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

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 part one of this guide on improving mix translation, I covered five aspects of how equipment, room acoustics, and speaker positioning are compromising the effectiveness of all but the most ideal setups, and more importantly, what you can do about it on a reasonable budget. If you haven't read this yet, you'll definitely want to give it a read.

Today, in part two of this series, we'll be covering steps you can take working with the equipment and room you have now in order to make the best of it and give…

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…