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FAQ

Mastering FAQ

Is it a good idea to mix and master your own music? When musicians mix their own records, it’s often all done within the same DAW session. Therefore it might be a good idea to wonder if you should do something that someone else can do better. A better recording makes a better rough mix, which makes a better final mix, which makes a better master. The perfect mastering is something Audiobyray Mastering can help you with.
Mastering is the term most commonly used to refer to the process of taking an audio mix and preparing it for distribution. One goal of mastering is balancing and optimizing playback for all systems. Another thing mastering does for a mix, is to enhance specific characteristics. There are several considerations in this process: unifying the sound of a record, maintaining consistency across an album, and preparing for distribution. Mastering puts the final touches on a mix.

Mastering can do a lot for your song but it really can’t fix it. This has to do with several factors. For starters, a mastering engineer deals with a track on macro levels. It can not effectively fix issues on a micro level. As you can probably imagine, mastering can’t add delays to just your vocal track. Despite the skills and experience of a mastering engineer, getting a good result naturally also depends on the material they have to work with.

Why is Mastering Important?
  • Emphasize or reduce frequencies to improve the overall mix.
  • Fix problematic frequencies and improve imbalances missed in the mixing process.
  • Create tonal balance, so there is an even distribution of frequencies.
  • Manage dynamics, control transient spikes, and glue tracks.
To get great mastering results, it’s important to correctly set your mixing levels. As long as your mixes give the mastering engineer room to work and cover your noise floor, then you’re in a good range. I recommend mixing at -23 dB LUFS, or having your peaks be between -18dB and -3dB. These are however general guidelines. In the end, all mastering engineers adapt the level to their chain anyway.
Providing a mix that is ideal for mastering takes in the amount of headroom in consideration. The general idea is: allow 6dB of headroom. Audiobyray Mastering recommends that the loudest part of the mix should be around -3db tot -5 db (below 0level). This encourages generally sane levels throughout the mix, it prevents any risk of inter-sample clipping and you still have masses of signal-to-noise ratio at 24-bit – and, plenty at 16 bits too, assuming you dither correctly. 
A good mastering engineer will not make your songs sound worse and will not hamper your song’s creativity, they’ll likely understand the sound you’re going for and help get you there (their only limit being the quality of the recording and mix of course)
In terms of speed, eMastered is faster with songs processed and available for download in under a minute compared to Landr’s two minutes or so for a download to be sent by email. Currently eMastered is free to use, unlike Landr which can go up to $25 per month depending on how you want to use it.

Now, if you’ve never heard of LANDR before, it’s basically an online, automated mastering service. So, it doesn’t use human beings on the back end; it’s driven by an algorithm. You basically upload your tracks to this service and it automatically masters them, and then it allows you to download them instantly.

The Best Online Mastering Services Reviewed 2020
  1. Abbey Road Studios. It goes without saying that Abbey Road Studios is one of the most iconic studios in the world. …
  2. BandLab. BandLab has been creating quite a storm with indie musicians, producers and artists over the recent years. …
  3. Landr. …
  4. CloudBounce. …
  5. Metropolis Studios. …
  6. eMastered.

Not everyone thinks the same on the matter of whether or not sending music into a professional mastering studio is a necessity. If the mix doesn’t need any modifying, this means that it is at a perfect volume level, the fades are well done, the EQ is consistent throughout, the compression is right on, and so on. In that case there’s no need for mastering. If these basics are not covered, audiobyray mastering can help you out.

Mastering is the final step of audio post-production. The purpose of mastering is to balance sonic elements of a stereo mix and optimize playback across all systems and media formats. Traditionally, mastering is done using tools like equalization, compression, limiting and stereo enhancement.

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Here at AudiobyRay we have both Mixing & Mastering experience for over 9 years.We mastered over a 1000 EDM tracks, Stem Mastering sessions, and countless DJ Mixtapes so far

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