Songwriter Forum > Recording

Mastering - what is it, and why should I care

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Mr.Chainsaw:
Ramshackles mentioned he's getting his EP mastered (dude, let me know when your selling those things so you can hook me up :) ). But what IS mastering?

Seriously, is it just e.q.ing the track to sound nice, or what? Why would you need Someone else to do it?

Peter

Ramshackles:
OO, tricky question.
Mastering is giving the final 'professional' sheen to your music. This in itself covers many things.
Most of mastering would be given over to preparing your music for specific formats (CD, Vinyl etc) and delivering, e.g. a 'redbook' master CD if thats you're required format which can be used for duplication.
Another large proportion of mastering would be increasing the loudness of your mix to modern standards, while at the same time avoiding the negative artefacts that can occur when increasing loudness (e.g., if you just turn up the fader in your DAW to a loudness comparable to the songs in your itunes, you will probably distort your music. If you do the normal 'mastering' you might do your self and just put a plugin limiter on the stereo mix you might introduce 'pumping' sounds or decrease the dynamic range so much that it causes listening fatigue). A pro engineer will have some very expensive limiters and compressors at his disposal to get the necessary gain without so much of the side effects.

A main part of mastering, to me, is to get another pair of ears to go through your mix critically with a fine toothed comb! A pro will of course, lend an unbiased and purely technical ear that will pick up on things you didnt, either because of your bias (it's your work) or because you have simply listened to it too many times. What they will do may depend on problems in the song: The frequency image may be distorted (too much bass, resonant freq's etc) and that would be corrected with EQ. They may be unintentional noise which needs reducing, or pops and clicks that need removing. The stereo image may be unnaturally wide or thin, which could be corrected.

IMO, mastering is only mastering if you are using a professional, outside mastering engineer. You could slap a limiter on your track and say you've 'mastered' it, but then it's missing the point.
It's also only useful (I think) if you are mastering a collection of songs at once - EP, album etc... It's about making sure all these seperate songs sit well together.
Theres not point just mastering single songs which you might just put on your website or anything. For one thing it wouldnt be worth the money, IMO. Then you really might aswell slap a limiter on to bring up the volume :D

Hmmm..I'm rambling a lot, wikipedia has a big article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_mastering

2 of the biggest mastering studios in the world have this to say:

http://sterling-sound.com/?page_id=274
http://www.abbeyroadonlinemastering.com/faq.aspx

And this, I think, is just a good article:
http://therecordingrevolution.com/2010/03/15/does-my-album-need-mastering/

It brings up a great point - mastering wont make your songs better!

Ok, dont listen to my rambling and just read those articles.

BTW, our EP I hope will be available by the end of january/early february, thanks!

Schavuitje:
hmmm. You've sold it to me.
That's one thing that is frustrating me right now. I feel I have songs with all parts written and recorded that are good
but the quality of the sound is letting it down even though sometimes i think it's only in a minor way.
As part of the whole process of writing and recording my songs, I have been trying to learn how to do it all myself, and I do
spend a lot of time altering volume level of instruments, adding compression, taking the edge of vocals, fading things in or out to basically bring it all
as close to a proffessional sound as I can but I don't know if that is mastering or mixing?
It sounds attractive to me that if I have spent so much time on something, to have it polished and ready for display :)
Is it expensive to get a song mastered and can you do it online?

Ramshackles:
Thats mixing. A mastering engineer only works with the final 'mixdown' (the stereo audio file of the finished song). They generally require 44.1 KHZ/24 bit wav or aiff files.

The last link I posted I think had one of the best and most important paragraphs:

" The fact of the matter is that the two biggest benefits to mastering have nothing to do with the special “gear” or “techiques” that we tend to associate it with.
When you send your tracks out for mastering you’re looking for two things: a fresh set of ears and intentional finalizing of your album. By having a mastering engineer listen to your final mixes, you’re getting a huge advantage…honesty. Said engineer isn’t going to lie to himself that the bass sounds better than it does, or that your EQ balance is perfect. Just the opposite; his job is to simply assess the mixes as a whole, and make sure they are balanced just right. If that means he has to adjust some dynamics and EQ, then he’ll do it. And he won’t feel bad about it. This is crucial as we all tend to lie to ourselves about our mixes.
The second major point to mastering is you have someone who takes the process seriously. To the mastering engineer, this is not some quick finishing touches; this is his speciality and his job. He wants to be as intentional as possible about making sure the songs are clear, punchy, translatable onto many systems, and in general just sounding good together as a unified album. If you and I are playing the part of musician, engineer, mixer, and mastering engineer, we’re probably about done with the songs by the time mastering roles around and we won’t take it as seriously."


I dont know if getting a single song is much use...but Im not really the person to talk to.

Like anything, you can pay all kinds of prices for mastering. And I guess the quality depends upon the price up to a point. Out of dedicated places that master online, the cheapest I've seen is around £30/song and the most expensive (abbey roads) is £90/song and they usually have extra charges for format (extra price for delivery of a master CD/Adat tape/a lot extra for a lacquer vinyl master etc etc).

The top-end mastering studios like sterling sound I guess dont even advertise their rates. You'd have to get in touch with the booking agent of the engineer you want to use...

Schavuitje:
Wow that is quite expensive, even the cheapest one. Expensive from my poor point of view I mean  :P
But I guess to be sure it's something that could actually be used quality wise it is a must do.
You have made me think about what I'm doing.
I'm going to try it out with a finished song. scarey haha!

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