Info
About Mastering
In my opinion a mastering engineer should have some knowledge from all fields of music production. Personal involvement in various creative projects as a musician, songwriter, producer, mixing & recording engineer - with a track record from every field - is a must.
When I am mastering, I always try to take into account the environment where the music was recorded/mixed with all creative processes involved. Communication with the client is very important to me and I think that it's an essential part of the mastering process.
The experience from producing, mixing or co- writing various records that I worked on over last 30 years, makes me confident in my judgement of what does and what doesn't work sonically. Listening to diverse genres of music daily - on my high resolution full range monitors in acoustically treated environment - also gives me a broad sonic perspective on the current & past trends in production or mixing styles. Therefore I can choose appropriate mastering techniques for different genres of music with great confidence in my decisions. Trying to improve or keep the original sound aesthetics of the songs is my main goal.
How do we start?
I usually work in the way of clients sending me their mixes, which I then listen to closely on my monitoring system. If needed I will write a detailed revision of the original mix and suggest minor changes in levels (if that is possible) that could produce much better results in the end. For a mastering session I will definitely need a version of mix without any final limiting and levels not exceeding -1 dbFS - creative bus compression and EQ is o.k. in the majority of cases.
After mastering is done, I precisely save all of my outboard settings so 100% recall of the settings is possible if a revision of the master is needed.
If you have any additional questions just mail me.
Best, Gregor Zemljic