boo131 wrote:So i need to wait to get my work noticed by a label before it gets mastered?? i thought it had to be top notch to evan get a look at? maybe i'm gettin the wrong end of the stick, and yes it wil sound a bit flat it is still a WIP. Thanks for your advice people, anyone know how to go about gettin labels involved?
There are plenty of people on this forum (and elsewhere) offering free or cheap mastering services. If they're any good at all then you'll learn a lot from getting them to do your tunes and asking what they did to it, as well as getting your tunes mastered.
The experience I've had of 'mastering' was sticking something up on a forum and having someone say "it's alright, but the high end is really lacking - look here's a version of the wav file where I've cut the midrange and boosted the top and it sounds much better". And it did sound much better.
On which non-evidence I'd say that the main things that are necessary to do rough-and-ready stick-it-up-on-soundcloud mastering are, in order:
i) the ability to spot what's wrong with a mix
ii) the skill to know what to do about it
iii) the monitoring and listening environment to do i) effectively
iv) the tools to do ii) effectively.
Long story short, I reckon Jason from Transition could do a lot better with Reason (and a good monitoring setup) than you or me could do with all the shiny kit in Transition Studios. Ie being stuck with Reason is probably the least of your worries.