Once a record is mixed it still needs to be mastered.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on that process and it’s necessity, so let me clarify a few points.

For the purpose of this article I am limiting my expertise to CD mastering. Mastering for Vinyl is a whole other ball game and definitely needs some specialized equipment and understanding.

Mastering is the final step in the recording process. The main goal of mastering is to prepare your CD project for replication and to balance your tracks that they will sound great on any system.

This often includes :

• making sure all songs are in the right order
• making fine EQ adjustments, so that each song has a balanced sonic signature
• enhancing the stereo image, if necessary
• carefully adding some compression, to obtain the same perceived volume level
• ensuring that all songs have a similar sonic signature ( balance between bass, miss and highs)
• making sure that the spacing between the songs feels just right
• making sure that the fade outs are clean
• adding ISRC codes (which will let your songs being tracked by SoundExchange and such to collect performance royalties)

Even though there are an abundance of tools and plug-ins for mastering available, such as Izotope’s Ozone and several others, I highly recommend letting somebody else master your project.  In today’s world most projects are recorded and mixed either in a home environment, or at different studios by different engineers.

For one, I would never master a project in the same room and on the same speakers where it is mixed.

Mastering facilities have a finely tuned room with highly accurate speakers and amplifiers. Your home studio and even some professional facilities have their own characteristic sound. Some rooms (especially home studios) will have some shortcomings , so do have cars and living rooms in which you might double check your mixes. So if it sounds good at home is not a necessarily guarantee for it sounding good on other mediums.  A neutral listening environment and a good mastering engineer will ensure, that your CD sounds good wherever it’s played back.

For your CD to sound like a coherent project, the mixes need to have a similar sonic signature. If you get tracks mixed by different engineers in a variety of places, you will definitely have big differences within your mixes. Even though each mix might sound great in itself, you will like likely encounter that one track might be much louder, more bass heavy or has more treble than the other. The lead instrument, or voice might be louder on one track than another and mastering is the art of making all these mixes sound like they belong on the same album.

I am still a believer in albums and I cherish the experience of listening to a whole album in sequence, as opposed to downloading the one or other track. As an artist I want to take the listener on a musical journey. I spend a considerable amount of time figuring out the right order of my songs, not unlike putting a setlist together for a live show. There a subtleties I learned over the years that have quite an impact on the listening experience, such as spacing between tracks and the speed of fades. The generic 2 sec pause does not always sound right.

Finally if you want to make some money from your recording through airplay, you will need to have ISRC codes embedded into the files. These codes ensure that companies like SoundExchange, which collect monies for the artist and the master owner, properly track your song.

Mastering engineers are experts with a specialized skill set and equipment. But they are not magicians. So the old “we fix it in the mix” (to dismiss problems in the recording process) is just as wrong as “we fix it in mastering” to dismiss problems in your mixes. Try to get your mixes to sound as good as you can before you send them to mastering. And don’t over-compress them; leave the mastering engineer some room to work in.

And don’t get cheap on this process. I learned the hard way, when I tried to safe some money on mastering and going to a cheap place, just to find out that the final result was horrible. A bad mastering job can actually destroy your project. I went and borrowed some money to have it done properly and was rewarded with a great sounding album.

There are many great mastering places out there. If I may recommend someone, then it is Ron Boustead at resolution mastering. He mastered my last 5 albums and he is excellent and reasonable. Your music can be uploaded digitally and can be delivered digitally by him directly to the printing facility. So even if you are not local, you should check out his services. Here is a link to his site. RESOLUTIONMASTERING.COM

Until next time this is Nils signing off

PS:  For the last few years I have been helping new and established artists by writing and creating tracks and getting their music presentable for radio and commercial distribution. For those of you you need some great material and want some songs recorded, check out my site nilsmusicproductions.com

But that doesn’t mean we are getting the same results. Here is what I consider to be the main differences:

The first there is the acoustic space. A proper recording studio is always going to sound better than your bedroom or garage. This can be counteracted somewhat by proper acoustic treatment, adding bass traps and acoustic reflectors to the walls etc. Then close miking an instrument, so you don’t get much of the room sound, and applying of a good reverb plug-in can produce good results.

Secondly, not everybody is an engineer. Many musicians have a hard times switching from the creative right brain mode to the more analytical left brain. when trouble shooting a signal flow in the recording chain. You can say you’ll loose the vibe when you have to figure out why the guitar sounds distorted due to a bad patch cable. I feel fortunate to have had the experience to work in a proper studio as an engineer. So I am quite comfortable with equipment. However, I always prefer to have a setup day, where I get the amps and microphones placed, dial in the right tone, set the right recording level and balance the headphone mix. When I come in the next day, I just start recording and that frees up my head to concentrate on my performance.
But what we are mostly missing is the live interaction of musicians who play together in the same room. This, by necessity, has been replaced by carefully overdubbing individual parts one by one. And there it gets tricky. I heard too many recordings that sound clean but sterile, just for that reason. As a music producer I pride myself to being able to create tracks that have that live feel even when parts are overdubbed one by one. Just to share a few tricks:
A) hire the right musicians. There is no substitute for a great player, But be aware, that the best player you now might not be the best player for a particular track. Getting the right musicians is the key.
B) I often record parts more than once, especially my parts. I may lay down a guitar track to programmed drums, then record live drums and bass. I find what magic happens between drums and bass and redo my guitar part to emphasize it, just as if I was reacting to it when we play live. Then when I add keys, I listen to the voicings used and I might re-adjust my rhythm guitar parts to complement the keyboard parts. I might go back to edit some bass or drum notes in order to catch some accent I played on the lead guitar track. So I move back and forth until I arrive at a recording where each part is reacting to the other’s performance. It’s more work, but until I get a recording budget, that allows me to hire the players I want, rehearse and go into some of the big studios left in town to record my albums, that technique works quite well.

If you want to check out Nils’ productions, you can listen to samples of his music on his album page and on this page of featured artists he produced.