Mastering Made Easy
Mastering might seem like a magical black box to a lot of engineers and producers. It’s one of those things that we know we need, but don’t always understand how it works. For a long time, I was in that group too.
If you had asked me when I had just started recording and mixing music what mastering was, I probably would’ve just said something like “It makes your mixes louder.” While that’s usually a primary result of the mastering process, there are so many more areas that mastering improves a song.
Mastering your music doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, there are a few easy steps you can take to master any song that we’ll cover here. The process itself is very simple, but don’t think that means you’ll start getting pro results right away. Learning to master music is a lot of trial and error – just like learning to mix.
As long as you continue to follow these easy steps & trust your ear, you’ll have professional sounding mastered songs in no time.
Step 1: Make the Most of Your Environment
Regardless of if you’re working in a bedroom studio or multimillion dollar room, optimizing your listening environment is key. Those high-dollar studios cost so much for a reason, and a lot of that has to do with the acoustical design that’s gone into crafting that space.
In lieu of thousands of dollars in renovations, smaller studios and home recording enthusiasts have less expensive options that can improve their room drastically. Add some treatment to your walls at the point of first reflection. Make sure your speakers are placed perfectly with your listening position. Ditch the subwoofer if your space isn’t big enough to justify it.
For a little extra, many engineers choose to use room correction software to optimize their space. This software often sweeps a series of frequencies through your speakers and captures them at different points in the room with a microphone. Once it collects enough information about your space, it applies an EQ curve to your speakers to “correct” the issues it’s found. Pretty cool, huh?
Step 2: Finish Your Mix First
Before you even THINK about mastering your song, make sure you’re done with the mix first. There’s nothing more time-consuming than trying to do both at the same time, and neither job will get done efficiently if you’re constantly switching between the creative mixing process and the analytical mastering process.
Keeping your two worlds separate ensures you’ll do the best you possibly can to mix the song AND the best you can when mastering it. In other words, you’re starting from your best work to do your best work.
Make sure there’s no clipping on your final mix and leave some headroom (-3 dB to -6 dB peaks) on your master fader. Print this down to a lossless stereo wav file that matches your session’s sample rate and bit depth. DON’T use an MP3 – you’ll be starting from a reduced quality audio file before your mastering session is even created.
Step 3: Create Your Mastering Session
Once you’ve got your final mix, it’s time to build up your new mastering session. Start by creating a blank session in your DAW that matches the sample rate/bit depth of your original session. While higher resolution might seem like a good approach, it’s often just wasting hard drive space. You can’t add something that’s not there. If the goal is a higher resolution product, make sure you’re recording it that way from the start.
Once the session is created, bring in your track and any reference tracks you might want. These tracks can be entire songs that you aspire to have yours sound like, or they can be songs with certain elements like a chorus or bridge that you’d like to pull inspiration from. By having them all in your session, you can quickly toggle between your song and your references while gaining additional monitoring options to help make your mastering decisions.
Listen to your song straight through and make a note of what you think could be improved. Whether your notes are mental or you prefer to use a notepad is up to you. I like to write problems down so I can treat them like a checklist. It keeps me on track while mastering and prevents me from getting distracted by smaller details that might not be worth my time if I only heard them on the 20th pass while working on something else.
Step 4: Control Your Dynamics
Dynamic control is key to any great song, and while you’ve likely already used compression in the mix to control groups of instruments, this is where you should start controlling the whole song. Start with a few dB of compression if you need it – just enough to catch your peaks without heavily limiting or altering your song. A bus compressor like BG-Mix can be the perfect solution for this initial compression stage if you didn’t have one on your master fader while mixing.
Multi-band compression can be used for more targeted dynamic control, which will be especially important when matching your song to your references. If you hear that your reference tracks have a tighter, more consistent low end, using multi-band compression on just the lows can help you achieve a similar sound while leaving other bands alone.
A great technique for multi-band compression is to push the compression a little harder than you usually would by lowering the threshold on the band in question. Once it’s working hard, you can sweep the cutoff frequency so you know exactly where you compression starts/ends and try to match that to your reference. Once set, back off the threshold to an acceptable level and you should get just the sound you’re after.
Step 5: Use EQ
I won’t belabor EQ here because I know most anyone who’s worked in a studio understands how an EQ works. When it comes to mastering, EQ is all about the broad strokes needed to match your tone to your reference tracks. If your references all seem airier, use a shelving filter to boost the upper frequencies evenly in your song. Work in small increments until you get a sound that closely resembles what you’re after.
Step 6: Make It Bigger & Louder
Big and loud seems to be the common trend these days for music, but mastering has always been about maximizing all that a mix has to offer. Once you’ve generally got your song sounding tonally similar to your references, you need to add some limiting (and possibly a bit of width). Use a combination of monitoring plugins with your favorite limiter to get your levels up around your reference track levels. You don’t want to squash your mix completely, but you’ll want it competitive with other songs that might sit alongside it on a playlist.
If your song doesn’t sound as wide as your competition, you can always use a bit of spatial widening toward the end of your mastering session as well. By adding some width with a plugin like Sidewidener, you can make your song wider without sacrificing the center content.
Step 7: Print It & Ship It!
With all of your dynamics under control, the overall tone of the song fitting your references, and the overall level maximized with some limiting, all you’ve got left to do is print it down and release it!
When printing your final master down, be sure to include dithering, which helps reduce low-level distortions in your mix. If you’re just doing a standard release, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz is still the standard for CD quality. Other platforms like iTunes have their own high-fidelity requirements for Mastered for iTunes releases.
Where Does Mastering Fit in Your Master Plan?
Mastering engineers tend to keep pretty busy with work if they’re good at what they do. Engineers and producers that are capable of mastering are often relied on by their peers, because their mastering acts as a second opinion (second set of ears) on others’ projects.
Whether you’re looking to master music full time or just looking for a way to supplement your recording and mixing work, it helps to know all aspects of the recording process. JST VIP members get full access to our collection of recording, mixing, and mastering resources right from their dashboard.
