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

If you have worked extensively with unedited vocals, whether your own or by recording someone else's, you've probably had at least one track full of uncomfortable sibilance. You know the sound I'm talking about: powerful "S" sounds that make your head hurt. In unfortunate situations, it can happen with other consonants too, including "T" sounds and occasionally even "F" sounds.

Sibilance is often caused by how close the singer is to the microphone. Sometimes backing off just a little is all…

Introduction

When I first started out mixing, I thought sounding pro meant using every semi-relevant plugin at every available opportunity. Compression is a perfect example to cherry-pick: clearly, compression needs to exist on every drum, every vocal, every instrument, and every bus, right? I felt the same way about EQ too: every single channel has to have EQ to improve it, right? So I'd slap EQ on every single channel and move some bands around until I felt maybe things were sounding okay. They weren't…

Introduction

Mixing audio can seem like a black art. There are millions of tips around the internet on how to do this or that to create a great mix. And I'm sure you've seen just as many tutorials by the masters as I have. The problem is that 99.9% of these are based on some minute little trick to handle this tiny little situation, or it's using gear you don't have to fix problems you also don't have.

The truth of the matter is that there's far too much information on the specifics, but not enough on the…

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…

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…