MASTERING
Before you send your material out to get mastered, it is important to receive a sample and understand what mastering (or, more accurately termed, pre-mastering) can do for your project.
Mastering performed well can yield wonderful results. Handled by an experienced engineer using quality gear in a well designed room, mastering almost always elevates the quality of the final mix to ‘another level’. Mastering is hard to describe in words, yet easy to hear once performed. In other words, you can listen to a track un-mastered vs. one mastered and hear the difference between the two. Sometimes the difference appears very subtle.
Professional mastering can make a decent song sound more sonically polished and ‘glued’ together. The individual elements in the mix appear to fit together better with added dimension (width and depth), improved low end definition and power, reduced mid frequency mud, increased overall warmth, focused high-mid frequency energy and punch, and revealing high frequency sheen and clarity. Unwanted or distracting noises should be removed or minimized. Mono compatibility is checked. In addition, song sequencing is arranged, fade-ins and fade-outs performed, spacing in between songs defined, data integrity ensured, and identifying metadata (artist name, song titles, copyright info, ISRC, UPC, etc.) inserted, among other things.
All the above is reason enough to have your songs professionally mastered, yet is not all you need to know about mastering. For all the wonderful things mastering can do, it is important to be aware of what mastering cannot do (either easily, or at all). Many musicians have the misinformed impression that mastering is a magical wand that can fix ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that’s wrong with a mix. This is certainly not the case in many instances!
Following are some things that either cannot be corrected at all, or cannot easily or inexpensively be fixed during the mastering stage without (sometimes) adversely affecting the mix:
- Out of tune vocals or instruments. These include basses and guitars not properly tuned, or individual strings on a bass or guitar out of tune.
- Excessive effects (e.g., reverb, delay, flanging, chorus, etc.) applied incorrectly to a particular track in the mix (e.g., vocals, guitars, drums, etc.) and need to be reduced.
- The opposite of #2 above; a situation where processing is required to enhance individual tracks within the mix that lack ‘character’. For example, “can you add some distortion to my guitar solo?”, or “can we add a delay and some reverb to the background vocals?”
- Extreme volume or panning imbalances of individual instruments within the mix.
- Sloppy, out of time performances by the vocalists or musicians.
- Lackluster individual performances that need to be ‘spruced up’.
- Individual instruments with extreme phase issues.
- Excessive distortion on specific instruments in the mix.
- An over-compressed mix that has also been severely limited (volume maximized).
- Individual sounds within the mix that need to be replaced (e.g., snares, kicks, etc). For example, “I don’t like the sound of the snare in the mix. Can we replace it during mastering?”
Some of the things mentioned above can be addressed or minimized during mastering by using multi-band processors (e.g., compressors, expanders), utilizing M/S (Mid/Side) processing, copying good parts of the song from one section and pasting to another, using stems (separate tracks imported from the mix), and other techniques. However, some of these techniques may dramatically alter the sound of the mix (sometimes for the worse) and increase the costs of mastering significantly.
Therefore, while mastering will do wonders for your mix, a terrible mix will almost always be improved with greater satisfaction and sonic accuracy by re-mixing the song. The key is to get the mix to sound as good as you possibly can before sending it out to be mastered. However, even if (for whatever reason) you are unable to re-mix your song, professional mastering will still make an impressive improvement to the overall mix.
Feel free to submit a song for a free, no-obligation sample mastering in order to get a sense of what professional mastering can do for your project. You can send your song to us for a sample using WeTransfer at studio302mastering AT gmail.com. Please note that samples are offered time permitting.
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