Radiophonic wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 11:27 pmWhy, if there is a step like mastering, is there any porcessing on the mixbus at all (lets say in a rock mix). Where is the line between mixbus-processing and mastering?
It all depends on what you see as the role of mastering.
In the 'good old days' mastering was fundamentally about two things. 1) Taking a bunch of superbly mixed and finished tracks recorded and mixed at different times and in different places, and tweaking them very slightly to give an homengenous sound so they sounded like they belonged together as a complete album, with consistent and appropriate relative levels, and similar tonalities.
And 2), it was also about the dealing with the technical aspects of taking that album and making a viable disk master for pressing vinyls or CDs, or duplicating cassettes or whatever.
In my view, what goes into mastering, ideally, should be the finished mix, and that may well require the application of various mix bus processes, like compression, limiting or whatever. Ideally, again, it should be the mix engineer (with the producer/band) that decides what the final mix sounds like long before it goes anywhere near the mastering room. For me, the mastering engineer's job is to get that track onto the release medium in the best possible way. End of story.
However, increasingly we live in a world where no one wants to make decisions... so it has become fashionable to record a dozen mics in front of an amp instead of one so 'the sound' can be decided 'later'. And stems are sent to mastering engineers so the 'mix engineer' doesn't have to make those decisions either...
So to answer your question... the line is wherever you want it to be.
