What is mastering?
The term ‘mastering’ is much misunderstood. It’s not just about making things louder. Nor is it some mysterious ‘dark art’ that will turn amateurish mixes into hits. In reality, mastering is mostly just the technical process of preparing mixes for release, and making sure they meet the specifications for the chosen release format.
The first stage of mastering is checking for technical issues such as clicks or pops, or excess noise at the start or end. This is the last opportunity to fix such problems (or draw them to the attention of the mix engineer), so the mastering process includes taking responsibility for final quality control. If you’re mastering an album, you’ll need to set appropriate pauses between songs, too. The mixes then need to be matched in level and tone, before conversion to the correct format for release.
The technical details have changed over the years: 50 years ago, mixes would have arrived on reels of tape, and the final destination would be vinyl. These days, though, the final mix format will almost certainly be WAV or AIFF, even if you’re releasing your music on a downloading or streaming platform.
So, the relative importance of the mastering engineer’s role has changed accordingly: technical aspects have receded, while ‘tone matching’ has grown into a much more creative role, with the mastering engineer making aesthetic judgements about how the music should be presented.
More significantly, mastering is traditionally done by a specialist engineer in a dedicated mastering room, so they might spot problems that were masked by monitoring issues at the mixing stage. And the mastering engineer has another big advantage in not knowing about any of the issues you dealt with while mixing. If you spent hours tuning your snare in the mix, you might be wary of affecting it in mastering. But the mastering engineer, unencumbered by any mixing baggage, can simply say, “There’s too much 200Hz” and adjust accordingly.
While you miss out on these advantages when you master your own mixes, you can certainly get good results if you know what you’re doing. That’s where this feature comes in…