You've probably heard of "Pareto’s Principle", or the 80/20 rule. In a nutshell, it says:
80% of your results will come from 20% of your activity
The numbers aren't exact of course, in reality they'll be slightly higher or lower, but the point is, not everything we do is equally valuable - in fact often most of the value we get often comes from things we don't spend a huge amount of time doing. You only spend 1/5 of you time getting 4/5 of the results !
Usually this idea is used to help us improve our productivity - for example, I spend a lot of time on social media, but the reality is it almost certainly doesn't do nearly as much for my success as writing blog posts like this one.
But it occured to me the other day that it also applies in exactly the same way to actual mastering - the process and skills we use when we're working. So what do I mean by this ?
Well, typically if I'm mastering a single song I'll spend between 30 minutes to an hour working on it. And my initial workflow is always the same:
(If you want more information about this process, you can see a flow-chart I made going into more detail here.)
And after several cycles through this process, when I've honed in on the perfect balance of level, EQ and dynamics for the song, only then do I move onto all the other details - internal dynamics, stereo image enhancement, analogue flavour, transient design, saturation & distortion, tape emulations, True Peaks and dither…
And that list of "other details" - I bet those are the topics you've heard and seen most about online recently, right ? In fact, I bet True Peak levels just keep showing up in your timeline over and over again ?!
But here's the thing - dither and True Peaks contribute to only a few percent of the final sound, if that. Probably less than 1% !
And in fact if you add up all those exciting "other details" they probably don't even add up to 20% of the sound we hear. Sure, they're fun and interesting and important… but EQ and level alone account for at least 80% of the final sound we hear, if not more.
That's the 80/20 rule in action, for mastering.
It applies to time, too. In that hour or less that I spend mastering a song, I probably get the overall EQ & level balanced in the first 5 or 10 minutes - often much less. So the time I spend on the most impactful changes, that accounts for 80% or more of the final result… I do it in way less than 20% of the time.
Which is why I spend so much time in my courses talking about level, EQ and dynamics. If I can help you master 20% of the topics in mastering, your results could improve by 80% or more.
It's that simple ! (Not easy… but simple)
If you want to find out more, try watching the Mastering Essentials video series I made for Sound On Sound magazine, you'll get a great idea of how this works in practise.
Focus on level, EQ and dynamics when you're mastering. The other 20% is also fun and important, but nailing the fundamentals will get you more than 80% of the results you're looking for.
