Introduction

You're ready to publish your music and you can't afford a mastering engineer. You're familiarized with what a mastering engineer does, and you're ready to tackle this yourself. But one problem: you don't know where to begin. What's the best way to approach mastering when you've never done it before? Fortunately, that's what we're covering today.

Preparing Your Files

Before you begin, you need to gather all the files: whether you're mastering an 18 song album or a 3 song EP, you need to…

Introduction

I love listening to dynamic music. There's just no replacement for those clear sounds and clean, punchy drums that make the mix sound powerful. With many of the songs I critique, loudness is one of the biggest issues, and when the producer or engineer just backs off of the limiter by 3-6 dB, everything sounds cleaner and more professional.

In a previous post, we explored the context for measuring loudness in decibels, how to read LUFS meters, and how to arrive at the perfect loudness for your…

Introduction 

Maybe your DAW comes with a dithering plugin, or maybe you've seen dither as an option in your limiter, or in the export settings of your DAW. You have the vague idea that it's used for mastering, and you can't remember if you're supposed to always use it or never use it. 

What is dither? Why do you want to use it? And when is it appropriate? 

For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume you have a rudimentary understanding of sample rate and bit depth. If this isn't the case, we'll cover…

Note: there is an update to this article (August 2018). 

Introduction

In a previous post, I covered how the Loudness War started, and why it's bad for the sound of music from increased distortion and decreased dynamic range. Fortunately, there's a glimmer of hope in that many of the popular streaming services are turning down songs that are too loud in order to even out playback volume for listeners. As of this writing, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal all turn down songs that are too loud…

Why We're Talking Loudness

Releasing music is complicated. One of the reasons it's complicated is that it can be really hard to know how loud to release a song. If you make your song too quiet, many listeners might check out and skip to the next song because they feel it sounds "boring". But if you make your song too loud, the audio quality really suffers.

This is pretty easy to solve for those with money: hire a great (loudness-war-aware) mastering engineer and let him/her decide. But for those of us who…

In an earlier post, I wrote about how mastering isn't a process. It's definitely worth noting that a mastering engineer has to approach each song differently in order to make it sound its best. That said, of course there are some systematic things a mastering engineer should pay attention to. Some of which many readers may not already know. Two biggies are micro-dynamics and macro-dynamics.

Why Dynamics Matter

If you're not caught up on the lingo, dynamics simply refers to the volume variation within a…

You know the drill. The song you're working on sounds amazing while you're working on it. But when you hear it the next day, or on a different stereo, it just sucks. What happened??

A number of things, to be honest.
 

Sources of the Damage

First, our hearing adapts very quickly. Within seconds. And if you mixed your track yesterday to sound very fatiguing, but acclimated to it before you fixed it, you likely became used to the problem. This happens to me all the time.

Second, you're likely not as skilled and…

The Big Misunderstanding

I wanted to share this because there is so much confusion around the internet on what mastering really is. "Mastering is making your track loud." "Mastering is part of mixing; the engineer always mixes and masters." "Mastering is when you put these six plugins on your master channel."

I can see where the confusion stems from. It's really hard to describe a process that may be different every time, or may occasionally be doing nothing at all. And it's something that even the masters…