Mastering is a dark and mysterious magic, becoming a Mastering Engineer involves a dedication to the dark arts and eating a goat’s head.
Actually, that’s not true, though sometimes it seems that way.
What is Mastering?
Mastering is the final step in the creation of an album before duplication. Mastering is all about the big picture, how the collection of songs works together as an album, and getting the album to sound good on most systems, from HI-FIs to iPods. Mixing is taking a bunch of tracks and making it sound great, Mastering is taking those great mixes and making them even better. It’s the final step of sonic correction and sonic enhancement.
It’s just about loudness right?
There’s a misconception that mastering is just about making a recording loud, that’s just one of the processes involved. Compression, Equalization, Harmonic Exciting and Stereo Widening are often part of the mastering process as well.
Mastering at home
Before you attempt to master at home there are a few requirements.
Room treatment – If you haven’t take the effort to get your studio sounding as good as it can acoustically this will be an exercise in futility
Monitors – as important as having a great sounding room, you need accurate monitors, you can not master on computer speakers or headphones.
Experience – Complete understanding of your tools is essential, if you aren’t 200% sure how to properly use a multi-band harmonic exciter, it might be better to leave this to a professional.
Watch out!
I’ll also caution against mastering your own music. It’s very common for bands to record and mix themselves then send the mixes to a mastering engineer. Why? Partly because of the requirements of mastering, but more because of the emotional attachment you have to your own music. When you’ve just spent a few months recording and mixing, you lose perspective, you can’t see the forest for the trees. If you must master your own music, don’t listen to the songs for few days or weeks, hopefully you will have a different perspective when you do finally listen again. And hopefully you won’t want to go back and remix it all over again.
Mastering Software
Now if I haven’t scared you off the idea of mastering completely, there are a few DAWs aimed at mastering.
Steinberg Wavelab is an excellent program for mastering. It has excellent analysis plugins as well as very easy to use CD creation tools. The only downside to Wavelab is its PC only.
Bias Peak is for Mac, it is excellent for audio restoration, mastering and CD burning.
The majority of features in these programs are also in any major DAW, the big difference is the professional CD burning tools. There are LE versions of these Mastering DAWs which should cover what you need to do from home.
Mastering Plugins
There are two very popular all-in-one (nearly) mastering plugins. Izotope Ozone and IK Multimedia T-Racks.
Some things that I like about Ozone are:
Ozone has a multiband approach, dynamics, harmonic exciter and stereo imaging tools are all multiband.
You can take a snapshot of the eq curve from one song and apply it to another.
The interface does not look like a piece of rack gear.
Several dither options.
Some things I like about T-Racks are:
Excellent modeling of classic pieces of gear
Great metering, that is completely customizable
Stand alone mode allows you to load a wav file, process and export. Great for when you just need to do a song at a time.
Series and parallel processing with 12 effect slots.
You can use these plugins in any DAW and will get the bulk of your mastering work done, minus the CD burning. I highly recommend using a combination of one of the mastering plugins within a dedicated mastering program.
This is just an extremely brief overview of the massive topic of mastering. For information, please see the documentation for the software listed above or these great books: Mastering Audio by Bob Katz, and Mastering Engineer’s Handbook by Bobby Owinski.
Also Interesting:
A good basic intro into DIY mastering although the main issue is accurate monitoring, without it you can easily being doing more harm than good.
cheers
The cost of mastering has come down a lot over the last 5 years so it can certainly be worth looking into professional mastering if you are not confident enough to go DIY. thanks for the nice read.
Music and audio mastering can be done with just a computer our days but if you want the sound that sale CD you’ll need a pro engineer and some pro gears.