Any Music Engineers?

For 3 years now I have been learning the "art" of mastering, and mixing. I could literally just sit at a computer for days mixing or mastering the dynamics of a song. I believe mastering a song, or sound is really a whole art of its own, separate from the music. You manipulate sound frequencies and velocities of several instruments making them either brighter or duller, louder or more quiet. In doing this you are creating in a way your own work of art because you decide what people get to hear, and how they hear it. I hope this makes sense.

I just want to know if there is any other people who are really passionate about music, and who are interested in the MUSIC ENGINEERING part of music producion.

 

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN LISTENING TO SOME MUSIC I'VE PRODUCED: benjamin tha king's sounds on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

I do not do this as a profession (hopefully one day). All the techniques that I've learned about mastering and mixing I have either learned from my father, youtube videos, and really just sitting down at a computer for literally 12 + hours trying to perfect a sound to what I like.

I've been producing hip-hop instrumentals for quite some time now, even though I am actually a guitar player of 12 + years (and my favorite genre is prog rock). A simple rap beat may be "easy" to recreate, but in reality its almost impossible to perfectly match every single detail in a song.

For an example, If I want a particular sound I may want to add an effect, like a phaser. Now, depending on which program, or particular phaser you have there are going to be different settings you can change. The phaser I use for a song that I created has these settings:

Sweep Frequency (0.5846372 Hz)
Frequency Range (small)
Feedback (0.4356734 amount)
minimum depth (0.1756345)
stereo (0.5666453 phase)
dry-wet (50% wet)
maximum depth (0.8345735)
nr. stages (8)
out gain (4.082399)

These settings are unique to my song. Unless you would somehow already have these specific settings there is NO WAY human ears could be that accurate. Maybe you think you "perfected" the sound but without actually seeing the numbers in front of you, the changes are so small you couldn't differentiate between the sound, but that's not saying the sound is not different.

I may be dragging that explaination on a little bit, but I really feel like if you don't know about producing music, or have knowledge in the area is can be really difficult to really understand what's going on. I only gave 1 example of a technique/effect I would use to create a sound, and already it had 9 different settings I could change to very very specific settings. Think about a song that uses hundreds of effects, each plug-in effect (examples of plug-in effects: compresser, flanger, phaser, parametric eq) each numerous amount of very specific settings.

All of these variables can be manipulated to what YOU as an engineer like. Though you didn't create the actual "music" you created how people hear it.

This is such a deep passion of mine and to really explain all my thoughts would take literally years. Mastering, and mixing is truely one of the greatest things that I have ever even started to learn. Every single day I learn something about mastering, and how to improve, there is ALWAYS room for improvement. Shit, even top-engineers that master tracks for the worlds most popular bands/artist still learn and improve on their skill everyday.

Now, with that being said. I'm going to load another bowl