The final step in music production is to create your master. This is the pinnacle. The final step in the rendering of your musical designs and efforts. The complete optimization of your audio for playback on various sound system platforms. Mastering is crucial to having a professional quality sounding product, whether you’re a seasoned producer or a newbie coming off the starting blocks. Let’s take a look into the mastering process and see how the sausage is made!
Before we even start into the aspects of the creative side of things for mastering, you will want to ensure that your overall mix is clean. I mean ‘really’ clean. This means using plugin tools, like noise reduction and spectral repair, to remove unwanted sounds, like hisses, pops, clicks, and noise. These tools will help enhance the quality and the overall integrity of the sound in the audio tracks.
To have that nice, clean, polished, quality sound, the frequency bands will need to be balanced out. A typical EQ workflow will incorporate about four steps, where each step addresses the threshold and range of the signals being pushed through the Equalizer.
This filter removes the low-end rumblings from the signal allowing the high-frequency signals to dance and pass through the circuit.
This filter will tame all those harsh highs by reducing the force of those frequencies at a set cutoff point allowing the lower frequencies to pass on through the circuit.
This step will enhance the vocals and instruments. It will also enhance any other key elements in the tracks. This is where the bass and treble spectrum is designed for precision sound control. We’re talking about frequencies dancing between 300hz and 4khz, which is a good range for playback on many audio systems that can kick out the sounds.
This step will fix any specific frequency problems. On very narrow bands you can apply boosts/cuts. This can help in accentuating a frequency or surgically cutting out a crummy frequency. This will help in shaping the track’s overall frequency response in the bandwidth.
Using stereo plugins can help create more depth and space in the stereo image, but only if needed. There are a lot of opinions on how to approach using these plugins, but, without a doubt, you want to be subtle in your application and avoid overkill by overdoing it. Don’t need a murder scene in the soundscape throbbing through those HiFi, Hi-Def speakers.
With the use of compression, you can control the dynamics and enhance the consistencies. You’ll want to be gentle when starting so use the lowest ratios to begin with. Ratios at 1.25:1 or 1.5:1 are usually the jumping-off point. You will want to use multiband compression to customize and target those areas that need adjustment.
"Don’t need a murder scene in the soundscape throbbing through those HiFi, Hi-Def speakers."
Crank up your track without killing the quality. A limiter used for loudness will help increase the perceived volume. Try to keep to industry standards for levels of loudness. There is some debate about using up to 14 LUFS, for streaming platforms, especially with some defaults set to normalization of overall volume. But with that said, you will want to master your levels and dynamics to make it sound the best to your feel and liking.
For your EP or album, you will want to arrange your recorded tracks so that from song to song they will have a nice flow from the first track to the last track. Also, keep in mind, the dynamics involved in the transitions like intros and outros, crescendos, and decrescendos, to create a seamless listening experience for the listeners.
This is your final step in mastering your tracks. Getting them finalized and ready for distribution. The current industry standards for music files are:
Digital Formats: Export your files to FLAC or Wav., AIFF.
CD Mastering: Everyone these days streams. But if ‘you’re likin’ to press up’ some CDs you’ll want to create a DDP image (Disc Description Protocol). Keep in mind that the CD standard for a master is 16bit/44.1kHz
iTunes: If you are going this route, set it to 24bits’96 kHz.
So, in a nutshell, you will want to master your sampling rates between 44.1kHz to 96 kHz keeping you in the ballpark for the accepted norms.
The artistry and techniques involved in mastering require significant amounts of time, practice, experimenting, exploration, and just trusting what you hear with your ears. As the classic caveat goes, ‘less is more’, and ‘K.I.S.S.’ (keep it simple stupid), all apply here. Please note that this article provides just a bit of a concise overview of the mastering process. Going deeper into the nuances and mastering techniques will involve more in-depth analysis and study to master the skills needed to be a top dog.
Cheers, keep it fun and happy mastering.
Image: MaurosArt
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