Hello,
Mastering is the last step in preparing the music for its final application.
Most music we hear has little dynamics, I'm sure you've heard of the term "Loudness War" - basically every pop/rock track that's supposed to air on the radio is mastered for the purpose of going head to head with all the other tracks.
With game music it's a different thing. You've already mentioned a certain similarity between game music and film music: picture yourself meticulously scoring a track to a cinematic scene - the music can end up having a lot of dynamics, which is actually desirable in this case. Mastering this with the same hard multi-band compression and limiting approach as the pop/rock music would be quite counterproductive.
Another thing to think about is playback systems: while mastering engineers for movies have the big cinema speakers in mind, we game people need to consider the music might get played back by the tiny speakers of an iPad - and still needs to be audible.
That said, for game music I don't outsource the mastering process but rather do it myself: I don't need the biggest most artfully compressed "sausage wave", I simply need to make sure it sounds good on the system it needs to sound good on and has the dynamics needed for the scene/level/menu screen/whatever. Giving that job to someone else would make me lose some of the control of the overall sound.
The mastering process's sonic influence is overrated in my opinion: a weak mix will sound weak even after the best mastering, and a good mix will sound good even without mastering.
Cheers,
Moritz
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#1Moritz P.G. Katz
Posted 09 February 2012 - 05:28 AM
Hello,
Mastering is the last step in preparing the music for its final application.
Most music we hear has little dynamics, I'm sure you've heard of the term "Loudness War" - basically every pop/rock track that's supposed to air on the radio is mastered for the purpose of going head to head with all the other tracks.
With game music it's a different thing. You've already mentioned a certain similarity between game music and film music: picture yourself meticulously scoring a track to a cinematic scene - the music can end up having a lot of dynamics, which is actually desirable in this case. Mastering this with the same hard multi-band compression and limiting approach as the pop/rock music would be quite counterproductive.
Another thing to think about is playback systems: while mastering engineers for movies have the big cinema speakers in mind, we game people need to consider the music might get played back by the tiny speakers of an iPad - and still needs to be audible.
That said, for game music I don't outsource the mastering process but rather do it myself: I don't need the biggest most artfully compressed "sausage wave", I simply need to make sure it sounds good on the system it needs to sound good on and has the dynamics needed for the scene/level/menu screen/whatever. Giving that job to someone else would make me lose some of the control of the overall sound.
The mastering process's sonic influence is overrated in my opinion: a weak mix will sound weak even after the best mastering, and a good mix will sound good even without mastering.
Cheers,
Moritz
Mastering is the last step in preparing the music for its final application.
Most music we hear has little dynamics, I'm sure you've heard of the term "Loudness War" - basically every pop/rock track that's supposed to air on the radio is mastered for the purpose of going head to head with all the other tracks.
With game music it's a different thing. You've already mentioned a certain similarity between game music and film music: picture yourself meticulously scoring a track to a cinematic scene - the music can end up having a lot of dynamics, which is actually desirable in this case. Mastering this with the same hard multi-band compression and limiting approach as the pop/rock music would be quite counterproductive.
Another thing to think about is playback systems: while mastering engineers for movies have the big cinema speakers in mind, we game people need to consider the music might get played back by the tiny speakers of an iPad - and still needs to be audible.
That said, for game music I don't outsource the mastering process but rather do it myself: I don't need the biggest most artfully compressed "sausage wave", I simply need to make sure it sounds good on the system it needs to sound good on and has the dynamics needed for the scene/level/menu screen/whatever. Giving that job to someone else would make me lose some of the control of the overall sound.
The mastering process's sonic influence is overrated in my opinion: a weak mix will sound weak even after the best mastering, and a good mix will sound good even without mastering.
Cheers,
Moritz