What is mastering in music? Do
you always have to master a song? And exactly how does mastering work?
Today I'll explain all of this. Mixing and mastering are two different things.
Mixing is all about getting the levels right, adding eq, delay, reverb, sidechaining, and so on.
Mastering, on the other hand, is the final step before the track is released. I'll show you what
a typical mastering chain looks like in a bit, but first, I'll explain what mastering really is.
Let's assume that you're done mixing. You should always aim to get your mix sounding as good as
possible during the mixing stage. After that, the track should be 99 finished. Mastering is the
process of doing that last one percent fine-tuning and polishing before the track is released.
Imagine that you've just bought a brand new car, and you put on a coat of
wax to make it really shine. The car represents your track after mixing. The
wax job should represent the mastering. Another example would be a girl putting on her makeup.
A new car is relatively easy to wash and wax. It won't need much work. Likewise, a good
mix won't need a whole lot of mastering. A mix that's not ideal will need a lot of
corrections during mastering. Mastering can fix some issues in a mix, but it's not intended
as a tool to fix a broken mix. It's primarily intended to enhance what's already good in a song.
You should always try to fix issues in the mix itself, and get the mix to sound as good
as humanly possible before mastering. Let's get back to the car analogy. Imagine you
have an old car with lots of scratches. It'll take much more work to buff those out. Depending
on how deep they are, some may not be removable, and if there's rust on the car, it'll need
bodywork. No amount of cleaning will fix that. It's the same thing with mastering. If the vocal
needs more autotuning for example, or if there's noise in the recordings, then this will have to be
fixed in the mix itself. Because anything you do during mastering will affect the whole mix!
As you enter the mastering stage your track should already be 99% finished.
It's about very small fine-tuning. Typically a mastering engineer will do some very
fine eq'ing to remove any problem frequencies and some light multi-band compression.
Sometimes a warm tape emulator effect and such are used to make the track sound more warm and analog,
as well as some final limiting to make it louder. It's not the same process every time,
it depends on the track itself. What one track needs in terms of mastering is perhaps
what another track has too much of and so on. Again, the process is different every time, just as people are different. Every producer
has a unique style that requires a unique form of mastering. Mastering is an art itself. It's
a highly specialized field which is why there are dedicated mastering engineers who specialize
in it. They have years of experience mastering, and most importantly, they have just the
right equipment and facilities to do so. You'll always have a hard time
monitoring in a typical bedroom studio. A mastering studio will have all the necessary
sound-absorbing material on the walls and such. It's been designed with just one thing in mind:
to reproduce sound as realistically as possible. You'll never be able to obtain the same level of
precision in terms of monitoring in your bedroom. Even though a typical bedroom studio is not ideal
for mastering, that doesn't mean it can't be done. There's also software available that can
help mitigate these problems. For example: sonarworks reference 4 is specifically designed to
help cancel out unwanted room coloration, and will help you achieve a flatter frequency response.
It works with both monitors and headphones. Another useful plugin is the isotope tonal
balance. It analyzes the tonal balance in your track and compares it to commercial tracks. When
you can't fully trust your ears due to a poorly set up studio, poor equipment or both, then
visual aids like this can be extremely useful. Many artists prefer to send their tracks
to a mastering engineer despite having the skills necessary to do it themselves.
The reason for this, as you work with a track, you tend to become immune to how it sounds.
After hearing the same track over and over thousands of times, it can be beneficial to have
someone else master it. Someone who gets to hear it for the very first time. That way they
can go about mastering it with fresh ears, without having their judgment clouded by having
listened to it over and over for so long. This doesn't mean you can't do it yourself. A lot
of artists actually prefer to master themselves. It's a personal decision. It's also possible to
become good at mastering even though you don't have an ideal monitoring environment. It will take
a lot of practice and it's all about knowing your speakers and your room, and how it translates
to other rooms and other systems. A typical mastering chain will look something like this:
Some corrective eq will usually be used to boost or lower certain regions, or to
deal with some resonant frequencies. for example, there will often be some mud
in the three to four hundred hertz region, so you might have to make a small cut there. If the track lacks clarity, a wide boost of 1 to 1.5 decibels around 1500
hertz will often do the trick. As I've said before, the exact
processing will vary with every project and the different sounds that
are in there. It will never be exactly the same every time. Check out my more
in-depth video about this. The link is down below. If the mix is good, some gentle glue compression
will usually be enough however if the mix needs more attention then the mastering engineer will
usually use multi-band compression instead. A multi-band compressor can compress different
parts of the spectrum individually. If a track has problems in the low-end for example, then you
can tighten that part up separately. Compression can also help make sounds fuller. Sometimes
the width of a track will also be adjusted. Some parts of the spectrum might
need more stereo separation, and some might need less, like the lower
end for example, which should be more mono. Be very careful not to use too much of it.
Also, keep in mind that very wide sounds often cancel out on mono systems, so I recommend
constantly checking your mix in mono like this: Some warm tape saturation
will often be used as well. The last step is the limiter.
This will ensure that the track is brought up to a commercial
level in terms of loudness. There should always be some headroom on the
final master itself, to help prevent clipping and distortion due to inter-sample peaks
later on when the file format is converted. You can find links to all the plugins
used in this video down below. The exact mastering chain will differ
depending on the mix, and what it needs. A bad mix will need a lot of post-processing,
which is not ideal. However, a perfect mix should only need some basic eq and a limiter.
I have a separate video explaining how to prepare a track for mastering, so make sure to
check it out when you're done watching this one. There are also dedicated mastering suites
available such as isotope ozone. It's an all-in-one package providing everything you need
to master a track. It even has a built-in master assistant which makes things easier for beginners.
There are also automated online mastering services available. That said, there's no accounting
for experience, so even the best plugins won't do much good in the wrong hands. I
actually have a mastering service myself, so if you'd like me to master your
track, then check out the links below. What do you want our next video to be
about? Let us know in the comments below, and make sure to like, share, and subscribe if
you enjoyed this video. Thanks for watching.
