Mastering considerations

36.45

While Mason does send his mixes to a mastering engineer for finalising, he sees that stage of the production process as a corrective necessity rather than a creative collaboration.

“The idea with mastering is that it fixes the last issues that you didn’t do yourself,” he explains. “So if you’re doing a good mixdown, the mastering engineer shouldn’t do anything, really – the better you do your job, the less they have to do. Half the time they send it back and say it doesn’t need anything, or, ‘You might want to give it a little push on 150Hz’, or something, that I can do myself. The other half of the time they do a lot of work on it, as I couldn’t fix the issues.

“But I see it as weakness if I can’t fix those issues myself, so I always ask for feedback: ‘What did you do? What was the stuff that needed work?’