What is Mastering and Why is it Necessary?

What is Mastering, and why is it so important to the record making process?

Today, the majority of music is being written, recorded, and mixed in DIY home studios. I love this! But it’s a double-edged sword. Making records is now available to virtually anyone, but so many of these studio spaces are not professionally tuned for critical mixing and mastering decisions.

One of the most common complaints I hear is “well, it sounded great in my studio, but once I put it in my car/on my phone/on my friend’s speakers, it sounded awful.” Even if you DIY absolutely everything else for your album, you should still hire a mastering engineer to make sure all those long hours you spent on your project pay off when your record hits the shelves.

Mastering is the final step between what is created in the studio and what is heard by the consumer - it’s the last creative step and the first part of distribution. The most important role of a mastering engineer is to optimize audio recordings for all playback systems and distribution platforms.

Here’s the lifecycle of a professional record:

1. Conception - songwriting, arrangement, practice, choosing a song order, production, more practice, cutting songs that don’t work, did I mention practice?
2. Pre-Production - choosing your team: Producer, engineers, and studio, booking session time, making sure everyone’s calendar lines up.
Recording - Studio time! Your goal here is to make the best possible recording and never ever say “it’s ok, we’ll fix it in the mix”.
3. Mixing - your mixing engineer’s job is to balance each element of your songs (kick, snare, bass, guitar, vocals, synths, etc.) in a tasteful and artistic way that fully realizes your artistic vision for the record.
4. Mastering - the final “studio” step - one last quality control check and optimizing your record to playback at its fullest potential on all devices and platforms. Your mastering engineer will give you the final “masters” that you will deliver to your distributor.
5. Distribution - these days, distribution is largely done through online services such as Distrokid, Spinnum, CD Baby, and TuneCore. You upload your masters, along with artwork and metadata to one of these services and they will send it to online stores, streaming services, and can make physical copies as well.
Bonus: Promotion - A record doesn’t promote itself. Without you promoting your record, it will sit there in a vacuum and no one will know about it. It’s a good idea to be promoting throughout the entire record-making process to build hype over the release, but a record release party and an accompanying tour is a great idea.

As you can see, mastering is the last line of defense between what happens in the studio and what gets released to the public. Skimping out on a mastering engineer at best means that you don’t have anyone to do a final check-up of your record, and at worst, could mean that your record is entirely unlistenable - full of distortion, way quieter than other professionally released songs, riddled with skips, pops, and glitches, etc.

A mastering engineer is outside ears – unbiased, fresh, and finely tuned. Our job is not to slap a mastering chain on your mix – our job is to listen and decide whether your mix needs a mastering chain and if so, what should be in that chain.

As a mastering engineer, It is my responsibility to balance the sonic elements of your recording and create a “master” from which all copies are made. In the case of multiple songs making up and album or EP, I create uniformity and consistency of sound across the record while maintaining or enhancing the sonic characteristics of each recording.

To achieve this goal, I use analog and digital equalization, dynamic range manipulation (compression, expansion, and limiting), stereo imaging, audio restoration tools, and much more.

If you are in need of real, professional, custom, bespoke, artisanal, musical mastering, I’d love to help you out with that! Hit me up at borzamastering.com, and if you’d like to discuss this video further, or if you have any questions, come join the Analog Mob on Facebook and hang out with some really cool people!

https://www.borzamastering.com

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