Slave to the Master

So we finished writing and recording Daylight Robbery. We spent absolutely ages mixing it on our brand new Genelec 8020a studio monitors, potentially some of the best monitors money can buy for a control room as small as ours. When we first got them a couple of weeks ago, we were amazed with the detail and brightness of the sound, even hearing the breath on some Mraz tracks that were previously inaudible. Having worked on a pair of bog-standard Sony Hifi monitors for the last year, the difference was huge.

We got to the mastering stage last week, and spent a couple of hours playing around with T-Racks3, Izotope and the Oxford plugins to produce a brilliant sounding master. So brilliant in fact that when we compared it to Karma Police and Violet Hill, it sounded richer, warmer, fuller and generally better. How had we, with limited equipment and experience, produced a track that sounded better than Radiohead?

Well our sense of achievement rapidly dissolved into a pitiful mess or sorrow and depression when we listened to our master on a normal Hifi. It sounded muddy, over-compressed and had a stereo image as wide as our punctured egos. It was at that point that we realised why the Coldplay and Radiohead tracks sounded worse than ours; their tracks were mixed and mastered for the Hifi, whereas ours was done for the high-end studio monitors, a listening environment experienced by almost nobody.

The moral of the story? Always listen to a mixdown on the track you're working on on different systems throughout the mixing process. Don't wait until you've spent weeks mixing and mastering it, otherwise you'll be in for a nasty surprise.