The View From 2009: This is a slightly manic run-through of the major issus involved in the proces of mastering. It’s still true. Sorry for the slightly breathless writing style. Enjoy.

Tips ‘n Tricks for Mastering

So What Are We Talking About Here?

Mastering continues to be one of those tantalizing pursuits where we’d all like to do it, but aren’t sure quite what is needed. Meanwhile, we hear sage advice telling us to leave it alone. “Don’t do any fancy compression,” we’re told. “Leave that for the mastering engineer. He or she has very special compressors that will do a much better job than you can do.”

Well, I guess we’ve been told! First, we ain’t Michael Schumacher (which we probably already knew). Two, we ain’t even got a Ferrari (don’t we wish!). Why in the world would we have the temerity to even THINK about venturing out onto the parking lot of audio life?

The answer is that because, at the same time that all this elitist advice spells out once again our all-too-obvious inadequacies, we are still trying to make our own recordings, and one of the traditional verities behind our efforts is that we simply haven’t got the friggin’ green we need to go out and hire all the really best guy/gals that we KNOW we’re supposed to need in order to do anything worth doing!

So, in spite of everything, we know, in our heart of hearts, that we really HAVE TO try our hand at mastering. How tough can it be? Buy one of the special mastering boxes or plug-ins, jack those levels right up, and master a kick-ass disc! Why, we can do it for about a tenth of the cost of takin’ it to some guy/gal that’s simply gonna tell us how hopeless our tracks really are, and how before he/she will even consider listening to them a second time we need to remix them yet again.

Why NOT To Master By Yourself

With that all said, there really are some good reasons for having somebody else master your work. As Mark Twain pointed out, “A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.” It is tough to put on the mastering hat for a recording that (a) you know really well, and (b) you have a strong emotional investment in. You aren’t gonna be very rational about it, and some rationality is called for.

Think of it this way: the mastering engineer functions as “the ears of last resort.” It is the masterer’s job to translate your efforts into something really palatable (and hopefully delicious!) for the public, AKA your fans. That’s the masterer’s specialty. It’s a tricky, creative and quite subtle process – the mastering engineer will hear and be sensitive to things that you and I, in our creative turmoil, don’t even begin to sense.

At the same time, it is not reasonable to assume that just because you can create a really cool recording, that you also have the chops to master it. That first task is plenty hard – concentrate on it. Personally, I’ve always found great comfort in knowing that somebody else is gonna edit or master my work, catch my mistakes, clean up my various crazy misguided ideas.

Enough said. Sometimes we just gotta do what we gotta do.

About Levels Management

Probably the most critical element of mastering is taking care of the levels of the recording. For this to happen, we need to know something about levels. This is hard. First, our range of levels is huge. Second, we use the term “decibel”, which is by itself truly confusing and maddening. Third, we need to concern ourselves with three realms of sound, all of which have their own weirdnesses and pitfalls. Let’s go there for a second.

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