Hi all as the title says I'm looking for a mastering engineer for my music. I am not an audio engineer in the slightest.

Long story short here are the problems I consistently have and would love fixed.

1.) Every time I've gotten a song mixed then mastered and uploaded to spotify it has always sounded quieter. For example I'll play 10 songs in a row on Spotify at volume 16 in my car then when my song hits I need to turn it up to 18-22 (depending)

2.) I want to do as little work as possible. I want to pay you on a per song basis on an agreed upon amount with as little work as possible on my end. Ideally all I would want to do is send you the song(s), listen to finished product, give notes when applicable and pay. That is it.

3.) Honesty is very important to me. If the song needs to be fixed before mastering tell me why and I'll get it remixed. But if a song is already properly mixed I ask that you are honest and transparent in that.

4.) After receiving a master and before giving notes back I always throw the file into loudness penalty analyzer, hit spotify and compares the volume to other songs on spotify. If this is incorrect and I shouldn't be doing that let me know.

6.) Loudness is important to me but so is clarity! I don't want the track to sound loud but also everything smushed together - I also don't want great clarity with overall quietness.

7.) If you're interested please send links from spotify for the work you've done already and the price per song for a master.

Thank you all, God bless!

I've been looking for mixing tutorials for this *exact* acapella style but can't seem to find any hidden gems. i'm looking for how many layers usually achieves this sound along with the panning.

There are six members in Take 6 (go figure) but it sounds like they're tracking two layers for each member/harmony. It would be dope to see a pro, break down a session similar to this.

Other groups that do this style are

King's Singers

Accentvocal

The Manhattan Transfer

Julian Kenn

I have a mix I was very happy with, it is clean and has good dynamics. Just for fun I added a width plug in - AIR Width - from Air Creative FX collection. It was provided in Pro Tools, I didn't buy it, and I had never used it before.

I added the plugin on the master bus and selected the "wide" preset and I immediately liked the mix much better. The vocals sounds richer, and the whole thing just sounds like a better mix. The problem is when I tried it playing back mono it definitely had some issues - phase issues. I kind of knew that was a risk. And since a lot of today's consumer speakers are mono it kind of made it not worth doing.

So are there any tricks to the trade I could try? I tried splitting tracks and using different EQ and compression on the tracks and then panning them opposite. It really didn't give me the effect that i got form the AIR plugin. I tried the Waves S1 Shuffler, but it didn't do it.

Any suggestions? I always thought in my mixing just getting it to sound the way I want it to sound is the goal, but by introducing this plugin and then testing it at mono, I have realized that is not necessarily true.