Mastering is the final stage of audio production and admittedly the most misunderstood stage. Let’s identify in this article 3 different ways which mastering improves your music.

First, audio mastering simply put imporves the quality of your music. It can take a bland mix and a good mastering engineer cacn unlock that mix’s true potential through effects such as compression, limiting, EQ, stereo imaging, and much more. Compression can take a weak mix and give it the glue or presence that it needs to really pop in the speakers. EQ can give a track the shine and cleansing that it needs to sound professional and glossy. Playing with the stereo width will make your track sound larger and more enveloping in the stereo, as well. All of these tools can go a long way when masterfully applied by the right engineer.

Secondly, mastering provides parity level and sound wise with all of your tracks on your record. The audio mastering engineer ensures that they’re all on the same level with one another volume wise and have the same style between them all, effectively taking a random collection of songs and creating a sense of unity which is present on the album.

Finally, the mastering engineer ensures that your music is consistent with industry standards in terms of levels. This is important because most contemporary music today is much louder than music of 30 or even just 10 years ago. If your songs are quieter, they will be perceived as being weaker and less professional than their contemporary peers. A good audio mastering engineer ensures that not only are the songs on your album all at parity volume wise with one another but also with industry and contemporary standards of the day so that when they are played side by side with songs from other artists from today in a mix, they stand up right along side them.

Discover how muh more professional and plain better sounding your final mixes can sound in the hands of our talented audio mastering engineers and get a free sample master today so that you can experience our professional services today firsthand.

Mastering audio refers to expressly improving the audio itself. There are other aspects of mastering audio when it comes to the post-production of creating the actual data or image file for a record which will be sent off for replication. In CD format and vinyl format to a lesser extent you have to consider sequencing or how each track flows into one another, whether or not there’s a break, whether or not the tracks overlap, etc.

If you want to forgo the CD pressing altogether and focus on a digital release through a site like BandCamp, then you are exclusively interested in just mastering the audio. Let’s talk about 3 reasons for why mastering audio is truly important and should never be considered optional but unnecessary.

First off, as I mentioned in opening, mastering audio will significantly improve the quality of your audio itself in the hands of a skilled and knowledgeable mastering engineer and yield a much more professional quality to it. Likely the most common effect used in mastering is equalization because it gives you so many options and so much control over the quality of the sound. This breaks a mix into different bands of frequency which can be more closely edited, boosted, or diminished as necessary.

You can compensate for voids and inconsistencies left by the recording stage if you know what you’re doing and the difference between an unmastered and a well mastered track are overwhelmingly palpable.

Secondly, mastering audio ensures that every song which makes up your record is harmonious in terms of volume with every other song on that record. This is important because most songs aren’t recorded in the exact same setting and even if they are then it’s likely that they weren’t recorded at the same levels or with the same instruments. Less sonically dense tracks will likely come out as sounding quieter than one with dozens and dozens of tracks, so the engineer has to make sure that there are no inconsistencies when listening to each one back to back in that record’s mix.

Lastly, mastering audio works to get your music on the same volume as industry standards dictate. Even if you’re a purist who doesn’t believe in compressing and boosting a mix’s overall volume, you still likely don’t want to annoy your fans which is what you’ll do if your music is substantially quieter than other contemporary records so that when played back to back in a mix someone has to continually change the volume between your tracks and everyone else’s.

The ultimate goal in mastering audio is to unlock a final mix’s true potential. Discover your music’s true potential by entrusting one of your songs to a free test master from Music Guy Mastering today and hear how good your music could be sounding in less than 24 hours.

Audio mastering is the last part when it comes to music production. Once the artist or band has recorded the various tracks making up a song and the mixing engineer has mixed those tracks together and rendered them down to a final mixed file, that file is handed over to the mastering engineer for the final glossy touch.

While audio mastering is by no means a requirement in music production, it will substantially increase to the overall quality of your finished product so it’s extremely important that you think about having your audio mastered before releasing it to your fans. Many engineers offer free test masters so that you can experience firsthand the benefits of audio mastering without risking a dime beforehand; but this article is designed to inform you of the reasoning behind it.

Basically the benefits of audio mastering are threefold.

Initially, song mastering is essential for improving the overall quality of your music. Even after you have recorded your various tracks using natural as well as perhaps adding some digital effects to improve the sound, the mastering engineer can make use of digital and analog effects and plugins to really bring out the full potential of a song.

The major three effects generally consist of reverb, compression, and EQ. Reverberation first adds a bit more atmosphere to your tracks and can improve a flat sounding record to give it a sound of being recorded in a different and perhaps better space. Compression will give your track more unity from top to bottom without sacrificing the dynamics. EQ is important for emphasizing or diminishing the focus on certain areas or ranges of your audio spectrum over others.

A skilled and consummate audio mastering professional is capable of unlocking a track’s true potential through the artful application of just the right breadth and depth of effects such as these.

Secondly, audio mastering is used to create the finished product in terms of a record. This means putting every song on the record at the same level as every other track on the record, adding important data such as any text/credits/ISRC codes, and creating the sequencing of the record which includes the table of contents for the record, breaks between tracks, etc.

Finally, audio mastering can be used as a final check point so that a fresh set of ears can listen for problems in the audio. Not only can you go back and touch these problems up in the recording phase but the mastering engineer can actually go ahead and cover up and correct problems in the audio. While this is not ideal and certainly is not something which you should rely on, in some cases this can save you a great deal of headache.