An awesome thread on gearslutz where somebody asked "what is more difficult. Mixing or mastering?" we had several HUGE names in mastering almost all replying at the same time. Most of them said either mixing or recording!
This is so true. If you think about it from a song standpoint. Where do you have the chance to screw things up the most? The answer: In the actual composing/production/arranging session! That's where you make the first massive mistakes which have repercussions throughout the entire project. Then you come to he recording phase (provided that the music genre has live/acoustic instruments) which is another place where you can do some irreparable damage!
Then you have the mixing session which could basically be considered as a mastering session that has 100+ tracks instead of just one!
(well, not really because blending tracks together is a very different kind of process but it is still all about balancing elements and going for compromises, kind of like in mastering!)
Finally you have the mastering session where you are basically stuck with everything that came before. You can't do miracles and you can't really do huge changes. So why on earth has this become so revered and acknowledged as the most difficult? I have absolutely no idea.. to me it's completely backwards.
Sure, to be a good mastering engineer you need a lot of experience and must have been exposed to a huge variety of music. This builds up your musical "taste" and will let you gel with the client and produce a good end product.
But this is equally true for recording and mixing engineers! There's nothing unique here that only applies to mastering. On top of that, a recording engineer needs to know A LOT about mixing and perhaps something about mastering too, to get the best raw data on disk/tape! The mixing engineer needs to know a lot about recording techniques to be able to fully utilize the recorded data he has and he has to know a lot about what happens in the mastering stage too! The mastering engineer doesn't really need to know anything about recording or mixing!
I think various music technology schools have it completely backwards. The students should START with mastering. They should start with the broad strokes and thus start understanding how EQs work and how it affects the general tonal balance. Then they learn which decisions make the track better and which make them worse. In the same time they experiment with the EQ they get an intuitive grasp on tonality of music and how it's affected by EQ.
Same goes for compression. They learn to hear how a compressor works. It's much easier to hear a compressor working over a whole track than over a single instrument or vocal track. They intuitively learn the differences between the various types of compressors.
Once the students have learned the "broad strokes" of fine tuning a complete mix they should go to the next stage, the mixing stage! Here they can utilize their knowledge from mastering. They know which instruments might clash and at what frequencies so they already intuitively learned to remedy these situations. They learned the basic operation of compressors and what they can do with it. Once they've mastered the mixing stage
.. they can move on to the ultimate challenge, the recording stage!Here they need to take all knowledge they had from the previous two stages to fully optimize their recordings. They know from the mixing stage what mistakes not to do and what constitutes a "good" recording. It's amazing how many people don't really know what a good recording is. Sure, you put a mic there and hit record.. it sounds good enough but only when you reach the mixing stage do you realize just how badly it fits with the other tracks! Going backwards in the study process you can avoid these mistakes and can intuitively learn what constitutes a good recording thus knowing when you have one!
Sorry for the massively long post. I find this topic extremely interesting and stick by my "reverse study order" like it was gospel! If I ever decided to take up teaching in the field at some point I'm going to test this and see if it has any merit in reality (it might not..
).Cheers!
bManic
I wasn't really following the thread.