Mastering is the final stage of music production. These days the process of mastering is as much about delivering final mixes to streaming services, ensuring specific loudness specifications are met, as it is about the art of shaping the tonal and dynamic picture of music in ways to compound all the creative ideas that came before the master.
We have been fortunate enough to have several top mastering engineers share their mastering experiences and expertise with The Production Expert Community. Such engineers include Neil Pickles from Reveal Sound, Tom Frampton from Mastering The Mix and Ian Shepard < These guys know their onions when it comes to mastering, what they don't know about mastering isn't worth knowing.
If you self master your own music, master music for artists or, you do neither of those, instead you send your mixes to mastering professional then these 12 articles will teach a number of key subjects in today's mastering workflows:
With so many powerful, easy to use and affordable plugins dedicated to mastering on the market, there’s certainly no reason not to give it a go yourself. Here are some things to bear in mind if you take the DIY route.
Over the last few years, more and more plug-ins have emerged that promise great mastering capabilities making "self-mastering" easier than ever before while also providing tools that help us to deliver music to a range of loudness specs.
It can be very difficult to get a collection of mixes to sound as though they all belong in the context of an EP, album or playlist. Often one mix will sound louder than another, while others sound quieter. LANDR's new album mastering feature claims to produce consistent, pro sound across entire projects. In this video we test that claim.
In this extended free video tutorial Dan Cooper shows you how he uses FabFilter plug-ins to master his mixes to sound transparent and untouched while also ensuring his masters are shaped to sound loud and proud. The plug-ins featured in this video are plug-in found in FabFilter's Mastering Bundle
With more and more music tracks being delivered on services that now use loudness normalisation, we no longer need to compress the life out of a song to make it louder than any other track, because tracks that are too loud will just get turned down. We can now enjoy tracks with some dynamic range. In loudness workflows there is a new measurement Loudness Range. Tom Frampton a mastering engineer from Mastering The Mix explains what Loudness Range is and how to use it to help produce tracks with an appropriate amount of dynamic range.
In part 1, of this series on things you should do before sending your mix to a mastering engineer, Neil Pickles from Reveal Sound talked about 5 things that can be useful in checking your mixes to make sure that they are good enough to send for mastering. In part 2 Neil is going to discuss 5 final things to do that will make for a smooth mastering process with no last minute screw ups and enable you to get the best results and therefore value for your mastering money. Over to you Neil...
We asked Neil Pickles, Mastering Engineer from Reveal Sound to give some advice for those thinking of sending their mixes to a mastering engineer. His advice is comprehensive and we have split it across two parts so you have a chance to grab a second coffee! Over to you Neil...
There is a wide range of Loudness meters out there now. In the last of our 3 part series on Overview - Loudness Metering Plug-ins And Resources we focus on loudness metering plug-ins aimed at the music mastering sector.
In this free video tutorial, Tom Frampton from Mastering The Mix covering how to use LUFS in music mastering and the need to create more than one master for different platforms. Over to you Tom..
In this article Dan Cooper lists his mastering plug-in chain. Dan uses each item in his chain very sparingly with the ultimate goal of shaping music in a transparent and musical way.
In this Pro Tools Expert Podcast Extra James Ivey talks to Mastering Engineer Ian Shepherd about his current work, his website Production Advice and the 2016 Dynamic Range Day which is coming up on Friday 20th of May 2016.
Tom Frampton who is the man behind Mastering The Mix has produced a free ebook called Preparing For Mastering - The Essential Checklist in which he guides you through how to prepare your tracks so that any mastering engineer can get the best of of your music. We are also running a deal where you can save 33% on Tom's stereo and stem mastering services.