Mastering Your Mix
- by Tatiana Ryckman, Open Labs Staff Writer
Unless you do it for a living, mastering can be something of a mystery, and with good reason.
The three main steps in recording a track are recording, mixing, and mastering. Recording is easy enough to understand – you make noise and through the magic of technology it is saved, in some form, to listen to again and again. Mixing is taking all the separate components that build your recording and layering them until the song, or whole album, is as close to perfect as possible.
Mastering is like the glaze on a donut, the gold on your teeth, the lacquer on your little sister's weird, collaged art project. This final step provides a number of important assets to the final product. It's main purpose is to enhance the sonic quality of the audio by adjusting volume and frequency levels so the vocals are not drown out by the drums and the bass is not hidden under the lead guitar. The process can be analog, digital, or both, and uses converters, compressors, equalizers, and software that have all be designed specifically for mastering.
It is a common mistake to use the terms mixing and mastering interchangeably. Not only are they two totally different phases of production, they also use completely different knowledge and skills.
Separation between mixing and mastering is further magnified by the fact that these jobs should not be performed by the same person. If you read the back of any commercially-produced CD there are almost always separate credits for the studio where the music was recorded, the engineer who mastered it, and the one who mixed it. One benefit of having a different person as your mastering engineer is that they can often hear the bias of the person who mixed it (are they a drummer? It might show in how they've balanced the volume on different instruments). A mastering engineer also offers a fresh, objective set of ears, or at least one that isn't already numb to your music after hearing it 1,000 times.
There are a few arguments around mastering, such as can you do it yourself? And what about the “loudness war?”
As far as being able to do it yourself, there is a broad gap between what you can do yourself and what a professional with years of practice and all the right equipment can accomplish. There are mastering software programs you can buy, some techniques you can learn, and if you don't have the budget to have your music mastered professionally, definitely DIY. However, when you wonder why software alone doesn't make your song sound commercially produced; remember that professional engineers are just that: professionals. Many musical engineering schools are difficult to get into and have rigorous programs. Some programs have drop-out rates close to 80 percent because they're so hard. Mastering engineers have both the training and practice to give you one of the best products possible.
The loudness war is not a new phenomenon. For roughly 40 years artists have wanted their music to be the loudest and most noticeable, and hoped that these attributes would make their songs the most played. The 1990s are often referred to as the “golden age of mastering” because for that brief time most music was being mastered according to the music's specific qualities. Even though some of the loudest bands, such as Nirvana, were recording during that time, their music is actual much quieter than much of today's music.
When a song has gone through its final mastering stage it still needs to change formats multiple times before it can be mass produced. First it is recorded to the CD/DVD master, which is the final mastered format of a project. These masters are only for duplication and manufacturing. This disc is then used to make the glass master. The glass master is coated with a nickel salt solution to make it more durable. This is called the “father”. When a copy of the glass master is made, which can stamp the final CDs (to be distributed to consumers), it is called the “mother”. Glass masters are made at the actual manufacturing plant. These masters are used to punch all of the data pits into a CD. They are so sensitive that they need to be used in a “100 clean room”.
A 100 clean room is a room specially designed to filter dust and other pollutants from the air. Clean rooms are classified according to the number and size of particles permitted. Large numbers, like 100, denote the number of particles of size 0.5 µm or larger, permitted per cubic foot of air. Small scratches and pollutants can cause serious errors in the final CD, so the clean room is very important.
After a coat of photosensitive material is applied to the CDs, this layer is burnt with a deep blue or ultraviolet laser, which causes the photosensitive material to go through a chemical reaction and harden. The glass master “mother” then stamps data onto the new CDs, which go out and woo wanton listeners the whole world over.
Then you make lots of money, and that's why mastering is important.