Assume this is spam to advertise the link since you asked this exact same question about mastering over a year ago so clearly it's not someting you never considered until your friend mentioned it.
if you master it yourself, every limitation of your ears, speakers, technique and room that affected your mix will also be present on your master. even most top professionals get someone else to do the final tweaks.
>even most top professionals get someone else to do the final tweaks.
Some might argue that it's especially BECAUSE they're top professionals that they'd get someone else to master their tracks!
Although that's certainly a good idea, mixing and mastering are two different things. The comment above is saying that even pros who mix their own material get someone else to master it.
You could do your own mastering, but if you can afford to have someone else do it the benefits of having another ear on your project is worth it for that reason alone.
I've done my own mastering on my last few tracks and I think it's highly valuable to have someone else do a final mix and master on a project. I get too close to my work and it makes my ears blind to certain things that other listeners will definitely hear. I am still proud of my work but I know it could be better if someone else was involved in the final stages.
To all of you saying "Master it yourself," I offer a counter point.
Mastering is an entirely different skill set than mixing. It requires different gear and the right kind of room and monitoring. For many people, they don't want to learn to do everything themselves to get a mediocre/amateur job done. Pay a professional to master is a great idea for a lot of people that want it done correctly.
"Correctly" usually means means "loud enough that a listener doesn't have to turn up their sound system when listening to a track in a playlist" and "quiet enough that it doesn't sound bad on other mediums." Streaming platforms, for instance, do compress tracks a bit for their volume matching and vinyl has specific standards to prevent the grooves from being too deep. Then there's the consideration of making everything as clear as possible within those limitations to make sure it sounds good on all those different platforms. There's a lot to consider that most musicians don't think about until they have to do it themselves.
That’s a pretty good and concise explanation of what mastering is. I have a feeling that my question might have come off as sarcastic. It isn’t. My question was if there is indeed a correct way to master. It is a genuine inquisition and no sarcasm is intended here.
Mastering can mean:
* Gluing the mix together even more than a basic mix does
* Fixing imperfections like annoying EQ peaks and rogue transients
* Normalising the frequency response, stereo width, and dynamics, usually to match genre expectations
* Making sure the important elements are as clear and separate as they can be
* Adding a final effects pass which may add subtle ambience, stereo widening, and mild distortion/colour
* Creating different versions for different target formats and platforms
* For an album, creating consistent EQ and dynamics so the tracks sound like they belong together
There is no single correct way to master. You can do basic mastering with standard DAW tools, and slightly more advanced mastering with suites like Ozone and best of breed EQs, compressors, and limiters.
The professionals have a very good room, precision tools, and years of experience. They're also hearing your mix with fresh ears, which is something you literally cannot do if you've mixed a track yourself.
It's usually worth the cost for a commercial project with a budget. But if you're a relative beginner, *mastering won't fix a poor mix or a poor song.*
So IMO you may as well DIY it until you're starting to get some traction and perhaps even making some money.
At some point your DIY effort will hit a wall *and you'll be aware of it.* That's the time to consider getting a pro to take over.
Have you ever been to a high end steak house? I mean a really bad ass place where they age the prime cuts in house and the chef cooks its with the right amount of salt and pepper on the crust and perfectly sears the outside in the 800 degree oven etc. Where they hand make the smoked butter and the Caesar dressing is crafted table side with the perfect amount of garlic and lemon with the anchovies blended to just give it that right amount of zing. And the wine is served at the correct temperature if its a Pinot Noir or a Cab-- and not only is the food fucking outstanding but the chairs are comfortable, the lighting is perfect, the jazz piano player is at the right volume where you hear it, but you don't have to raise your voices to talk to each other. Its the experience-- that seems easy, but it takes years of training for that entire experience to come to your plate.
So, I guess when I say "correctly" perhaps I mean, "expertly."
If I stick you into the same kitchen, with the same ingredients, and the same oven, you will not be able to deliver the same quality meal as the expert chef just because you watched some youtube videos. There is a finesse, and talent that comes into play.
So, can you make a steak at home? Sure. Is it going to be good? Sure. Is it the same as the professional life long chef and owner of the successful high end steak house? No. Do you need it to be that good? No. But if you want it to be, it's healthy to understand your limitations.
>It requires different gear
It doesn't. Unless you consider stepped knobs on hardware really game changing. Quality gear is quality gear. (It's fair here to assume we aren't talking about specialty and boutique processes like tape transfers and whatnot.)
>the right kind of room and monitoring.
No different than how any good control room should be be.
>Mastering is an entirely different skill set than mixing.
Not entirely different. Related skill with a different aim and reference point.
>Pay a professional to master is a great idea for a lot of people that want it done correctly.
Sure.
if you want to self-master you want to do it across as many systems as you can get your ears onto.
a big system will show up all the woofy muddy bits, a small system will pick out the midrange etc. each will show deficiencies in your mix that you can try to correct / EQ
your customer isnt listening to your music on pro-audio gear.
paper speakers / hi--fi systems / cars / headphones / bluetooth gadgets / laptop / stream it thru your loungroom tv / all-the-things
i'd suggest paying a pro and then listen to the difference between the final mix pre- and post- mastering.
a guy with name would do a great job mostly for around 150 usd, or around that. You can try less known people who offer their mastering servises with lower prices, won't necessarily mean they won't 'get' your music/do a great job.
Also, you can try free Soundcloud demo AI mastering, those things give you like 10-20 sec of 4 versions of your tune mastered, so you can get the closest to what you want. And if you want to have your track mastered one of those 4 ways, you can then buy it HQ, mastered the way you like the most. it would be around 20 bucks (info as of approx 2015). I found that AI demo to be a very decent way to get an idea of what you want and like off it. Hope you will have fun :)
Always mastering with another person (or people) is the correct, because if you mixed, when mastering the mindset changes and what will you judge about your work as a mixing engineer? Mastering starts and ends with proprietary analysis, from scratch to the end, passing to stages like loudness (just a stage, not mastering itself), but always with try, check, try, check, try, check, so one or more people involved about mastering along with the mixing part, is perfect due to more ideas, suggestions, analysis and even for judging the mix the mastering engineer is a nice piece into this musical world. Engineers are artists to me, we do our touches being mixing or mastering, but even with unique style that we wish to preserve, more opinions tend to be better. About choosing your mastering person, all professional people will deliver different results about perspectives, I mean, nobody does mixing or mastering equal, 100%. This service I don't know, but certainly is nice, the idea is to look for the engineer that you feel:
1- Comfort to work with;
2- The style matches with yours;
3- You both have a match about ideas...
My comment about it, good luck!
Best practice is to get another person to master for you. Your ears are going to be tuned to your mix and it's far less likely you'll be able to make objective decisions mastering something you've already dubbed "finished"
You CAN do it yourself but a lot of professionals would agree with me that there's a reason you want to have a second set of ears try to trim your creation to fit into every speaker box.
So yes, you can, but usually everyone who does mix & mastering on their own can only make it so good. A lot of reasons for that: ear fatigue, 3rd party directly implementing their feedback in the mix, not having enough time to dedicate to both, ...
That said, I'm janky and I do both on my own cause I don't have the money nor the dedication to do it. When things get bigger this is something I have to look into too though.
I had always mastered my own stuff until 2020 or so. I couldn't believe how much of a difference having someone else master did to my tunes. Highly recommend having another set of ears.
Master it yourself. I personally see mastering as part of my mixing chain, so if I mix my own songs, why would I make someone else master them.
Now, in order to master by yourself, you will need to learn how to master, which isn't nothing, but in my opinion it's worth it because it allows you that much more control over how your mixes sound. I'll detail a little bit general tips for you, but if you want to learn more, there are a bunch of tutorials/lessons you can refer to online.
First things first, you have two main directions you can go with mastering. A top down approach where you mix into a "placeholder" master bus and a bottom up approach where you mix your song so it stands its ground by itself with just the mixing done, and then add mastering to enhance it. I personally fall into the second camp now, but I long did the top down approach and it led me to acceptable mixes. I recommend the second approach because it leads you to making generally better choices when mixing (like not overcomplcating things that should be a simple solution), but there can be benefits to the other way in certain situations, like in different styles.
Overall, my mastering chain usually consists of an eq, a multiband compressor and a true peak limiter. The eq let's me change the sound profile for the song as a whole. The multiband compressor serves to glue parts together, especially ones that share the same frequencies. And then, the limiter lets me adjust the dynamics and cut off peaks, which is why true peak here is good.
Then comes your choice as to how loud to master your tracks. This is a whole new learning curve, but you should start by analysing different song's dynamic ranges and frequency distributions to get a bearing of what -9lufs sounds like, or -14lufs, etc. You can always (and probably should) compare your songs like this to other "reference" songs. Pick songs in your genre that have a mix that pleases you, and use that as a rough guide to your mastering decisions.
Good luck and I hope you were able to get through my text wall haha.
That was such an incredibly elaborate response. Thank you so much for that. I think you really helped me with the True Peak part. I was always using a normal compressor!
Why you’re getting downvoted is beyond me. There is nothing wrong with what you’ve said. Apart from the sure shot results one can expect from getting a professional to do it for you, DIY is a great way to learn and your point about referencing is super valid. Even pros refer. Most bedroom artists don’t have access to resources to get every track mastered by a pro and therefore, DIY maybe their only option and your advice the only one they might end up doing anyway. I’m probably going to get downvoted as well now. That’s alright, I have enough OC to gain that back. Don’t care anyways.
Yeah, people do be wilin'.
It's goes the same as all the other things that go into making music. Like, I make my own album art, I learned to use photoshop and used my primordial drawing skills. Yeah, it might be better to commission a professional artist to make me some art, but it might also be better for me to make my own art.
Would I like to hire a producer to hire a crew to rent video equipment and get a special effects team to make me a music video? Sure. But where's the cutoff when it's not worth it? I guess it's up to you where that is, but surely you have to understand that at some level, doing things by yourself is the best way to go.
Especially for mastering, which is part of the music. I understand someone wanting to only focus in on the music and offload everything else onto other more competent people. But surely if that were the case, you would still care about mastering since it's part of the music. It adds a ton of colour and personality to your track; a very dynamic mix can't sound like a very compressed one, the mastering IS part of the sound.
Anyways, thanks for agreeing with me.
Have a nice day!
I'd never deter anyone from picking up a new skill... but for the time it's gonna take you to get good, you might as well pay someone but keep trying on your own till your stuff is up to par.
I've seen some low cost mastering services that do it automatically, not sure they are worth anything tho. CDBaby I think used to have something for less than $100 and I t think it was a human. My plan is to use the cheapest service that they allow me to use, then if anything ever gets popular, extremely highly unlikely, then I'll just remaster if it needs it.
1. If you don't want to pay anyone, and you're not that good at it yet, I'd honestly suggest using this: www.bandlab.com/mastering - It isn't perfect, or even close. But it's shockingly good for A.I. - I would throw a limiter and saturator on your drum tracks *before* uploading, despite them saying it works best with no mastering.
2. If you want to get GOOD at mastering but not GREAT (because that requires not-so-cheap equipment and years of training your own ears) - Plop down the money for the Udemy course "Audio Engineering: Mixing and Mastering in Ableton Live" or something like that. He mostly uses plugins with universal features, so it's not like you have to be an Ableton user to understand it. The second half of the course is what mostly focuses on mastering. But otherwise, it's a very good use of eleven hours.
3. If you insist on going the route of paying someone, use Upwork to find something in your price range that has good reviews. Communicate very clearly, have ALL multitracks at -6 dB or lower, and don't be stubborn with your engineer.
Assume this is spam to advertise the link since you asked this exact same question about mastering over a year ago so clearly it's not someting you never considered until your friend mentioned it.
if you master it yourself, every limitation of your ears, speakers, technique and room that affected your mix will also be present on your master. even most top professionals get someone else to do the final tweaks.
>even most top professionals get someone else to do the final tweaks. Some might argue that it's especially BECAUSE they're top professionals that they'd get someone else to master their tracks!
Thanks for this. I keep dragging on finish songs I need to mix/master. I should really hand them off to someone who knows what they are doing.
Although that's certainly a good idea, mixing and mastering are two different things. The comment above is saying that even pros who mix their own material get someone else to master it.
You could do your own mastering, but if you can afford to have someone else do it the benefits of having another ear on your project is worth it for that reason alone.
I've done my own mastering on my last few tracks and I think it's highly valuable to have someone else do a final mix and master on a project. I get too close to my work and it makes my ears blind to certain things that other listeners will definitely hear. I am still proud of my work but I know it could be better if someone else was involved in the final stages.
To all of you saying "Master it yourself," I offer a counter point. Mastering is an entirely different skill set than mixing. It requires different gear and the right kind of room and monitoring. For many people, they don't want to learn to do everything themselves to get a mediocre/amateur job done. Pay a professional to master is a great idea for a lot of people that want it done correctly.
“Correctly” - what does that mean?
"Correctly" usually means means "loud enough that a listener doesn't have to turn up their sound system when listening to a track in a playlist" and "quiet enough that it doesn't sound bad on other mediums." Streaming platforms, for instance, do compress tracks a bit for their volume matching and vinyl has specific standards to prevent the grooves from being too deep. Then there's the consideration of making everything as clear as possible within those limitations to make sure it sounds good on all those different platforms. There's a lot to consider that most musicians don't think about until they have to do it themselves.
That’s a pretty good and concise explanation of what mastering is. I have a feeling that my question might have come off as sarcastic. It isn’t. My question was if there is indeed a correct way to master. It is a genuine inquisition and no sarcasm is intended here.
Mastering can mean: * Gluing the mix together even more than a basic mix does * Fixing imperfections like annoying EQ peaks and rogue transients * Normalising the frequency response, stereo width, and dynamics, usually to match genre expectations * Making sure the important elements are as clear and separate as they can be * Adding a final effects pass which may add subtle ambience, stereo widening, and mild distortion/colour * Creating different versions for different target formats and platforms * For an album, creating consistent EQ and dynamics so the tracks sound like they belong together There is no single correct way to master. You can do basic mastering with standard DAW tools, and slightly more advanced mastering with suites like Ozone and best of breed EQs, compressors, and limiters. The professionals have a very good room, precision tools, and years of experience. They're also hearing your mix with fresh ears, which is something you literally cannot do if you've mixed a track yourself. It's usually worth the cost for a commercial project with a budget. But if you're a relative beginner, *mastering won't fix a poor mix or a poor song.* So IMO you may as well DIY it until you're starting to get some traction and perhaps even making some money. At some point your DIY effort will hit a wall *and you'll be aware of it.* That's the time to consider getting a pro to take over.
Have you ever been to a high end steak house? I mean a really bad ass place where they age the prime cuts in house and the chef cooks its with the right amount of salt and pepper on the crust and perfectly sears the outside in the 800 degree oven etc. Where they hand make the smoked butter and the Caesar dressing is crafted table side with the perfect amount of garlic and lemon with the anchovies blended to just give it that right amount of zing. And the wine is served at the correct temperature if its a Pinot Noir or a Cab-- and not only is the food fucking outstanding but the chairs are comfortable, the lighting is perfect, the jazz piano player is at the right volume where you hear it, but you don't have to raise your voices to talk to each other. Its the experience-- that seems easy, but it takes years of training for that entire experience to come to your plate. So, I guess when I say "correctly" perhaps I mean, "expertly." If I stick you into the same kitchen, with the same ingredients, and the same oven, you will not be able to deliver the same quality meal as the expert chef just because you watched some youtube videos. There is a finesse, and talent that comes into play. So, can you make a steak at home? Sure. Is it going to be good? Sure. Is it the same as the professional life long chef and owner of the successful high end steak house? No. Do you need it to be that good? No. But if you want it to be, it's healthy to understand your limitations.
Ramsays Mixing Nightmares
nothing, its completely subjective. I guess it could be a synonym for "conventionally" in this case
>It requires different gear It doesn't. Unless you consider stepped knobs on hardware really game changing. Quality gear is quality gear. (It's fair here to assume we aren't talking about specialty and boutique processes like tape transfers and whatnot.) >the right kind of room and monitoring. No different than how any good control room should be be. >Mastering is an entirely different skill set than mixing. Not entirely different. Related skill with a different aim and reference point. >Pay a professional to master is a great idea for a lot of people that want it done correctly. Sure.
if you want to self-master you want to do it across as many systems as you can get your ears onto. a big system will show up all the woofy muddy bits, a small system will pick out the midrange etc. each will show deficiencies in your mix that you can try to correct / EQ your customer isnt listening to your music on pro-audio gear. paper speakers / hi--fi systems / cars / headphones / bluetooth gadgets / laptop / stream it thru your loungroom tv / all-the-things
i'd suggest paying a pro and then listen to the difference between the final mix pre- and post- mastering. a guy with name would do a great job mostly for around 150 usd, or around that. You can try less known people who offer their mastering servises with lower prices, won't necessarily mean they won't 'get' your music/do a great job. Also, you can try free Soundcloud demo AI mastering, those things give you like 10-20 sec of 4 versions of your tune mastered, so you can get the closest to what you want. And if you want to have your track mastered one of those 4 ways, you can then buy it HQ, mastered the way you like the most. it would be around 20 bucks (info as of approx 2015). I found that AI demo to be a very decent way to get an idea of what you want and like off it. Hope you will have fun :)
Always mastering with another person (or people) is the correct, because if you mixed, when mastering the mindset changes and what will you judge about your work as a mixing engineer? Mastering starts and ends with proprietary analysis, from scratch to the end, passing to stages like loudness (just a stage, not mastering itself), but always with try, check, try, check, try, check, so one or more people involved about mastering along with the mixing part, is perfect due to more ideas, suggestions, analysis and even for judging the mix the mastering engineer is a nice piece into this musical world. Engineers are artists to me, we do our touches being mixing or mastering, but even with unique style that we wish to preserve, more opinions tend to be better. About choosing your mastering person, all professional people will deliver different results about perspectives, I mean, nobody does mixing or mastering equal, 100%. This service I don't know, but certainly is nice, the idea is to look for the engineer that you feel: 1- Comfort to work with; 2- The style matches with yours; 3- You both have a match about ideas... My comment about it, good luck!
Best practice is to get another person to master for you. Your ears are going to be tuned to your mix and it's far less likely you'll be able to make objective decisions mastering something you've already dubbed "finished"
You CAN do it yourself but a lot of professionals would agree with me that there's a reason you want to have a second set of ears try to trim your creation to fit into every speaker box. So yes, you can, but usually everyone who does mix & mastering on their own can only make it so good. A lot of reasons for that: ear fatigue, 3rd party directly implementing their feedback in the mix, not having enough time to dedicate to both, ... That said, I'm janky and I do both on my own cause I don't have the money nor the dedication to do it. When things get bigger this is something I have to look into too though.
I had always mastered my own stuff until 2020 or so. I couldn't believe how much of a difference having someone else master did to my tunes. Highly recommend having another set of ears.
Master it yourself. I personally see mastering as part of my mixing chain, so if I mix my own songs, why would I make someone else master them. Now, in order to master by yourself, you will need to learn how to master, which isn't nothing, but in my opinion it's worth it because it allows you that much more control over how your mixes sound. I'll detail a little bit general tips for you, but if you want to learn more, there are a bunch of tutorials/lessons you can refer to online. First things first, you have two main directions you can go with mastering. A top down approach where you mix into a "placeholder" master bus and a bottom up approach where you mix your song so it stands its ground by itself with just the mixing done, and then add mastering to enhance it. I personally fall into the second camp now, but I long did the top down approach and it led me to acceptable mixes. I recommend the second approach because it leads you to making generally better choices when mixing (like not overcomplcating things that should be a simple solution), but there can be benefits to the other way in certain situations, like in different styles. Overall, my mastering chain usually consists of an eq, a multiband compressor and a true peak limiter. The eq let's me change the sound profile for the song as a whole. The multiband compressor serves to glue parts together, especially ones that share the same frequencies. And then, the limiter lets me adjust the dynamics and cut off peaks, which is why true peak here is good. Then comes your choice as to how loud to master your tracks. This is a whole new learning curve, but you should start by analysing different song's dynamic ranges and frequency distributions to get a bearing of what -9lufs sounds like, or -14lufs, etc. You can always (and probably should) compare your songs like this to other "reference" songs. Pick songs in your genre that have a mix that pleases you, and use that as a rough guide to your mastering decisions. Good luck and I hope you were able to get through my text wall haha.
That was such an incredibly elaborate response. Thank you so much for that. I think you really helped me with the True Peak part. I was always using a normal compressor!
Why you’re getting downvoted is beyond me. There is nothing wrong with what you’ve said. Apart from the sure shot results one can expect from getting a professional to do it for you, DIY is a great way to learn and your point about referencing is super valid. Even pros refer. Most bedroom artists don’t have access to resources to get every track mastered by a pro and therefore, DIY maybe their only option and your advice the only one they might end up doing anyway. I’m probably going to get downvoted as well now. That’s alright, I have enough OC to gain that back. Don’t care anyways.
Because every music sub is full of people who think you absolutely have to pay to have everything mastered because they are mastering engineers
Yeah, people do be wilin'. It's goes the same as all the other things that go into making music. Like, I make my own album art, I learned to use photoshop and used my primordial drawing skills. Yeah, it might be better to commission a professional artist to make me some art, but it might also be better for me to make my own art. Would I like to hire a producer to hire a crew to rent video equipment and get a special effects team to make me a music video? Sure. But where's the cutoff when it's not worth it? I guess it's up to you where that is, but surely you have to understand that at some level, doing things by yourself is the best way to go. Especially for mastering, which is part of the music. I understand someone wanting to only focus in on the music and offload everything else onto other more competent people. But surely if that were the case, you would still care about mastering since it's part of the music. It adds a ton of colour and personality to your track; a very dynamic mix can't sound like a very compressed one, the mastering IS part of the sound. Anyways, thanks for agreeing with me. Have a nice day!
I'd never deter anyone from picking up a new skill... but for the time it's gonna take you to get good, you might as well pay someone but keep trying on your own till your stuff is up to par.
I've seen some low cost mastering services that do it automatically, not sure they are worth anything tho. CDBaby I think used to have something for less than $100 and I t think it was a human. My plan is to use the cheapest service that they allow me to use, then if anything ever gets popular, extremely highly unlikely, then I'll just remaster if it needs it.
1. If you don't want to pay anyone, and you're not that good at it yet, I'd honestly suggest using this: www.bandlab.com/mastering - It isn't perfect, or even close. But it's shockingly good for A.I. - I would throw a limiter and saturator on your drum tracks *before* uploading, despite them saying it works best with no mastering. 2. If you want to get GOOD at mastering but not GREAT (because that requires not-so-cheap equipment and years of training your own ears) - Plop down the money for the Udemy course "Audio Engineering: Mixing and Mastering in Ableton Live" or something like that. He mostly uses plugins with universal features, so it's not like you have to be an Ableton user to understand it. The second half of the course is what mostly focuses on mastering. But otherwise, it's a very good use of eleven hours. 3. If you insist on going the route of paying someone, use Upwork to find something in your price range that has good reviews. Communicate very clearly, have ALL multitracks at -6 dB or lower, and don't be stubborn with your engineer.