Mastering is the final polish in the production of a song, EP, or album. It was originally the final processing done for vinyl records to ensure that they played properly, at the right volume, and with each song flowing into the next with the right amount of silence in between. This is still very much the case but, with digital mastering, we don’t have to worry about accidentally making the needle pop off a record if there’s too much bass.
Mastering for digital distribution (such as for CDs or Streaming services like Spotify) is all about getting a mix up to industry standard loudness while also gluing the mix together more and addressing tonal balance problems.
It’s a technical task, but it requires a lot of sensitivity to your music and an understanding of how decisions in the mastering phase affect how your music will play back on different systems (such as car stereos or consumer HiFi).
My mastering starts at £30 per song for a stereo master and increases for multiple masters of the same song (i.e. a CD master and one for digital distribution) – depending on what’s needed.
Get in touch with me (below) with a link for me to hear the final song mix (or mixes, if we’re working on an EP or album) – ideally something like a Google Drive link so I can also download the files to do some preliminary tests in my DAW.
I’ll let you know if there need to be any changes made before I get started with the mastering.
Depending on my schedule, I’ll usually be able to get a standalone single back to you within about 3-5 working days, an EP within 5-10 working days, and an Album within 8-12 working days.
I’ll be vocal about when I plan to do the mastering, so you know when to expect the first passes for listening & feedback.
If you’d like to chat about a project, feel free to get in touch either via my Instagram page (below) or by using the contact form.
Once you’re happy with a mix (or all the mixes) for your single, EP, or album, have your mixing engineer export 24bit, 48kHz (or 44.1kHz) files for each mix.
Make sure that there’s no limiting on the master bus when they export and that the mixes aren’t clipping.
Please make sure that the mix bounces are named appropriately – ideally something like this:
For a single – BAND NAME – SONG NAME – MIX B – 48k 24bit
For an EP/Album – BAND NAME – ALBUM NAME – SONG NO. – SONG NAME – MIX A – 48k 24bit
When you send me the mixes, it helps to also send a few reference songs that you’d like your single, EP, or Album to sit well with on a playlist.
Almost every master I’ve heard done by an AI mastering tool like LANDR, iZotope’s Ozone AI, or any other “online mastering” tool – free or otherwise – (like that on Soundcloud) sounds completely garbled. It’s sometimes cheaper than paying for mastering, but good, professional mastering is absolutely not an expensive part of the production process.
You can view mastering as a technical task – you’re aiming to get your song to be up to industry-standard loudness – but it’s a fundamentally creative task because it needs a sensitive (human) listener to listen to your song and assess what they want to hear and whether any processing is affecting the important parts of the mix. All AI tools do is analyse your mix and put a series of relatively pre-defined processes on it. This usually has the effect, for example, of making the song loud but making certain elements of the song (such as the high end) brittle and harsh.
Now, don’t get me wrong, iZotope’s Ozone Advanced suite comes with a bunch of really helpful tools, and I frequently use the AI tool to test against my master, but I almost always hate what the AI tool does to a master because it inevitably makes it sound like you’ve pulled your song through a cheese grater 🤷♂️ Music’s an emotional medium, and I think it therefore needs a human touch at every point.
This is a bit of a piece-of-string question. I talk a bit about the analogue/digital divide on my page for Mixing. The short of it is that really good analogue hardware sounds amazing. So, yes… but it’s also really expensive and comes with a lot of physical limitations (i.e. many hardware EQs only offer fixed frequency points – so you need a few different EQ units to be able to maintain flexibility with your mastering).
A fully functional signal chain for mastering can easily run you upwards of £50,000, and that’s before you’ve invested in amazing monitors and treating your room.
The price of great analogue hardware is why great analogue mastering can be so expensive, but this doesn’t necessarily make it inherently “better” because these are only tools. And a lot of modern plugins are really, really good – you just have to avoid ones that aren’t good. That’s why most of the best mastering engineers in the world use as much software as hardware; they’re simply different ways to get to a sound that the engineer is aiming for. Where hardware is undoubtedly most important, however, is when it comes to Recording.
This depends on the needs of the song. While you can master a song in half an hour, you’ll usually need to spend considerably more time in total in order to account for mix revisions, careful listening, testing on different systems, and mastering revisions after feedback.
Mastering is often said to be the last 5% in the production process – the “icing on the cake”, so to speak. But, as Marc Daniel Nelson (a great inspiration of mine) has stated a few times, “if you’re able to get that extra 5%, it’s 100% better than it was before”. So mastering isn’t really the “icing on the cake”, it’s more like the baking of the cake: all the ingredients need to be there, you just need to provide the right amount of heat to make them work.
As such, mastering isn’t more or less important than mixing, but failing to do either will result in an unfinished production (and one that sounds unfinished). Remember, Fix It In Pre! It’s not always possible to fix recording problems while mixing, and it’s not always possible to fix mixing problems while mastering, so mastering is not a magical fix for a bad mix.
That said, before signing off on a mastering project, I’ll always give you pointers for where I’d like things to be addressed in the mix.
In order to master well, you need to have developed a fairly accurate and sensitive ear for the entire frequency range, as well as an ear for how different processing affects different signals. Crucially, a lot of sound that you “hear” isn’t as much a case of hearing a sound as it is of feeling it. This might sound a bit new age, but it’s also actually true! You don’t really “hear” sub frequencies, for example, but if someone plays a loud 15Hz tone through a big subwoofer, you’re quite likely to feel sick pretty quickly.
So a lot of mixing and mastering isn’t just developing your “ear” but developing a sensitivity to how your whole body responds to a change in sound.
As such, you can’t really “master by numbers” in the sense of (for example) aiming for a certain amount of gain reduction with a compressor or always boosting/cutting a certain frequency by a certain amount of dB. Instead, you need to develop the sensitivity to hear problematic areas within a mix and know which tools you need to reach for in order to fix them.
tl;dr, decent mastering takes a lot of experience to get right – and even the best mastering engineers in the world don’t always get it right on the first pass because it’s a subjective, emotional, and human thing.
Sort of, yes. In an ideal world, all you need to do to a “perfect” mix is apply limiting to raise its volume. But in the real world, there’s basically never a mix that can’t be improved because, as the great mastering engineer Brian Lucey has stated, “there’s no perfection in music”. What’s more, applying any limiting changes the tonal quality of the sound and introduces new problems that need to be resolved. So you’ll never find a mix that “just needs 2.5dB of limiting” until that mix has practically already been mastered.
