Mastering is the final stage in the music production process before you send the audio out for CD manufacturing or to download and streaming outlets. It’s where you add finishing touches to your completed mix before your fans and potential fans hear it. Mastering accomplishes several things:
- Makes the whole thing hang together better — mastering can be the final glue that brings a finished mix together.
- Optimizes levels for competitive impact without killing the dynamics.
- Makes the audio more transportable among various playback systems (earbuds, car speakers, home stereos, etc.) — you want the mix to sound good no matter where it’s played.
- Gives your tracks that final, professional shine and polish.
- If you’re working on more than one song (an album or an EP), mastering helps the songs come together cohesively as a collection.
If you’re not an experienced mastering engineer, it’s often a good idea to seek one out. Mastering is an advanced skill, and experience counts. Plus, it’s often valuable to have a set of professional (and unbiased) ears assess and tweak your mixes before you present them to the world at large. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with trying your hand at mastering yourself! You’ll learn a lot — both about mastering and about your mixes — and you may get exactly the results that you want.
If you want to learn how to master your tracks, here are three basic tips that can help get you started down the right path.
1. Time For Expansion
Good news — the loudness wars are over! This means that every track doesn’t need to be a flat line in which the loudest and softest moments of your song are at exactly the same volume. Dynamics are interesting and exciting. They add a sense of movement and interest to the song. If your mix already has a healthy amount of dynamics, you’re good to go. But if your mix is sounding more squashed than you wanted, or your song doesn’t have a lot of dynamics to begin with, it’s time to reach for the expander.
An expander is the opposite of a compressor. It doesn’t squeeze the dynamic range together by bringing louder peaks down in volume; instead, it increases dynamic range by reducing the volume level of signals that drop below a certain threshold level. Using a modest expansion ratio of, say, 1.5:1 or 2:1, set the expander’s threshold so that slightly soft passages will be made even softer, but not so soft as to sound unnatural, as if you just turned down the volume. This can be exactly what a song needs to make those softer passages really stand out, and to give your song energy and dynamism — the louds are louder, and the softs are softer.
2. Mastering Isn’t Remixing
There are a lot of great mastering compressors, EQs, and processors in both the analog and digital realms. The one thing they all share in common is that even if they have a signature sound, they’re meant to be used in moderation to enhance a great mix. In the mastering stage, you want to use the highest-quality, most transparent hardware or plug-ins and make micro-changes — add just a couple dB of high shelving EQ to bring out the “air,” or a few dB of multiband compression on the low end to add punch.
The mastering stage is not where you want to fix problems with the mix. If your mix has problems, go back and fix them in the mix itself; don’t try to fix them in mastering. You’re not remixing, fixing balance problems, or trying to correct for issues with a single instrument or vocal; you should be polishing a finished mix to an even higher sheen.
3. Use a Look-ahead Limiter
A limiter is a dynamics processor that clamps down on signals hard when they exceed an upper threshold level — basically, a limiter sets a ceiling level for the levels. Limiters are ubiquitous in mastering for keeping the signal from peaking above a hard output limit, which can cause undesirable clipping (distortion) in the signal. However, if a limiter has to clamp down too quickly, it can cut off the attack/transient portions of louder parts of your song and make the end result sound dull.
Enter the “look-ahead” function. In the digital realm (meaning, either software limiters or digital hardware limiters), the limiter can decrease the audio level before or as it actually crosses the threshold. It literally “looks ahead” at the audio to determine when it will need to function. This allows the limiter to “see into the future” — to evaluate the audio in advance — so it knows where it will need to clamp down and can do it in a much more musical and natural way. This is exactly what you want from a mastering limiter.
