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Originally Posted by Genteel Death
I'm spending my weekend reading about different approaches to the mastering process of records, so I was wondering if anyone has ever had any experiences with it on the forum. If you have any stories or personal experiences, please share. I think that even lo-fi recordings can benefit from it (see Bob Ludwig's work for Guided by Voices, for instance).
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Mastering your own project really can be like "doing your own dentistry work" to use the old cliche. I have a lot of experience mastering my own work out of necessity ($$$) with mixed results. The problem with doing your own mastering is it defeats the main purpose of the mastering step in the first place. When mastering yourself you are obviously in the same room in which you mixed with all the same audio deficiencies.
The best advice one could give in regards to mastering yourself is fix it in the mix and do as little as possible in the mastering stage. To achieve this mix to the best of your ability by A/B'ing with a good selling, professionally made album of your choice within your genre. Then confirm your mixes in as many different systems as possible (your car, your computer, your boom-box, your iPod, etc), tweaking the mix to be compatible in all of them. The final step, "mastering", in "home mastering" should involve only limiting to bring the overall audio volume to a reasonable modern level (very light EQ and compression can be used before the limiter in the chain but is usually not necessary).