Mastering Overview

Mastering

Prepare your creation for distribution

In many ways, mastering is more of a functional step in the process of music creation – a mastering engineer prepares your music for distribution. Every medium (Spotify, CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes, etc.) requires that your music be prepared in a different way so that it sounds as good as possible. As a result, it is important that a mastering engineer understand the specific needs of that medium they are preparing your music for.
Control/Refine the Tonal Balance, Dynamic Range, Loudness, and Peak Level

Beyond considering how to best prepare your music for a specific medium, mastering engineers are also concerned with the
- Tonal Balance: Mastering engineers will use an EQ to control the relative volume of the low, mid, and high frequencies of your track.
- Dynamic Range: Mastering engineers will use some combination of compressors, multi-band compressor, and sometimes even limiters to control the relative distance between the quiet and loud elements of your track.
- Loudness: Loudness is a measurement of your track’s dynamic range and is often very important in determining how you track will sound playing back on a specific medium.
- Peak Level: While each medium may have specific requirements it is best practice to never allow you track’s Peak Level to go above -1 dBFS . This, however, does not mean that every track should hit a peak level of -1 dBFS.

EQ: Take care of any frequency problem with the mix.
EQ: Define the tonal balance of the mix.
Compressor(s): Refine the dynamic range of the mix.
Saturation: Make the individual sounds of the mix sound more “glued” together.
EQ: Take care of any frequency problem the resulted from compression or saturation.
Limiter: Make sure the track doesn’t ever get loader than -1dB and that it integrated LUFS is around the target range (e.g. -14 LUFS) of the platform you are mastering for.

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