Mastering
Learn the role of mastering in the creative process and why it matters.
Have you ever played your song in a car and it sounds nothing like the perfect mix you were just listening to on your headphones? Are your tracks quieter than all of the music by your favorite artists? If you have released music before, does your music work well on Soundcloud but not on Spotify or other DSPs? If you’ve answered yes to any of those questions, your music could benefit from mastering!
Mastering makes a piece of music ready to compete in the modern marketplace. With an ever-expanding number of avenues for releasing music and content of all kinds, that marketplace keeps getting bigger.
Mastering engineers are the last link in the chain of a song’s creative process. They optimize a song by balancing out frequencies, adding compression, and enhancing the stereo image so that it sounds great on everything from a massive festival sound system to your airpods. At its best, mastering is a dark art that engineers practice to sharpen a piece of music to its most refined form. At its worst, mastering is a cheap trick to make your piece of music louder than the next artist’s track.