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FAQ

Mastering FAQ

When musicians mix their own records, it’s often all done within the same DAW session. … It’s always best to get creative production decisions right at the source; a better recording makes a better rough mix, which makes a better final mix, which makes a better master.
Mastering is the term most commonly used to refer to the process of taking an audio mix and preparing it for distribution. There are several considerations in this process: unifying the sound of a record, maintaining consistency across an album, and preparing for distribution

Can Mastering Fix a Bad Mix? No. … Because mastering deals with a song’s mix at the macro level, it cannot fix issues at the micro level such as within the individual tracks in your song (otherwise than it would be mixing duh!). For example, mastering can’t add delays to just your vocal track.

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.
So 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.
Allow 6dB of headroom
It 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.

There is some debate of whether or not sending music into a professional mastering studio is a necessity. If the mix does not need any modifying : it is at a perfect volume level, fades are well done, EQ is consistent throughout, compression is right on, etc.; then there is no need for mastering.

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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