The Mystery of Mastering

Some people and until recently i was among them are quite unsure what quite constitutes something being "Mastered." We've all heard the phrase after we've done the best guitar or vocal take of our lives and our next smash hit is finished recording "right now we have to get this mixed and mastered." I'm here to try and clear up any confusion between these two processes and show you how different yet essential they both are.

Mastering is the process of finishing any kind of audio for distribution.

Mixing is the process of taking the raw recorded files - or stems - and cleaning up noise, sorting levels and adding any relevant automation or effects processing

Mixing involves altering each individual recorded file so for example all 10 microphones used in the recording of a drum kit and altering each one to achieve the level you are looking for of kick, snare, overheads etc etc. Then finding the appropriate level between that and the other instruments so everything sits at the right level in its own space.

Mastering on the other hand is more affecting each completed track as a whole. Getting each song to be at the same competitive level as the others within a given EP or album. Making the space between songs uniform as well. Normally it'll just a singular waveform as opposed to the many stems of a mix.

Although the two skills do lead into each other quite well as there is a lot of common ground between mixing and mastering engineers and their tools of the trade.

EQ - now EQ is still very important during the mastering stage don't think now that you have the drums and guitars sounding just how you want it in the final mix that there still isn't room for improvement when it comes to the final mastering session. Personally i sometimes have a lot of problems around the low mids of my tracks that need be sorted in the mastering stage in order to not have the sounding too muddy. So an experienced mastering engineer would be able to hear that low mud and know to clean up what was missed in the mixing stage because nobodies perfect.

Compression - Now compression is very important in the mastering stage often featuring multi band compressors which allows you to compress differing amounts between different frequency ranges. Say the vocal in the higher register is a little shrill and too loud but when you compress the whole thing it means the lower register and frequencies of the voice are now too quiet for you. Well use a multi band compressor to compress the higher mids of the voice while leaving the lower mids unaffected thus smoothing out the vocal. I use vocal as an example in this mastering scenario as I mix and master with the vocal being a key instrument in my head.

Limiting - Now that we've got compression out the way lets move on to its edgy big brother. Limiting. Where compression will usually have small ratios such as 3:1 or 5:1 limiting is on the much larger end of that scale with things like 20:1 and 40:1 ratios being not uncommon. This is because we need to get the track up into the loudness level that will make it compete with current production and mastered tracks on the market. Usually you can find a monitoring plug-in that will detect the level of your track and the "Lufs" level. Now take note that most audio streaming services limit their playback to "-14 Lufs" so if you limit to around the volume level keeping most of the transients intact it'll play back better than if you maximized the loudness and have the streaming platform squash the transients and leaving you with a hyper-compressed track with little dynamic variation.

That was my quick intro to mastering for mixers thanks for reading.