As I said. All in the box. I didn't use hardware on it. My home rig is based around composing and editing orchestral works and samples these days. As that's what I mostly do/did for a living. I quit recording bands more years ago than most bands stay together, only really taking a step out for the opportunity to work with a favorite rock band from highschool a few years ago and it totally soured me on the process all over again for a whole slew of new reasons.
I could go into detailed reasoning on pointing out ore flaws in the recording and source that could be as much issue trace you hear than the master. Lets just keep it on the short list... cheap mics, focus on time working on multiple arrangements, large separated sessions, cheap interfaces... the whole thing was done on the super cheap, but included hiring live musicians, rooms, orchestrations...etc )
It wasn't planned that I'd master the record originally. I actually think it requires a separate set of ears, but it just ended up this way. I actually hate mastering, since I'm not really set up for it, and the process is such a weird balance of finding an artist/song natural aspects, and consumer's expectancy of perceived loudness.
Also, I didn't use all those plugs at the same time. Just choices and combinations for each song to get a good shape and balance as we could from the multiple sessions and different rooms, and highly varied song styles. Some songs just worked better with different choices with the volume levels we were after.
I think we found a good balance on keeping source character and said volume levels
On length, there was one more song planned for the record, but pulled at the end. Remember that this isn't my album, just something I helped create from the ground up with a friend.
I'm with you, I like longer albums
Still pretty proud of how Caverns tuned out on the master side though. I've never been able to find a nice balance in making an acoustic based song fit in with louder more broadband material, without squashing the absolute life out of it. Sadly catch wasn't a multitracked song, so the balance on that acoustic song suffered.
The song I think turned out best is Missing a Cue.
Through all that defensive sounding nonsense though, I wanted to get to the one thing that actually did kinda bother me about what you said. I absolutely disagree with the idea that plug ins at 32/64 bits and 88.2 or higher resolution is going to box up your sound just because of "calculations". Especially on a 2 track. The math is using such high values that the quantizing artifacts like aliasing and the like are minimal now, and it becomes more about source material and end usage more than anything, just like analog gear users can cause similar problems on material through misuse. I work pretty heavy with phase coherency on a near forensic level these days the idea that plug ins box up your sound is just a perpetuation of misuse or old analog "set it and forget it" workflow bias. While some great analog gear is never gonna be modeled correctly, and the character that specific piece of gear can bring is worth going to a specific studio/engineer for. The ability to do whacky parallel processing and still, after the fact, work on phase manipulation/frequency support at high spectral bin separation/high quality FFT makes the idea that stressing your track with calculations, and in turn making things sound worse somehow by default, is something I'll never agree with with today's software. Audio software technology has come a long, long way, form the days of fudging the math to try to cope with single processors, and we're at a point where things can be made spectacularly better in the box with some of the more creative software developers straying from chasing the modelling train. Kramer's and Slate's tape models are awesome though. That said, I'm not all high and mighty to say I didn't do a shit job at mastering. It's not at the top level of my skill set. It's not some inherent problem of using software though, probably more my chronic avoidance of working with bands to build up the right habits to do it better these days.
