Why Mastering Is Essential

Mastering is the last stage of music production, and it is basically the stage where the music is finished to a professional quality. It makes tracks appear louder, more dynamic and clearer. It also removes any defects in the audio and alters the frequencies or tone to perfection. The track is tweaked to industry standards and is made to sound good on any platform, such as TV, home stereo, headphones, car stereo and online.

The tools often used in mastering include compression, which alters the dynamics of the track. Some mastering engineers use multiband compressors, which compress certain frequencies. Stereo reverb is another common enhancement used to make the track sound wider. Equalization is often used to bring up or bring down certain frequencies, and is another way to increase clarity of a track, particularly in the high-end frequencies. Many of these effects are available as plugins on digital production software, and the hardware effects processors are a good alternative if you decrease your CPU usage.

One of the biggest issues with mastering is that it's very, very hard. The standard of clarity in professional music is so high, so an upstarting musician has their work cut out when they try mastering. There's also the common case that you may have a great song but it's been poorly mixed, and you or a mastering engineer can only do so much to rectify the sound quality. Mastering cannot save a bad mix. The general notion with a lot of musicians is that mastering is not a creative or exciting process, and therefore they don't give it the required focus it needs. I should also add that because mastering is in essence the 'finishing line' of a track or album's production, so some musicians attempt to get over that 'finishing line' as fast as possible.

You can solve many of these problems by employing or outsourcing this process to an experienced mastering engineer, rather than learning the tricky process yourself. You should consider doing a good re-recording or remix of a track before you give it to a mastering engineer. They'll ask you questions that include how you'd like your mix to sound, which frequencies to bring up, the required loudness level and what dynamics you want. Experienced mastering engineers know how loud a professional recording should be, set an even level of the left and right channels, and are 'ear-trained' to pick out and enhance the best elements and cut out the worst elements of a track.

Mastering is a vital but difficult process to any musician or producer, and anyone who attempts it must know the basics. If you want your music to sound professional, give it to an experienced mastering engineer, and if don't your final track(s) will sound underwhelming.