Mastering - Posted on 2014-06-02 by Jin Huang

Mastering, which is the final step for a song to be ready for duplication, indicates that the end of the program is near. Almost there, wow, how time flies I can hardly imagine. I don’t know why people are likely to become more sensitive when things are coming towards the end, but that’s always the way I am. Feeling a little disappointed, hope that the moment can just hold for a little bit longer. It’s probably that I have said so many goodbyes to so many people, those people who are close to me in everyday life, and I don't want it to end. Even this time, I knew this would be the case, even though I had decided to continue the advanced program the day when I started my first lesson. Anyways, I enjoy the journey, that’s why I’ll keep going.

Date of Session: May 21, 2014

Time in: 12:00

Time out: 14:30

Lesson 19: Mastering

Master is the first copy of a song. Mastering is the final step for a song to be polished and ready for duplication. Functionally mastering can be done at anywhere. We can even master inside the box, which means that we master with the program we use in a computer. However, mastering inside a real recording studio requires expensive high end gear and extraordinary sharp ears. Apparently, mastering belongs to the masters. Come on, but functionally, we can do it.

When a mix is done, it’s ready for the mastering stage; however, the trick is that if a mix is done a hundred percent how you want it to be, after the mastering stage things may change slightly. That’s what you need to think before hand. When it comes to the mastering stage, anything you change is applied to the whole song, to all the frequencies and all the signals. As a result, mastering is a very gentle process, we don’t want to change too much about the original mix.

There are two kinds of mastering guys — one will just push the volume while the other will try to fix things. Back in the days, all a mastering engineer has is the left and right track, so there is no means for him/her to pull a fader to change something very specific. Now with different approaches, mastering tends to be more flexible. A mixing engineer may print a vocal up mix and a vocal down mix for the mastering guy, or in other cases, print different instruments in stems and let the mastering engineer to do a simple mix as well. If you think the master sounds better than the mix, that means it’s done properly.

After the final EQ, compression, stereo imaging and stuff like that, there are several things you need to check for the master. Make sure the level is competitive with other songs while not clipping at the same time. Check your phase correlation so there won’t be potential problem when the song is played in mono. Mastering engineers will often prefer to have a reference track when they are mastering. The reference track is provided either by the client or chosen by the engineer him/herself, but the key is that it has to be the same genre as the song being mastered. A reference track is more like a guide, a goal, or a result that you want to achieve with your mastering, so there must be something that is shared generally the same between the two; otherwise, you won’t get the right song.

Except for the song itself, it is also the mastering engineer’s responsibility to organize the album and get everything else ready. It’s usually the mastering guy to put the songs in order and decide how songs are connected with one another. In the final step, dither the audio down to red book CD quality if you have to go down in bit depth and sample rate. After everything is done, put into the metadata, including the name of the artists, name of the songs, ISRC code, and maybe more information if the artist would like to add. Finally, the CD is ready to burn!

I’m lucky to follow the band Low Orbit for their whole trip to see how an album is born finally. That was also the time when I saw Lionel mastering their album in my last session before the final exam. I will write a journal blog for Low Orbits full trip sessions then. It’s good to see how a band works together with an engineer and finally get the kind of sound that they want. It’s really a lot of fun. So more blogs to come, see you next time!

Oh yeah, another thing to mention about this lesson. The mix I brought to Lionel this time was my own song, Drop The World (2nd remix), and another reference track. Lionel explained to me how to achieve the kind of sound that I was looking, and talked about how tricky it could be to record the vocal of oneself. Lionel said don't be discouraged when you can't get the certain sound that you are looking, those music you listen sounds good because they were done with multimillion producers in multimillion studios; if you can achieve almost the same quality with your pro tools in your bedroom, that’s impressive. Yeah, I do understand, and in fact this makes me feel a lot better. I’ll try to be the impressive.