The 5 Minute Guide To Mastering Your Recording
By Douglas Taylor
Mastering your finished audio product is considered somewhat of an art. There are mastering engineers that charge an awful lot of money to master your project for you. Depending on your situation this may be money well spent.
With the equipment available today you can do a decent job of mastering your project yourself if you are careful. Here are some things to consider when tackling the mastering stage yourself.
Dynamics: This is a very important step. Your music needs to breath and flow. You do not want to compress it so hard that it roars back at you. Find a good medium where your music has that fine line between volume and dynamics.
Eq: Your songs were probably recorded over a period of time therefore they most likely will have a slightly different feel to them. You need the songs to sound enough alike that they feel like they belong on the same CD. You don’t want the bass pumping loudly in one song and the next track finds the listener turning up the bass knob on his stereo. Try to get an even feel for the whole CD.
Same volume: The volume of each song needs to be similar. The general thought on this is you don’t want the person listening to your CD to have to turn the volume up or down. Your listener should be able to listen to your Cd at whatever volume they are comfortable with.
Order of songs: the order you choose for your songs is important. You need to be aware of the feel of each song. You want to take your listener on an emotional roller coaster and the order of the songs has everything to do with this ride.
Burn to Cd: The final and very important step is to burn your master to a Cd and listen to it on as many different types players as you can. Listen to it on everything from a cheap boom box to a high dollar stereo. Make sure it sounds good as it can on each one. The bass is especially troublesome to get right.
Be careful and take it a step at a time and you can come out with a decent master.
Doug Taylor has been creating audio online since 1999.