Fun Mastering Session

I go to mastering sessions from time to time. It gives me a good perspective on how my room sounds, how well my mixes translate, and also it gives me better insight into how mastering engineers want mixes delivered and what types of things they do to make my mixes better. All things are a good continuing education for me.

So, today i was at Scott Hull Mastering in NYC, midtown Manhattan. Very nice place and Scott is a great guy with great ears. He was mastering the Travis Matte album i just mixed, due out early next year. Scott has some great gear including a Sontec Mastering EQ and a Manley Vari-Mu compressor/limiter (both of which i have in my mixing studio as well, both of which almost always get used on my mixes :-)

Anyway, Scott's work sounded great. He definitely improved the mixes and i was flattered to see that he used no additional compression at all on any of my mixes. He did use some fast attack/ fast release limiting on each mix just to keep the peaks in check, and just to be clear, the mixes came out plenty loud. Nicest for me was that almost never was an EQ knob turned more than 1 dB in any direction on any of the songs. Occasionally he would pull out a 2 dB notch here and there but for the most part all of his changes were subtle and his work was excellent. It was a fun day, but i have to catch up now and get some production done.

-Ken Lewis