So then what's the definition of 'mastering?' Is that the same thing????
As it stands today:
- Mixing is concerned with the characteristics of individual
sources and the relationships between these individual sources.
- Mastering is concerned with the characteristics of
an entire song and the relationship between it and other songs.
You might find that there are activities that bleed from one to the other, and that's OK.
For example, I might get a song that an artist would like me to master,
and I might immediately identify that there's too much siblance in his lead vocals.
In this situation, I would attempt to isolate the problem area and fix it.
This would be manipulating an individual source against the other sources,
but with the intention of creating a consistent high-end so that the song's average frequency response is appropriate to what's expected from the genre.
What distinguishes mixing and mastering further are context and intention.
You mix a song immediately after recording instrument and vocal parts. Many people do some rudimentary mixing along the way.
You master a song after it's mixed. It's all about fixing any glaring issues that exist, and getting the song to fit in the landscape of other songs.
Many people are in disagreement over the meaning of mastering
simply because the roles in mastering have changed as the music landscape has changed.
What started as a purely technical role of creating a vinyl stamp for duplication
has gradually evolved to involve more artistic skills, as a final processing step for the mix as a whole.
Older folks or elitists will attempt to convert you to their dated perspectives on mastering as merely an identification and manufacturing process,
whereas younger folks and the inexperienced often believe that
"mastering is just about making things loud" (often, that's the most obvious change an ME makes).
-Ki
Salem Beats