Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 13

Long time no blog. It’s hard to figure out everything that has happened since the last blog. The most momentous event to happen is the preparation for mastering. If I wasn’t clear about it before, I’m definitely getting Heat Stroke mastered. It’s something that I’ve never done or even knew much about until a week or so ago.

In short, simple terms, mastering is making a finished song sound good. The entire spectrum of sound is utilized and everything sounds clearer and better. And while I pretty much always knew that mastering existed, I don’t think I ever considered it until I began recording Heat Stroke. Before this album, I would kind of EQ the master track in the song I was working on as I was working on it. Pro-tip: do not do that. Sometimes I get lucky and my mixes turn out pretty well. But for all those times that I don’t get lucky, off to a masterer.

Before I get into the meat of this blog, I’ll go into my journey into finding someone who I feel will do what I want when it comes to mastering the album well and helping me as well. I think I talked with 3 people about getting the songs mastered. The first 2 were very much just wanting to get my money. I explained my situation: that I was new to this, that I had some questions, that I wanted everything to go as smoothly as possible for the both of us. It’s not like I was small-talking or anything. I just was upfront about what I wanted, and I wasn’t getting it.

I would namedrop the business I’m going to utilize to master Heat Stroke with praise and whatever, but just in case something goes crazy, I’ll wait until it’s done. So far, this guy is pretty great. I explained to him my situation, what questions I had, what my songs should sound like before I sent him them, etc. You can’t expect someone to advise me all in-depth for free, so he didn’t give me quite as much information as I would have liked, but he definitely pointed me in the right direction and gave me good tips.

Anyway, I don’t know if this is boring or not, but it was interesting to me, so I’m going to explain what has gone into preparing these songs to be mastered. As I said before, I never mixed my songs with the intention of having them mixed. So that’s why most of my songs sound blown out and/or flat. Ironically enough, a song that’s fit to be mastered actually should sound flat and quiet. It needs to be a little quiet so that the engineer can fiddle with the EQ without blowing out the sound. It was completely bizarre to me that I needed to render out versions of these songs so quiet and flat sounding.

I got a free sample of a mastering of “Hotter Than a Mothereffer,” and it sounds awesome. That said though, that song already sounded pretty good. I’m more interested in hearing how a song such as “Burn It Down (Repetition of the Competition)” sounds when it’s mastered. Off the top of my head,  I think it’s one of the few songs on the album that has a range of sounds. There are quiet clean parts, and there are loud and heavy parts. I’m curious to see how much different a mastered version of the song will sound compared to my mix.

So…yeah, I just wanted to post a little update since it’s been a while since I last posted. After relistening to all the songs a few days ago, I decided to rerecord the vocals on “When Heck Freezes Over.” Speaking of which, I’m not sure if I’m going to have that track mastered just because it’s relatively simple and less of a song than just some vaguely musical noise with some distorted vocals on top of it. Same with the intro track, which is very short and is basically an audio experiment. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s it for now. My plan is to submit the tracks this weekend to be mastered. It makes me nervous. If I do get them through this weekend, I can’t imagine the album would be officially released everywhere no later than the end of January…