What Can Mastering Do? - Why Master Your Songs?

Mastering is arguably the most important part of the music production process. The problem is it can appear like black-magic to those who have never done it. What does mastering a track even mean? In this blog post we hope to clear up the confusion about why you need to master your music.

Blending

One of the main aspects of mastering music most people don't talk about is that it blends all of your tracks together, or 'glues' them. I'll give you a couple analogies. When you're editing photos in Photoshop, you may import the image into Lightroom and color-grade the edited photo as a whole. Similarly when you're adding motion graphics to live action footage, you may add filters and color-grading onto the final edited footage. The purpose of applying new settings to the final edited product is to provide common ground for everything in the image or video - this helps increase the realism of your edits. The exact same thing applies to mastering!

The reason this is so important is that you don't want your song to sound like a collection of tracks stacked on top of each other - you want it to sound like a cohesive musical experience. When you apply some like EQ and compression onto the master bus, you're effectively 'color-grading' your song which will help all those tracks blend together.

Loudness

The most common thing people talk about in mastering is loudness. Inside of your DAW, there is a maximum volume you can reach before everything starts clipping - this is not what people are typically talking about when they say loudness. The discussion about loudness is really about the 'perceived' loudness of the track which has a lot more to do about the average loudness in the track.

Since you can't actually change the final loudness of your track, the goal with loudness in mastering is to increase that perceived loudness. This is done by compressing the whole song, and limiting the whole song. Compression is used to reduce the loudest parts of the song, and limiting is used both to limit the maximum volume of the song and scale up the quiet parts. The result is that the maximum volume of your song will be about -0.1dB, and the quietest parts of your song may only be a handful of dB lower. Typically on a master bus you will use a multi-band compressor so you can focus on compressing on the frequencies that need it. Its very rare that your bottom-end will need the same settings as your high-end.

The problem with heavily compressing and limiting your song is that it can absolutely destroy the dynamics you worked so hard to create. There is a very fine line you have to ride in the mastering stage between having a nice loud track, and having a boring pile of mush. If you're at the mastering stage that means you've already compressed individual instruments and busses, so you should be focusing on subtle details. Typically the compression ratio during mastering may only be 1.5:1, and you'll have long attack and long release times so none of the transients are being sucked out.

Balance

The last aspect of mastering we're going to talk about here is balance. You've already mixed your song and have done 90% of all EQing you'll do. In the mastering stage you're more concerned with making sure the entire song doesn't have an abnormally high amount of low-end or high-end. Sometimes this will drive you back into the individual tracks and you'll cut certain frequencies out of certain instruments, and sometimes you can just apply some EQ on the master bus. If you find you can handle it all in on the master bus, you'll likely be using very wide band edits (or Q), and the cuts/boosts you'll be making are only a couple of dB. If you have to get more extreme than that its probably better to go back to the individual tracks and handle it there.

Another common issue that can come up in the mastering phase is masking. This is the effect of one instrument completely hiding another during certain beats. One example of this is when a bass drum hits hard on the one, but the bass guitar also hits hard on the one - the effect is likely that you don't hear the bass guitar on that note. This will drive you back into the EQ on those individual tracks, where you can cut some frequency content out on the bass guitar where the bass drum is active the most (or vice versa). There are too many examples of this to list, but the principle will be the same for every case: if one instrument is masking the other, you need to carve out a frequency slot in one where the other can live

Where to start mastering?

If you don't have a clue about where to start, it can be very helpful to get a software that has plenty of presets and automation to help you. This is not sponsored in any way, but we find that Izotope's Ozone bundle is probably the best way you could go. Of course nothing replaces experience and knowledge, but with Ozone you can literally just apply some stock presets for their EQ, Compressor, Exciter, and Expander and your track will sound pretty good. If you get their Neutron 2 bundle it will actually make recommendations for edits you need to make inside something called 'Tonal Balance Control' - plus you can import a folder of tracks you like and it will analyze them and help you get your mix closer to that music.

This isn't some gimmicky thing you'll only use as a beginner as Ozone and Neutron are both very detailed. You will have access to great mastering tools from day 1 that will get you going, but as you grow and learn how to master they will never become outdated. At Genera Studios we use Izotope software mixed with Slate Digital, Waves, and stock Logic Pro plugins. Sometimes a master will be 100% iZotope, we're just not as familiar with it as other plugins.