Yasae

I don't find a large difference in digital EQs, but things suddenly up and change when we talk Nebula versions of analog EQs or analog EQs themselves. Avalon or API or Neve etc. have rather distinct signatures. All the raving over various EQs didn't make much sense to me until I stumbled upon what Nebula offered. Now I'm fine with using ITB eq for general tasks where no signature is wanted or surgical cuts. (Helps to curtail CPU usage as well, since Nebula is one of the most demanding non-instrument plug-ins out there). A good high quality mastering-grade/use digital EQ is the one from Sonoris. You can get very far with just one decent parametric, however. It's easier to make them generate phase shift, but their versatility is unrivaled.

Learn the limitations of both systems, which requires a lot of extended listening. There's something to be said for monitoring which lets you create mixes that reproduce well from the start, but no one system can tell you everything. So you always have to tweak a little. I'm really not that big on reference mixes because the choices made from their staff are rather subjective. You can spin a mix from good source material many different ways and still have it sound right. I guess it helps with overall frequency skew.

Right but what ratio? How much GR? I doubt either of those numbers are ten. I haven't found a lot of heavy compression in mastering. Mostly that would be done in parallel. The mix usually has compression on it, which is the sum of compressed busses, which are splits and/or sums from compressed individual tracks. So really by the time it's at this final stage there's been 2-4 layers of compression already. With limiting we've been in the era of clipping converters for over 10 years now. It's whatever clients want, we went way beyond reason long ago. If you ask me, anything post-early 2000s is generally pushed beyond reason. There are plenty of exceptions, it's just the standard overall has continually been lowered, not raised.

Lower dynamic range isn't a problem, but the amount of limiting and hard clipping in this age of music is absurd. It sounds (and looks) like crap. Again, there's nowhere to go, so past a certain range you're just reducing quality and nothing more.

I see loudness as more of a taste thing, though it really started to get beyond reasonable limits past the early 2000s. I mean I don't know, it's about what sounds bad. Unfortunately a lot of bad sounding stuff is getting approved and even desired because of a multitude of factors, despite there being nowhere else to go in terms of headroom. I'm extremely unimpressed by loud stuff. It can never shake its lack of dynamics and tiny sound. Wow, okay, amazing, you got it loud. Almost NEVER sounds great in addition to that, though.

What a shame. I could easily point in the direction of his wall of credits and find a good score - Aliens, Cocoon, The Land Before Time, Pelican Brief, Apollo 13, Braveheart, etc etc. Even cheese like Titanic and Avatar was elevated. RIP.

Option 1.

Nothing will kill your love of this faster than not getting paid (or not getting paid enough) for your hard work. If there are small projects you'd enjoy working on just for the hell of them then shoot for the moon, but realize that's intentionally taking less than what your normal rate should be for other, less tangible benefits. It's not and should never be standard practice. Clients are there to get the most for the least, always, so there's nothing wrong with being shrewd.

Oooh Lyndhurst Hall? One of the best I've heard.

It is what it is. Generally speaking though, the louder tracks in my library sound worse than those which hit the right balance of loudness to dynamics. There's nothing wrong with being competitive on levels, but I feel it's a range as opposed to a hard number.

So... Techno. What's the deal with that?

I'm on the Sony Oxford mailing list because sometimes they have some good videos. Behold: She uses a Sennheiser MKH416 - the one I hate - but she does a lot of promo work and describes how it cuts through busy advertisement mixes. Food for thought.

Altiverb or IRCAM Tools are very good reverb choices from my experience listening to them. They're overpriced though. Maybe find a cheaper impulse response verb and buy/find some free responses? That video's good. Notice how the A-B (spaced pair) result sounds compared to X/Y and ORTF. I like that one. It's a soft, wide, rather classical sound to me, even if there is a little bit of phantom center going on.

I always see a spaced pair of ribbons or tube condensers either over the strings (closer sound) or elevated and back a few feet from the lid (more distant sound). Depends on the result you want and the limitations of the room. You're probably going to lean towards a closer sound in this case; a little bit of extra rejection/focusing from the NT5s, since they're SDCs, probably helps. This SOS article goes into all kinds of unnecessary detail: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may99/articles/recpiano.htm. I found it worthwhile. If you need more pictures, try browsing through http://scoringsessions.com/. Those aren't strictly classical techniques (which tend to be more distant/ambient), but there's a lot of overlap.