.

I have seen mastering being offered for as low as $25 per song.

It's just a matter of time before the price hits $10 per song for batch processed albums that are not even listened to during mastering. In fact based on some of the atrocious mastering jobs I've heard in the past few years nothing would surprise me.

The worst mastering job I've heard in recent years was a re-mastered 'Heart' compilation album that had so much upper midrange distortion that it was physically painful to listen to even at moderate levels.

Yep, the serious stuff in his desk. Nice room.
Turning the head for looking at the display would bother me, but he might want to totally concentrate on hearing while doing the analog side of things.

Having a huge display panel meters away between the speakers can help also. Since your eyes have to re-focus to actually see the display sharp. You can literally focus your eyes elsewhere and the display does not distract from the sound anymore. this is not possible if you have a small display near. You can not focus your eyes to a different distance then.
As always - personal preference...

Reminds me to the first mixing session I did for a band. The masters came back all with L2 like crazy, violins where pushed from the back to the front, verbs did sound too prominent in and all songs had a pushed top end. I did ask the ME if he thinks this is the art of mastering. He asked me if I could do it too - I said yes...

The problem of today is that mastering gets raped.
IMO mastering is the idea that virgin ears are checking the mix, and may do minor corrections, or they ask for a remix etc.

If the ME starts to change balances he may thinks he needs to remix it.
If the idea of the mix is changed I always ask myself - who needs mastering?

In the end we just adjustet the levels and the CD was done without seeing any masteting at all...
The whole CD is a premaster....

I run into this a lot. Bands who are ignorant of the process think that any joe with Ozone plugins can master anything. They blow their budget in the studio but still think that they need "mastering", so they cheapen out on "mastering".

There are a couple dozen of "mastering" guys around my area that are little more than students at the local for-profit audio school, using the labs at the school as their "studios".

There are precious few "Professional" "mastering" guys around who actually have anything more than some KRK monitors and a laptop with plugins around here too.

Because of that, I usually just make the mixes loud enough to compete with the radio and call it a day. Once the bands hear the final mixes they rarely want to go for mastering, since they only wanted it loud anyway.

Meh...the proof is in the pudding. I would think natural selection will eventually take care of the pretenders. Even people who write terrible music can tell who makes their terrible music sound better.

It does, but at least around here, when one disappears, 5 more pop up.  "Studios" are popping up like weeds around here, and are little more than some speakers and laptop in a bedroom.  Most of them are simply students at the institute of music trying to jump into the pool, or they are band members who've tried recording their bands and now think they have what it takes to run a studio..


The problem starts when artists go to these "studios" and get terrible results..  

It solidifies the belief that to get decent quality and save money, the artist MUST record themselves..

They invest in some gear, do their recording, but that gear is just sitting there a lot of the time..  

So the artist now starts to "record friends"..

Friends are friends, so they gush and pat each other on the back for a job well done, the "sweat equity" and ego don't allow either one to see that the quality is terrible..  

The original artist starts to record more often..  Giving terrible results and perpetuating the cycle.



From talking with bands these days, most don't see the benefit of spending money on decent studios.  They see it as money that doesn't have a return.  They no longer see it as an investment at all.  They only see buying their own gear as an investment, regardless if they have any experience or not.  "I'll figure it out" is a common retort I hear a lot when talking to folks about this stuff.

Well the client has decided to now have their album mastered by the mastering guy we use.
Although we suggested him in the first place they went with a guy they knew and who was around half the price.

I'm wondering whether their guy was more of a "rock & roll guy" than an "acoustic guy" but I'm only guessing and it shouldn't make any difference if he is a experienced mastering engineer though I have heard he operates a recording studio and also 'does mastering'. For me that's a 'Red Flag'.

We run a studio and 'could' also offer mastering but we don't, because we're not mastering engineers and some plugins won't suddenly transform us into one.

I do feel sorry they have spent $600 on a result no one was happy with.
For whatever reason they don't want to go back and tell him they aren't satisfied or ask for him to have another attempt at the job or give them a refund. Maybe they don't want risk damaging their friendship? Who knows?

*Edgy Opinion Alert*

In defence of the bogus cheap Mastering Engineer: I've first hand experienced a few pricier ME's who also delivered total garbage. In fact the main complaint young clients in Ireland have is that all the Engineer's are total geezers who won't do anything they didn't do in the 80's. A friend of mine sent a hip hop client off to a well known ME and was deeply disappointed with the results - sub gone, midrange pushed really hard. There's no accounting for taste, and a lot of the younger guys who may do a better job for contemporary music don't charge the same because they don't have the same clout.

Second of all, outside of the art of being really good at sequencing and a fresh pair of ears I feel 99% of the time Mastering Engineers are talking total shit. It's not really the kind of profession I get excited by, or admire particularly much, outside of things like adapting it for Vinyl. In the day of single song vanity projects, it has an ever decreasing significance.

For the record I've done a few small Mastering gigs. It's mostly been sequencing and minor bits of mix feedback, the choice of magical tube limiters wasn't as inhibiting as some of minor editing or automation errors I spotted. Client was happy, engineer was happy, it's repeat business from a few old friends.

We have 'recording schools' spitting our hundreds and hundreds of 'audio engineers every year who expect to walk into our vocation and get to the top of the pack quickly. When they don't,. they buy $5000 worth of 'studio gear' and start new 'recording studios' and half of them can't make it doing this, so the half who did manage to glean enough work away from unsuspecting morons looking for a 'deal' farm out their 'mastering work' to these guys who then buy a $199 software package and become 'mastering engineers'... and pride themselves on happy face EQ curves and loudness maximizers so they just 'flat line' the music and get it Skrillex loud.

That's the state of our profession. Oh, and they all watch Pensado's place and CLA videos and figure that very soon they'll be replacing Dave or Chris.