Producer and artist Luxxury says he no longer pays for mastering, and manages to do it himself by eye.

Appearing on the latest episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast, made in partnership with Audient, Luxxury says that taste should prevail over all when it comes to music production, and that we should stop fearing what is technically wrong or right. With that in mind, Luxxury doesn’t overthink the finer details so much these days.

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He explains, “I think taste, selection, curation, having an idea of, ‘oh, I haven’t heard this before in quite this way,’ far trumps how you’re able to dial in compression in the most scientifically engineered [way].

“I’m usually just turning knobs on my compressor until it sounds good, which I’ve heard many people say. Compression is conceptually a little bit rough. I mean, I can describe it. I know what it’s doing intellectually, but I’m not really sure what all the buttons do. It’s all based on sound which is based on taste. It’s just, ‘this sounds good to me.’”

To that point, co-host Chris Barker adds that compression isn’t really something he focuses on anymore when making music either, which is something he began to worry less about following an interview with Bruce Swedien regarding Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and how he barely used any compression on it.

“I do that, by the way. I do that with mastering. I stopped paying for mastering about five years ago,” adds Luxxury, “and sure, would it be a little better? Maybe, [but] I want immediacy. I want to put this song out now.

“What I’m doing, I’m about to out myself here, when I put out a record, I’ll put all the waveforms next to each other until they kind of look and sound kind of alike. And that is mastering by Luxxury. Shameful!”

He goes on to jest, “George Martin’s engineers are rolling in their graves. Fuck those white coated motherfuckers. They didn’t know dick. The obsession with knowledge and like, ‘this is the wrong way to do something.’ That is silliness.”

You can check out the full episode of the podcast below:

The post “I stopped paying for mastering about five years ago… I want immediacy”: How Luxxury masters his own music by eye appeared first on MusicTech.