What is music mastering?
Music mastering is the final step in the recording process in music production. During mastering, additional audio treatments are applied to your mix to correct problem frequencies and enhance the musicality of your track.
Since magnetic tape replaced straight-to-lathe cutting in the late 1940s, audio mastering has become its own artform. But many in the music industry still see it as dark magic. Before we pull back the veil on this mystery, let’s define an important term.
An “audio master” is the final version of a song that’s prepared for sale, download, streaming, radio play, or any other form of mass consumption by listeners.
The audio master is the song that appears on future copies of the recording. If you’re uploading your music to a streaming service like Apple Music or Spotify, pressing to vinyl, or burning to a CD, you need a mastered track to ensure strong audio quality. When you listen to a song via streaming, download or physical format, you’re listening to a copy of the master audio.
Why should I master my music?
Mastering is a crucial step before you release your music. The mastering process prepares your music for listening, distribution, playlisting and more. Without proper mastering, your songs could be rejected or comparatively quieter on streaming platforms, sound vastly different between playback devices, and lack the sonic glean listeners expect from a professional recording.
Optimize your tracks for distribution
Whether you’re releasing digitally or physically, mastering is an important step to prepare your music for distribution. CD Baby offers distribution to over 150 platforms around the world – mastering optimizes your music across playback devices. And in today’s playlisting and AI radio world, you’ll want your music to match the volume, dynamic range, and quality of the other music your fans have in their listening queue.
Provide a consistent and compelling listening experience
Mastering optimizes your music for every listening platform. This is crucial as today’s music fans have more choices than ever when it comes to music playback–you can be sure they’re listening on multiple devices. Mastering ensures your music will sound its best everywhere.
Improve musicality
Distribution requirements and playback aside, mastering provides the final touches on your music. It brings out the best in each instrument and vocal, smooths over and tightens dynamics, and brings up the volume to accentuate the subtleties in your music.
How does music mastering work?
Mastering works within the following categories to optimize your music across different devices, fix any hiccups in your mix, and bring out subtle sonic enhancements to make your music shine.
Audio Quality Control
Mastering can fix slight imperfections in your final mix such as pops and clicks or other background noise.
EQ
Mastering ensures your final mix is well-balanced and consistent throughout the changes in instrumentation and textures within a song. It prevents specific frequencies from sticking out in the mix.
Compression
Applying further compression to your mix, mastering can help a song sound more cohesive by limiting loudness and boosting quieter parts.
Loudness
Mastering brings a track up to the optimal and competitive loudness for listening, which is especially important for streaming as listeners may play your track in a playlist or queue of other artists’ songs. You’ll want your music to play at comparable levels and showcase similar dynamics.
Track Order and Spacing
If you’re releasing an album, you can decide on the duration of silence between, and order of, the tracks through the mastering process. Spacing is a subtle detail, but can have a great impact on the listener’s experience!s
Bit Depth Reduction and Sample Rate Conversion
You may need a different sample rate or bit depth when finalizing your mastered track for distribution. Mastering handles those conversions while preserving the audio quality.
How do I master my music?
Traditionally, artists hire a mastering engineer for this final step. As we outlined above, a mastering engineer takes the final mixes for the songs the artist has approved and works their magic. Finding a mastering engineer can be as easy as asking the engineer who mixed your music. They might have some favorite mastering engineers to recommend. The mixing engineer might even be a mastering engineer (though lots of mixing engineers don’t like to master their own mixes). If neither of those pan out, there are many mastering studios available. Do a search online and compare rates, and make sure to listen to some of what those engineers have worked on before to make sure you like their work. You can also check the liner notes or online credits of albums you enjoy to see who mastered that music.
In recent years, technology has made it easier for indie artists to mix and master their own recordings. Audio software called digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Pro Tools and Audacity provide tools for artists to record, mix and master their music right in their own home. Why don’t all artists do this? Because it takes a lot of work just to learn how to perform all these tasks, and even more work to complete all the steps yourself. Producers, mixers and mastering engineers still find work because their field is specialized. Most artists just want to make their music and let someone else worry about the tech wizardry that goes on behind the boards.
How much does a mastering engineer cost?
This varies from engineer to engineer and is dependent on a few things, like what you need done to the recording, how many songs you’re mastering and the length of the songs. If it’s just a “touch up” like making minor tweaks, it could be from $50 to $100 per song. For full services like adjusting EQ, volume and additional post-production effects, the average cost is about $150 per song. Many mastering engineers charge more for songs over 10 minutes, so if you’re a prog band prone to multi-part suites, be ready to pay more to master that epic half hour track.
This all might sound expensive, but keep in mind you’re not just paying for the engineer’s expert ears. Mastering studios have state of the art audio equipment and are built to be an optimal environment in which to listen to music, so the engineer is hearing your mix on the best equipment possible. This environment enables them to make accurate adjustments that you might not have been able to hear if you were to try to master on a DAW on your laptop.
Will my music sound better if I master it?
Mastering will make your final mix sound better, but only if the mix is already good, and only if the mastering engineer is judicious during the mastering process. The golden rule of audio mastering is: mastering won’t save a bad mix, but it sure can ruin a good one.
Should I do master tracks differently for vinyl, CD or digital?
If you’re releasing an album and are planning on doing a vinyl edition as well as CD or digital, a different master is required for the vinyl version. This is because there are differences between what vinyl and CDs allow with regards to bit-depth, compression and the sequencing of the files. A master for CD must be 16-bit. It can also be as compressed as the artist would like, as CDs allow more space for the loudness that results from compression.
Since manufacturing vinyl involves physically cutting an analog of the audio frequencies into the surface of the record, there’s a limit to what can fit. Vinyl cannot accommodate clipped audio, so heavily compressed files will need to be adjusted to press to vinyl. The best source file specification for vinyl is 24-bit and dynamic. So if you decide to sell vinyl, that’s another reason to make sure your mix is not overly compressed before mastering! Vinyl also differs in its track sequencing, since there are two sides to a record instead of one for a CD. Vinyl masters are usually sent as two WAV files, one for each side.
Digital is not limited by physical space. A digital file can be as compressed or dynamic as you like, and either 16- or 24-bit. Some artists even sell two digital versions of their songs on their site or other that host two types: a 16-bit standard version and a “high resolution” that’s 24-bit. Those larger 24-bit files meet the specifications to be labeled “high resolution.”
Closing thoughts
We hope this article pulled back the curtain on an area of the music industry that for decades has been shrouded in mystery. With at-home tools like digital audio workstations, technology has made it easier than ever for independent artists to not only record and master their music, but also understand what actually goes into each individual process along the way.