May 2, 2026 at 3:36 AM Yeah he mixed the entirety of Relapse, quite beautifully might I add. That’s one thing I do love about that album, Dres mixing is top notch. Mastering is different to mixing. Mixing is when you mix each individual recorded track (vocals, drums, bass, guitar, keys whatever it may be) to all blend together in the best possible way, like making sure the vocals sit right, making the bass thump, panning and so so on… Mastering is a technique done once all those individual tracks are are mixed down into one waveform. The Masteing engineer takes that one singular piece of audio and enhances it, usually with limiting, compression and EQ to make it radio ready, cd ready, streaming ready. Essentially it’s just making everything as loud as possible without distorting it, but doing that is an art in itself. Dre doesn’t do this part, he has used the Mastering engineer Brian “Big Bass” Gardner for almost everything he’s ever produced since the 90’s. Brian also mastered every single Eminem album from SSLP onwards, and most other Eminem related stuff. He’s one of the top mastering engineers in the world. Although I personally love the way he mastered albums like TES, MMLP, 2001 and even Relapse, I wasn’t really feeling how Recovery wasn’t mastered, it sounded way too over compressed and limited. Dudes been doing it since the 60s so I don’t know how old he is but I don’t know how long he can keep it up, with all the problems that come with the aging process, especially your hearing. He mastered the whole of Doss only 2 years ago.
May 2, 2026 at 7:30 AM I appreciate this breakdown. Thanks. And yea, something is different with Recovery and I attributed that to lack of Dre. (Still a 10/10 album though)
May 2, 2026 at 9:12 AM There’s an old thread on gearslutz from like 2010 about the mixing on Recovery and one of the main engineers who worked on it (Ryan West) and mixed like 4-5 songs on it posted in there that his original mixing on the songs, the versions he had before the mastering process, was much more open sounding and not so overly squashed and compressed.
