pouët.net

If by "good tools" you mean "tools with presets that are carefully put together to fit the type of music you are likely to be working on", then a reluctant yes, but that doesn't really have anything to do with skill, just luck.

In general, if you don't know how compression, sidechaining or reverb works, then you'll get shit results, no matter how expensive tools you're using. In fact, the more expensive, the less user friendly the tool is - at least that is my experience. :)

If your theory is that expensive plugins with loads of presets in general improves a mix that has not been touched up in any other way, then perhaps yes - it might take you a long way towards a good-sounding mix.. but it's not really related to the quality of the tool itself, just the luck of having good presets.

word.

<3 good presets

word at both gloom and skrebbel

rpfp: as everyone I was thinking those who make music and are not deaf. of course that was exagerated sentence from me :)

gloom: yes, exactly. the thing is tools with good presets are common nowadays. specially software.
random example here at page 20.

Evil: Well, then you and I have two very different definitions of the word "good" :)

well yes hehe, for the total n00b at mastering it will output good results.
and trust me when I tell you we might have the same definition for good.
it's just this is demoscene. not all can afford paying expensive software/hardware.

thats why we have warez groups, and God bless them too. :D

>> learning by doing <<

so all your coochie-bitchin' around about who knows best is plain useless.
i'm allergic agaisnt bullshit, you know :D

either you know what you're doing or you leave it the fuck alone,
no matter what plugin, no matter what hardware.

period!

Sorry if what I'll say is full of bullshits, but anyway I really think you should forget everything about the mastering silly thing.

Many high-end studios are even able to fuck up some good mixes and not only on customer's pressure reasons.

Therefore there is no tool, nothing that can make you sound good except your ears and experience. Everything is in the mix and in your knowledge of signal theory and tools. So try to figure out what it takes to be a good mastering engineer. Most of them (the real ones I mean) are first really experienced mixing engineers, not to talk about their amazing tools.

Mixing and "engineering" is first a technical thing so the better you are on this side, the more you can focus on the artistic side of your work (the most important). I won't lie. It takes time before you can connect the two so they efficiently work together on a regular basis and not by being just lucky. With our modern practises (home-studio) most of the time the mix is build within the creative process.

Listening to many genres of music probably gives some "sound prints" to your ear memory and surely enhances your mixes aesthetic and originality.

You would probably be really surprised to hear mixes coming from big studios before they actually go into the mastering process. Most of the time they sound great but nowadays requirements in term of music listening just have to make them sound good on Ipod and computer speakers (where cut-down-all-dynamics-and-predominant-frequencies rule applies here) more than on high-end monitors or speakers. So great mixes become crappy ones.

In an aside about my practises, I never apply any kind of pre-mastering to my works (only a limiter with at -0.3dB peak and with a maximum of -3dB treshold). The mix is the only thing I focus on. It has to be as perfect as possible and if not I start again.

So maybe you should consider that you can achieve definitive and final sound right out the mix process ! ;)