How do you go about selecting a mastering guy without having feedback to go from?

I'm a long time amateur and I'm going to be looking for a proper mastering engineer for a project I'm finishing (hopefully) until the end of this year. I'm having some trouble assessing different mastering engineers' styles because I can't figure out what part of the sound of what I hear in their productions was actually from the mix engineer. This project is probably close to metal, so I have going to places like discogs for metal productions I liked the sound of and checking who the mastering guys were, but I can never figure out what was the mastering guy's contribution to the tracks.

My intuition tells me I would like someone with a great listening environment to check my tracks for obvious mistakes in mixing and to make them all fit together nicely (homogenize them?). Basically someone with better ears than mine that is making sure everything is tidy, maybe even alerting me if they find something that needs to be fixed in the mix on my side.

I'm wary of going through the guys who self-promote on the internet, after having watched some horrendous youtube "mastering tutorials" where some of these guys slap multiband compression with ratios above 2 with 6 active bands, apply high-pass filters with 24db/octave from 40Hz up, heavily distort tracks intentionally with some plugin, etc.

My past experience with local audio engineers has also not been the best, as when I was doing projects with other people it was often the case that we would make the decision to give up on the local engineer's mix and just get the tracks and redo the mix in my shitty room, because the engineer's one was just that bad.

TLDR: I don't have a contact for a mastering guy that I like the work of; I want to learn how to assess the work of a random mastering engineer to be ale to select one and contact the studio through the internet.

 

That's for sure not easy. You'd need to listen to a lot of stuff of him, try to find a sound style and compare the tracks to another ME's work.

OTOH, you could also open a thread in https://audiosex.pro/forums/job-listings-finding-hiring.33/, upload a single track of yours, wait for replies of some members and then make your decision.

 

That sounds like an interesting idea. I might try it when I get these tracks finished.