IK and Gavin Lurssen set to unveil revolutionary mastering product at NAMM 2016

[simon.a.billington]

The 10 000 hour rule was popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. It is a generalization that seems to hold up under some scrutiny when you examine well known masters of music, athletics, academia etc. Obviously there will variation.

Oh, and who decided how many hours it takes to be brilliant at something?

Nobody decided. The 10,000 hour rule is an average time it takes to master a discipline.

Actually I got that information from the recent publication of a university study. Of course it's quite subjective, but I feel the main thing to get from it is the amount off effort required to master a craft and that in your life time, its possible to master a few crafts.

[simon.a.billington]

It is possible to be good, brilliant even, at more than one thing.

It's suggested that it would take around 10,000 hours to be brilliant at any one thing. That's around 5 years working full time on something, 10 years part time. Even then, this the extreme example.

If you have 50 years at your disposal, that's 5 things you could effectively become a master at. Again this is an extreme example.

It's certainly possible to become a master of many crafts.

You're just not thinking big enough.

The kind of person you are talking about here with your amazingly optimistic and a bit naive description is very rare. I'd say most people are way better off financially (plugins end up costing a lot!!) taking their time perfecting the song writing/production process and then investing in mixing/mastering/publication instead of doing it themselves. All truly "successful" people that I know of (except perhaps one dude who is just a bizarre exception) have one thing in common and it is that they rarely do everything themselves. On the contrary, they are experts at surrounding themselves with people who do various tasks better than they could have.. and they usually pay for a variety of services that enhanced their rate for success.

Sure, you CAN theoretically do everything yourself, at an exceptional quality but lets be honest here.. how many multi-talented, "old-experienced-young" freaks of nature like this do you actually know? Most of us are lazy gits that are good at a few select things and then spend the rest of our time either getting drunk, play computer games or look after kids & family.. or all three of those things combined.

I see what you are trying to say and I've said it myself when I was young and naive.. but reality is not like this. On the contrary I'd say. The amount of patience young adults have today in the hectic world of instant gratification / instant everything / instant demands just doesn't fit the optimistic description you made. This kind of instant-want-it-now world is the very reason for the changing climate of one-plugin/click-of-the-button does it all. This is not necessarily a bad thing at all. Once the plugins truly get so good that you can just click a button and get perfect results I will be out of work but I'll also be very happy because then I can finally put all effort into creating music, which after all is the most important part of the process (in my opinion of course). Sadly, we aren't quite there yet (read: not even close).

Not naive, not optimistic.

I've been doing this exact thing myself for the last 30 years. It's certainly achievable.

I do this by not spending my spare time getting drunk, or socialising... much. I don't read novel's I read technical articles, I don't have anything else in the way of hobbies other than my work in audio, video and programming.

I do have kids however, but they are older now, and i do spend some time gaming on my weekends just to relieve the stress and liberate my mind a little.

Even so, the skills a mastering engineer requires are ALMOST exactly the same as a mix engineer. In this instance it would definitely be conceivable to master the art of both mixing and mastering.

However, I don't think its wise to master your own mixes or at least, not straight away. You need fresh ears and a fresh perspective. Start a new project and get back to it perhaps. More than likey you will find a few more things you would want to fix in you mix before mastering... but hey, thats exactly the same process a regular mastering engineer goes through. It just says you're on the right track.

[dwozzle]

To me the big thing a mastering engineer provides is some kind of "absolute" perspective in relation to the universe of released music out there, as well as the skills to make any changes they think are constructive. They bring that by having a very well tuned room and playback system(s) that they're super familiar with, and by having something I've always felt I seriously lack, an absolute sense of appropriate frequency balance. My ears seem to get used to anything after a super short period of time, where it doesn't strike me as having way too much low end, or 5K, or whatever, any more, just sounds normal. Best I can do is step away for a bit, maybe listen to other relevant music, then come back to my own stuff. Mastering engineers seem to have a much more fixed sense of what works well on a lot of playback systems out there.

And as others have pointed out, they also provide a fresh set of ears, that didn't write, record, perform, edit, and mix your music, also hugely valuable.

[simon.a.billington]

To me the big thing a mastering engineer provides is some kind of "absolute" perspective in relation to the universe of released music out there, as well as the skills to make any changes they think are constructive. They bring that by having a very well tuned room and playback system(s) that they're super familiar with, and by having something I've always felt I seriously lack, an absolute sense of appropriate frequency balance. My ears seem to get used to anything after a super short period of time, where it doesn't strike me as having way too much low end, or 5K, or whatever, any more, just sounds normal. Best I can do is step away for a bit, maybe listen to other relevant music, then come back to my own stuff. Mastering engineers seem to have a much more fixed sense of what works well on a lot of playback systems out there.

And as others have pointed out, they also provide a fresh set of ears, that didn't write, record, perform, edit, and mix your music, also hugely valuable.

Oh I'm not saying pro mastering engineers don't serve a purpose, they serve quite few. There is still a need for them. But really, are you going to want to pay their expensive fees to master that video of your kids in their school production.

Mastering is desirable in many fields, many of them have a much lower threshold of diminishing returns than the commercial music industry so you really don't want to be paying those type of fees.

Perhaps you just want to polish your own material before putting it on SoundCloud. There's a good chance that its going to be substandard anyway. These are all good opportunities for people to start learning a new skill and expand their craft.

If you end up serious about it, generally that takes care of itself as you start finding a need for a better space, better room treatment, flatter, cleaner speakers... etc. People sure as hell shouldn't be spending that kind of money if they were just starting out. Alternatively if you have that kind of money you could also splash out for a mastering engineer. It becomes a choice.

Yeah, of course it can be better... it can always be better, that's the thing. But I think its more about working with what you have, expanding your own skills and working within your means. Especially if you don't have any better option available to you.

[simon.a.billington]

(Double Deleted)

[simon.a.billington]

There's all sorts of room for possibilities.

I see what you did there

Hahaha

[simon.a.billington]

(Double Deleted)

[Scotty]

I would think that finding a mastering engineer who actually has a tuned space and experience within whatever genre you are producing would be an even greater trick. I've seen self proclaimed "mastering engineers" mastering audio in bedroom studios. Well I am sure that some have great ears I think a portion of the fee has to be allocated to the space and the mastering grade processors and converters that are being used. YMMV.

You're view seems to be very dismissive of the fact that people need to start from somewhere and there are all sorts of uses and varying needs for mastering. There is a much bigger picture.

If one is serious about their music then a much better investment is to go to professional. It will cost far, far less in the long run. If you're an artist then why waste years and years of effort trying to be a mastering engineer too? You'll spend loads of money to boot.

It is possible to be good, brilliant even, at more than one thing.

It's suggested that it would take around 10,000 hours to be brilliant at any one thing. That's around 5 years working full time on something, 10 years part time. Even then, this the extreme example.

If you have 50 years at your disposal, that's 5 things you could effectively become a master at. Again this is an extreme example.

It's certainly possible to become a master of many crafts.

You're just not thinking big enough.

All of this is interesting, but this whole 10 years thing neglects the fact that people don't need to be "masters" at things that they do. For many things, the pareto optimal point, i.e., the 80% solution for 20% of the effort, is good enough. So allowing the bad assumption of a linear relationship between time and skill, 10 years just became 2.

No the 10 years is how long it takes to be a master. It doesn't neglect anything. Again its possible to be good at more than one thing.

Theink, everyone started from somewhere too. No pro mastering engineer was a master when they first started. There are now just new and alternative ways to learn other than paying lots of money for an education, or being mentored by a mastering engineer.

Of course having a mentor would be very desirable, but I challenge anyone to find one in this day in age, its very difficult if not, impossible.

This day and age we have to consider new ways to learn, to grow and develop.

[do_androids_dream]

You're doing a lot of talking Mr Billington - Let's hear your masters.

[pixel85]

I see that now topic goes to mastering discussion. Good. I'll back here when 'mac vs pc' discussion begin

[almound]

I certainly hope it *is* revolutionary. Haven't seen "revolutionary" since about 1997.

[ghettosynth]

You're view seems to be very dismissive of the fact that people need to start from somewhere and there are all sorts of uses and varying needs for mastering. There is a much bigger picture.

If one is serious about their music then a much better investment is to go to professional. It will cost far, far less in the long run. If you're an artist then why waste years and years of effort trying to be a mastering engineer too? You'll spend loads of money to boot.

It is possible to be good, brilliant even, at more than one thing.

It's suggested that it would take around 10,000 hours to be brilliant at any one thing. That's around 5 years working full time on something, 10 years part time. Even then, this the extreme example.

If you have 50 years at your disposal, that's 5 things you could effectively become a master at. Again this is an extreme example.

It's certainly possible to become a master of many crafts.

You're just not thinking big enough.

All of this is interesting, but this whole 10 years thing neglects the fact that people don't need to be "masters" at things that they do. For many things, the pareto optimal point, i.e., the 80% solution for 20% of the effort, is good enough. So allowing the bad assumption of a linear relationship between time and skill, 10 years just became 2.

No the 10 years is how long it takes to be a master. It doesn't neglect anything. Again its possible to be good at more than one thing.

My point was simply that one doesn't have to be a "master" to be useful at something. As I said, with some pretty heavy and unsubstantiated assumptions, one "may" reach the Pareto optimal point in two years.

Further, this whole 10 years to be a master is based on an average. That's fine in context, but there's a tendency to start accepting aggregate statistics as fact. It doesn't take 10 years to master soldering, for example.

Finally, as soon as we start incorporating actual needs for a project, even the Pareto optimal point may be far more than what matters, as others have pointed out.

As I said in a very early post in this thread, a lot of this discussion smells of FUD, i.e., I might miss out on that one chance that I had to be signed and be the next Celine Dionne if I don't have my latest piece of shit experimental modular wankery exhibition professionally mastered.

Nonsense. The marginal value of professional mastering MUST be a function of the value of the work in the first place. The stuff that "I" put out has virtually no value, as I suspect, is the case with many KVR readers/consumers who spend money on this stuff.

Yeah, I'm going to say that rendering the wave, wait a day or two, adjust EQ and compression to taste, and render MP3 is all the mastering that most of my stuff needs.

To that end, maybe, just maybe, I don't see professional mastering as an alternative to buying a slightly better EQ or limiter. Spending $200 on tools as a part of a hobby is just that, buying things that are fun to play with because that's what we enjoy doing. Spending $200 to have an album mastered, OTOH, turns it into something else.

Now, personally, I have this perspective from the 90s where, before I got an 1176, the best compressor that I owned was a DBX166 and I never owned an EQ that was better than the strips in my Fostex eight bus. So, pretty much everything that I have today, even the stuff that comes bundled with other stuff, sounds at least as good as it did back then, and my audience isn't much different. So, for me, and this is just me, I don't waste any money on "mastering" tools.

Speaking of the 1176, which I got at a great price and eventually sold for considerable profit. It is the reason that I have mastering credits on one minimally distributed self-released CD. My friend asked me to "master" his record. I was reluctant, I did not have a great monitoring setup, I had very little experience other than with my own stuff, and I felt that my tools were not at all up to snuff. He didn't care, he just wanted someone else who knew the genre and who's taste he trusted to do the work, and, I had better tools than anyone else in our circle. I was so afraid of messing up his record that I did very little but he was happy with the results.

Today, those of us who are on the hobby side of things actually get some of this feedback on places like soundcloud. People can tell us if the mix needs work and where. It's probably more than what I gave my friend, the environments are better and more diverse, it takes less effort than it did back then to listen and make comments, and the quasi-anonymity allows people to just post their two cents without much concern for what the artist thinks.

Unless you're achieving some level of distribution that puts money in your pocket, or, you really might be the next Celine Dionne and you are sending your work out in hopes that it will get you signed, mastering your own work is no more an issue than mixing or recording it in your own home studio.

You can get the best mastering in the world for your album for about $1000, that's based on what Bob Katz charges a non-major represented artist and an average of five hours of work. Since that's based on an average of 10 songs, then do_androids_dream will charge you about $200 for the same service. So then, again assuming everything scales, you should hire someone when you compare to about one fifth of the income or exposure of whatever the best thing in the world is with respect to your project. If the best nets a million views on youtube, and you expect to net 200,000, then yes, get that shit mastered by someone like do_androids_dream. If, on the other hand, you're more like me and you're happy when two of your friends up-vote your work, then well, there's no point.

[simon.a.billington]

You're doing a lot of talking Mr Billington - Let's hear your masters.

This topic isn't about me, if you think it is then you have misread something.

Go back and re-read if thats the case.

I have never once condemned the use from proper mastering engineers. I have never once said that a noob with a bedroom and some software could sound like a pro industry mastering engineer.

The rhetoric has been about EVERYONE has to start from somewhere. Wasting a fortune on mastering gear and a mastering space isn't the way to start. It's something you need to work at, build on, learn over time.

There is no such thing as mentors or internships any more. This type of learning is all done another way, either at universities or in the bedroom.

As you get better, as the need arises you will find your self investing more and more into it. That's the way it happens, even as a composer or engineer.

If you start putting limits on yourself, then you will never grow, or learn something new. That's dangerous because you risk making yourself irrelevant or redundant in an age where trends, methods, techniques and technology is progressing so rapidly.

I'm not saying mastering is the thing everyone should start learning, I'm saying that if people want to expand on their skills be learning to master, then its a fantastic thing and shouldn't be discouraged. Otherwise in 20 years time we will find ourselves in an age without mastering engineers, because of all the old dogs would have dropped dead by then and there would be no new blood because of all the naysayers bullying and discouraging them from ever attempting to learn it.

We are well in to the 21st century and people need to start changing the way they view learning and education.

It is DEFINITELY possible to use what we know about mastering and spaces to create something that can help facilitate low budget productions. Why spend an excessive amount of money mastering production professionally when it most likely isn't worth it just to show friends or put it on Soundcloud. That type of practice generally happens when you start approaching pro leagues.

It is definitely possible to add a bit of sheen, or fullness to a track to give it more energy, especially once you start understanding your system and your space.

Whether it compares to pro mastering engineer's efforts is entirely a different subject. It only has to sound better than it previously did before the mastering processes.

But NEVER once did I say you could master a mix and make it sound pro league from your own bedroom.

Although, that would be an interesting challenge.

[simon.a.billington]

You're view seems to be very dismissive of the fact that people need to start from somewhere and there are all sorts of uses and varying needs for mastering. There is a much bigger picture.

If one is serious about their music then a much better investment is to go to professional. It will cost far, far less in the long run. If you're an artist then why waste years and years of effort trying to be a mastering engineer too? You'll spend loads of money to boot.

It is possible to be good, brilliant even, at more than one thing.

It's suggested that it would take around 10,000 hours to be brilliant at any one thing. That's around 5 years working full time on something, 10 years part time. Even then, this the extreme example.

If you have 50 years at your disposal, that's 5 things you could effectively become a master at. Again this is an extreme example.

It's certainly possible to become a master of many crafts.

You're just not thinking big enough.

All of this is interesting, but this whole 10 years thing neglects the fact that people don't need to be "masters" at things that they do. For many things, the pareto optimal point, i.e., the 80% solution for 20% of the effort, is good enough. So allowing the bad assumption of a linear relationship between time and skill, 10 years just became 2.

No the 10 years is how long it takes to be a master. It doesn't neglect anything. Again its possible to be good at more than one thing.

My point was simply that one doesn't have to be a "master" to be useful at something. As I said, with some pretty heavy and unsubstantiated assumptions, one "may" reach the Pareto optimal point in two years.

Further, this whole 10 years to be a master is based on an average. That's fine in context, but there's a tendency to start accepting aggregate statistics as fact. It doesn't take 10 years to master soldering, for example.

Finally, as soon as we start incorporating actual needs for a project, even the Pareto optimal point may be far more than what matters, as others have pointed out.

As I said in a very early post in this thread, a lot of this discussion smells of FUD, i.e., I might miss out on that one chance that I had to be signed and be the next Celine Dionne if I don't have my latest piece of shit experimental modular wankery exhibition professionally mastered.

Nonsense. The marginal value of professional mastering MUST be a function of the value of the work in the first place. The stuff that "I" put out has virtually no value, as I suspect, is the case with many KVR readers/consumers who spend money on this stuff.

Yeah, I'm going to say that rendering the wave, wait a day or two, adjust EQ and compression to taste, and render MP3 is all the mastering that most of my stuff needs.

To that end, maybe, just maybe, I don't see professional mastering as an alternative to buying a slightly better EQ or limiter. Spending $200 on tools as a part of a hobby is just that, buying things that are fun to play with because that's what we enjoy doing. Spending $200 to have an album mastered, OTOH, turns it into something else.

Now, personally, I have this perspective from the 90s where, before I got an 1176, the best compressor that I owned was a DBX166 and I never owned an EQ that was better than the strips in my Fostex eight bus. So, pretty much everything that I have today, even the stuff that comes bundled with other stuff, sounds at least as good as it did back then, and my audience isn't much different. So, for me, and this is just me, I don't waste any money on "mastering" tools.

Speaking of the 1176, which I got at a great price and eventually sold for considerable profit. It is the reason that I have mastering credits on one minimally distributed self-released CD. My friend asked me to "master" his record. I was reluctant, I did not have a great monitoring setup, I had very little experience other than with my own stuff, and I felt that my tools were not at all up to snuff. He didn't care, he just wanted someone else who knew the genre and who's taste he trusted to do the work, and, I had better tools than anyone else in our circle. I was so afraid of messing up his record that I did very little but he was happy with the results.

Today, those of us who are on the hobby side of things actually get some of this feedback on places like soundcloud. People can tell us if the mix needs work and where. It's probably more than what I gave my friend, the environments are better and more diverse, it takes less effort than it did back then to listen and make comments, and the quasi-anonymity allows people to just post their two cents without much concern for what the artist thinks.

Unless you're achieving some level of distribution that puts money in your pocket, or, you really might be the next Celine Dionne and you are sending your work out in hopes that it will get you signed, mastering your own work is no more an issue than mixing or recording it in your own home studio.

You can get the best mastering in the world for your album for about $1000, that's based on what Bob Katz charges a non-major represented artist and an average of five hours of work. Since that's based on an average of 10 songs, then do_androids_dream will charge you about $200 for the same service. So then, again assuming everything scales, you should hire someone when you compare to about one fifth of the income or exposure of whatever the best thing in the world is with respect to your project. If the best nets a million views on youtube, and you expect to net 200,000, then yes, get that shit mastered by someone like do_androids_dream. If, on the other hand, you're more like me and you're happy when two of your friends up-vote your work, then well, there's no point.

When I start talking about things like 10,000 hours, of course its a purely subjective thing. Guaranteed you will master soldering well before then. Really, that kind of figure is more akin to mastering electronic maintenance, not just soldering.

10,000 hours thats a hell of a long time. If you put your concentrated effort into it and work at becoming good, but STILL aren't an expert at it after 10,000 hours, there has to be something seriously wrong with you.

But really it was only a way of stating that it is possible to become an exert at more than one thing. Especially if you dive into skills closely related to each other, such as mixing and mastering.

You can get the best mastering in the world for your album for about $1000, that's based on what Bob Katz charges a non-major represented artist and an average of five hours of work. Since that's based on an average of 10 songs, then do_androids_dream will charge you about $200 for the same service. So then, again assuming everything scales, you should hire someone when you compare to about one fifth of the income or exposure of whatever the best thing in the world is with respect to your project. If the best nets a million views on youtube, and you expect to net 200,000, then yes, get that shit mastered by someone like do_androids_dream. If, on the other hand, you're more like me and you're happy when two of your friends up-vote your work, then well, there's no point.

This last bit is really what I'm on about. There are all sorts of different levels of projects, high budget, low budget, a major album or something you put on Soundcloud or Facebook just to get a few likes from your friends. It really isn't worth spending $1000 just to get a few likes.

Many people are just too absolute in their thinking.

It's like thinking that we only need expensive, fast cars that can travel at 300 k/hr. Not exactly ideal if you just want something to get you to work or back, or drop off the kids at school, not if you need the extra space or a cheaper running expense. Every different type of car has its use.

Every different level of mastering has its use. Anyone wanting to become a mastering engineer needs to start from somewhere.

[jancivil]

The meaning of the term <mastering> gets to be a shifting goalpost around here, I think. There's the professional expectations metric, kind of objective in the industry at one pole and at some remove there's the thing of people that know their bedroom result does not remotely compete with what you expect from a 'record'. In terms of it's not loud, or beefy, punchy... it's just not present enough (because you don't know from mixing).

So, this site being about audio plugins, it serves people that charge money for this service to maintain a quality of mystique about it. And they can do some bidness up in here. Fact is, those descriptions of the missing-from-your-track attributes there can all of it be addressed during MIXING. The people that do "I always put The Glue on the master bus" and then they wonder 'am I capable of mastering it' and/or shop around for an affordable mastering job are putting the cart in front of the horse.

This next remark is not to gainsay what has been said by people in-the-know, but this *objective* judge in the perfect environment in which to be objective, making sure the problems in the result - supposedly a final mix - it's all solved in this mastering is some mystique on offer as well. For most people that will read such here this objectivity and attention to audio quality is way into overkill, IME. Not to mention how often it's total turd polishing.

If the audio is part of a zillion dollar movie, or even your movie is supposed to be a film festival happening concern, there is all sorts of science can happen in post-. But who is going to care about the music tracks at home like all that, particularly in this era of mp3s; Soundcloud quality 128mbps stream, FFS. Now, if you really care about quality and you're going to care about Soundcloud, you could very well want to master to that result! Last time I posted there, I had muy mucho in the bass in that track. It was not good in their compression. There's somebody that knows from their codec and what to do for it. That is not me and SC is not my cuppa anyway.

But I find at the KVR, 'mastering' is highly over-emphasized.

And so, this thread title '_ unveil revolutionary mastering product' really tells the story, I think. It doesn't insult everybody's intelligence, as we saw, but it really struck me as comical. Revolutionary! no less. And this mastering engineer as star or celebrity. I could give a shit. Good for you if you can do bidness! But expect ridicule when you're ridiculous. KVR done demonized and devalued yo ass. You sound like a fucken Republican with that victim pose, FFS.