What is " Mastering " your sound..?

ClockWise

New member
I've heard people saying things like "Well, if you use digital performer, you can't take your stuff to get it mastered" and "I went in there and did my **** in one take and sent it to be mastered a half hour later." What is this mastering?
 
mastering ,is in simple terms,taking all of yer different songs,..that peak in different places,...have different....frequencies,.....etc..levels,....and making thwem all sound.equal,.and uniform,..giving it a polished sound ,.a fattness,......without it,.....u may be turning up ,one song,.....after another,then turning,..it back down ,for another,.it may sound perfect on the recorder u recorded it on,.but.play it on another,.player,.etc,andu will see,how different,.in a nrgative way it would sound,.mastering,is a very important step,in getting your material,that in your face radio ready,sound,.peace
 
mastering is basically, running your music through various processors to give it a "professional" sound, equipment used in mastering is usually very expensive, and there are people who all they do is master music, mastering can take a song from night to day.. 99.9% of all music commercially released is professionally mastered.
 
Yes.. mastering is basically equalizing (removing some unnecessery frequencies) and making the track as loud as possible.. it's the final touch before releasing. Mastering can't fix a bad mix (if the guitar is too loud, you can't change it in mastering, you have to fix it when mixing). Mastering gives that professional dosage of fairy dust that gives the track a little more sparkle.
 
Mastering is the final process before putting it on CD or DVD.

It's the final step of producing, after composing and mixing.

The most important mastering parts are EQ and compressing (generally in that order - although there are exceptions of course).

FYI: if you want to get a whole lot of pro tips about mastering, get the Bob Katz book "Audio Mastering - the Art and the Science".
 
You have pre-mastering and pro-mastering. It’s important to get them both done in a best possible way.

Step one (pre-mastering):

Pre-mastering is all about what YOU do and what YOU decide (commonly in your home studio) for your songs appearance before the pro-mastering. The most of us, who produces music, both amateurs and professionals, wants to make something that’s original and something that’s ‘us’! And we all want those mixes to have a unique type sound adjustment.

Step two (pro-mastering)

Pro-mastering is the job for an educated mastering engineer in a dedicated mastering studio! This isn’t anything about ‘fine tuning for perfectionists’, it’s all about making your mixes so powerful so they’ll fit the high quality demands that exist in the commercial music business to day. The mastering engineer runs your mixes trough a set of expensive and high quality modules, both hardware and software, and generally adjusts and compresses your mixes so they get as good as possible. When that part is done, he/she will put your mixes in the right order so the album feels most possible right in the journey from the beginning to the end. In the end of this mastering process, the engineer presses the end result on a master CD/LP/MC/DAT.

As THM wrote, there’s literature out there regarding mastering. Everyone should learn this as much as possible so the pre-mastering gets best possible before the pro-mastering.

If your mix sounds straight after pre-mastering, it will sound superb after pro-mastering. If you mix sounds superb after pre-mastering, it will be a classic!

Mastering is extremely important! The most of them who send their mixes in for pro-mastering - mixes that feels amateurish - gets wide open eyes afterwards and shout out: “Man, now its sounds like a real ‘record’!”
 
Trip Marxx said:
Where can you send in your album for pro-mastering?

I found many local mastering studios after I used a local search engine here on the Internett, for my country only.

Or, as another person said above, find a local studio – they should be able to get you in touch with the right people.

But, this is a highly expensive operation! Here in Norway, the best mastering engineers takes about $100 pr. hour – and I’m not talking about 60 minutes’ hours! And that’s only the beginning of the total bill...
 
What types of data can be submitted to be mastered? I use digital performer but I heard that that cannot be mastered for some reason, like only a pro tools file would work.. Can a digital performer sequenced track be mastered?
 
You can provide the material to be mastered as a regular audio cd from where they export the audio tracks, or a data cd where tracks are file.wav -files...
 
ClockWise said:
What types of data can be submitted to be mastered? I use digital performer but I heard that that cannot be mastered for some reason, like only a pro tools file would work.. Can a digital performer sequenced track be mastered?

You should export your mixes by the following process on each mix:

* Have 5-10 seconds of emptiness before and after your mix starts and stops.
* Export you mix in 44,1 KHz sampling rate and 24 Bit data depth.
* Most of the engineers prefer .AIF format - I don’t know why, really.
* Put all your mixes, those you want to get mastered, on ordinary CD’s as data files.

It’s also wise to take a commercial reference CD with you to the mastering if you want your mixes to have a special type of sound – otherwise the mastering engineer will master it the way he thinks will be the best.

After you’ve mastered all your tracks, all you have to do is open a label, really... :)
 
cubbyhouse said:


After you’ve mastered all your tracks, all you have to do is open a label, really... :)

Before opening up a label it's very important to make sure you have a company that will distribute the records. :cool:
 
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But, on another hand; if you contact distributors with your pro-mastered material, it sure looks more pro if you contact them as a label instead of a singe civilian, imo.

Opening an independent label, officially, is just about signing some papers and paying a little fee or two. I was shocked (positively) when I saw how easy it was to do this here in Norway! And I’ve read that it’s pretty similar in other countries, even easier in the U.S.
 
What I mean is that it's best to look around, look at the possibilities for finding a good distributor for the type of music you release, before going forward with the pressing process / founding label. Distributors don't take everything. Perhaps one could send just the master to the distributor and ask what they think (would they distribute that kind of music).

I had my own d&b/trance label. I had to close it down due to the fact I couldn't find a proper distributor (I live in Finland) in my country. Now I have boxes full of unsold records because of this. I guess wasn't mainstream enough LoL..

Luckily, I will get to reduce the money I lost in the business in taxing so it's not really a problem for me. So, I'm just offering a word of advice from experience. :)
 
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