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…

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…

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…