How to choose a mastering mentor

Full disclosure: I sell a mentorship, so read this with that in mind.

I'm Ruslan Slatin, a mastering engineer in Madrid. I master over 1,000 songs a year, I have more than 90 gold records and I've worked on records by J Balvin, Quevedo and Sebastián Yatra. I've also taught at Anonymous Studios (Los Angeles), SAE Institute (Madrid), Millenia (Valencia) and DJP Music School (Madrid).

What to look for

• Their credits. Plenty of people explain mastering well online and don't master anyone's records. Look at what they've released, who with, and whether they're still doing it. Someone working with artists and labels every week teaches you what works today.
• How they communicate, and their ego. The people who share best tend to be humble, open-minded and willing to hear other ideas. The ones stuck in their own bubble who don't respect other engineers tend to sound the worst and get the worst results with clients.
• Whether their teaching clicks with you. Huge credits are no use if you can't follow the person. Before you pay, watch their YouTube or Instagram and ask two things: is it clear, and do their ideas make sense to you?

Mentor or course

If you're just starting out, I recommend a course. At that stage a mentor can cost too much for the results you'd get, and a course lets you learn at your own pace. The same goes if you're short on time or can't commit right now.

A mentor makes sense once you know your DAW, you practice regularly and you have your own work to review. That's when someone listening to your masters can save you years.

What a mentor gives you that videos don't

You see how a professional thinks: how they diagnose a problem, why it happened and how to fix it. Preset chains and magic tricks won't teach you that. What you take away is the reason behind each decision, and that's how you build your own judgment, your taste and your sound.

What you should start to hear after 3 months

The slowest skill to develop is hearing the small changes. They compound, and in the end they're the difference between an amateur sound and a professional one:

• Textures and color
• Harmonic detail from saturation
• Microdynamics
• Transient coherence
• What's in phase and what's out of phase
• How the mids relate to the sides

The most common mistake

Wasting the mentorship time and not practicing between sessions. If you have a call every week, show up having practiced as much as you can, with your questions ready. A mentor can't do the work for you, and the more material you bring, the more you get out of it.

Students who work like that move fast. Some of mine, starting with little background, have reached a strong level within 3 months and begun getting paid for their work.

What to ask before you pay

1. What have you worked on in the last two years?
2. Will you review my own work, or is it only lessons? How often?
3. Which genres do you work in?
4. What language are the sessions in?
5. What's the minimum commitment?

How I learned

I've always learned from mentors. As a kid I wanted to go to music school, but my grades weren't good enough for the public ones and my parents couldn't afford a private one. So I went to the studios of people who knew more than I did and paid for their time so they'd show me how they worked.

Years later I ended up teaching at music schools, and it showed me what not to do: all the filler you can cut to get down to what a professional engineer actually needs.

My mentorship, and who it isn't for

The Mix & Master Accelerator is my online mixing and mastering mentorship. More than 200 students have been through it.

It isn't for you if:

• You're a complete beginner. Start with courses and learn your DAW properly.
• You only want to learn production. We approach mixing and mastering from a producer's point of view, but this isn't a production course.
• You make classical or acoustic music. We work on modern genres that hit hard: electronic, urban pop, reggaeton, rock, techno and EDM.
• You aren't ready to invest in your career.

Language. The mentorship runs in English. The 1-on-1 call can also be in Spanish, and the recorded lessons have Spanish subtitles.

Why mixing and mastering together. The two share techniques and depend on each other, and the goal is the same: a song that sounds incredible. Most of my work is stem mastering, which is exactly where they meet.

See the mentorship

FAQ