Mastering (lesson 19) - Posted on 2018-06-02 by Hunter Rick

In this chapter we went over what mastering is and how to prepare your mix for it. Mastering is the final touches on a track or tracks if it isn't a standalone track. It intends to balance out the sound and polish any minor flaws in the frequency or width of the signal. Typically mastering engineers work with a rendered out wav file and not the multiple stems like a mixing engineer does. Depending on the genre a great deal of limiting and compression may be put onto your final mix in order to get a louder more aggressive sound. Often this is the case with genres like EDM and Pop. rarely would you see aggressive compression being applied to a classical song that relies on dynamics. Mastering engineers also apply a thing called Dither when they render out the final master. Dither is a very quiet white noise that can be inserted into a track. This white noise helps prevent distortions and inaccuracies in the upper frequencies of a track when decreasing the sample rate or bit depth of a track as you render it out.