Mastering Delay

Just a quick update since I didn't get around to posting this weekend.  I had a choice of going through basically 4 different people for mastering "The Effects of Connection" and I had decided to try someone new, basically since mastering in general is still a bit of a black box and I don't fully understand what I should expect from the process.  I made a choice on a mastering engineer based only on word of mouth from someone that I don't know/have never met, but upon reaching out to the engineer himself, he seemed like a good fit theoretically and he was more or less local.

I delivered the mixes maybe 2 weeks ago?  I've lost count, sorry.  In any event, the first crack at it was pretty horrendous to me and also raised a couple red flags.  Now, I'm not going to make any judgements about his actual work or experience because like I said above the whole process is still a bit of a black box in my viewpoint.  And so, I made some adjustments to the mixes and we did a round 2.  It was better but after listening to it over the weekend, coupled with a few details about the master itself that seemed just odd to me, I decided to pull the plug and instead book a session with the guy/company that I previously had gone through.

Mastering engineer #1 was okay with that but ended up taking a third crack at the mixes just for the hell of it.  This time around it was pretty good but there were still minor things that seemed alarming, not to mention items that I couldn't quite get my head around, such as why certain elements of the mix were being blown out of proportion.  On top of it, I also couldn't wrap my head around how I could possibly plan in my mix for these things since they sound fine in my version, and it's only the mastered version that has the issue.  It more or less made me question both his process and gear, to be honest.

Long story short, I have a session booked with my usual engineer for this Friday.  I decided to make a few tweaks in the mixes, simply based on the previous rounds and because I had the time and ability to do so, but that's pretty much where we're at.  I believe I'll have round one of the masters back late on Friday so we'll see if this take flies.  If so, the EP will be posted on Bandcamp this weekend.

In the meantime, I worked on the artwork piece and literally threw something together basically from nothing.  It still needs more work but the core concept is there, at least enough to post to Bandcamp if the release comes out this weekend.

That's the news on this front!  I'll post an update sometime this coming weekend.