How to get better song masters without shelling out

The final stage of preparing your music can be costly, unless you take the reins yourself. Here’s our guide to building up that solid mastering hub

Once all is said and done, applying the final touches to your track – stereo enhancement, adjusting loudness levels and a deft use of dedicated mastering compressors – can make or break your hard work. While it’s become something of a cliché to describe mastering as a ‘dark art’, there remains some mystery around the processes and approaches that only experience can truly shed light on.

In previous decades, mastering engineers could charge a pretty penny for sprucing up your track, but now we can enjoy online mastering via AI and, better yet, the ability to tackle the process ourselves at home. These have made what was once the reserve of razoreared experts another learnable skill. Mastering, whether it be in stereo or via stems, ensures that your track will stand out, and meet the release standards of other tracks on the radio, streaming platforms and more, guaranteeing consistent volume levels.

Mastering tools range from the extremely malleable to swift applicators of industry norms, and while prices vary, we’ve scooped up a few affordable pieces that together will equip you with all you need to get your tracks ready for public consumption – for under £500. Central to this arsenal is Steinberg’s WaveLab, a multifaceted software mastering factory that thankfully comes in budget-conscious, Elements form. While lacking many of its more costly bigger brother’s bells and whistles, this version is still a far-reaching environment in which to master, including broad metering options and clean-up tools.

We’ve also thrown in wide-ranging software from some of the industry’s most acclaimed experts in this field, namely Eventide’s equalisation workstation EQuivocate, and Leapwing Audio’s dynamic processing monolith, Dynone 3. Also worth hoovering up – while it’s currently generously priced – is Waves’ Abbey Road Mastering Chain, as used on some of the greatest records ever made.