subject: Why You Need Audio Mastering [print this page] Once a tune is recorded and mixed, the closing phase in the production process is called audio mastering. Many normal everyday people and even musicians themselves are unfamiliar with what exactly goes into audio mastering or even why it's important, and while it really is not a complete requirement before releasing your music, it can genuinely benefit your tracks in a variety of ways.
First, audio mastering substantially enhances the quality of your audio itself. The audio mastering engineer utilizes digital and analog effects such as reverberation, compression, and equalization. These effects will give your music more atmosphere, depth, and will even smooth out and correct problems in the sound.
This is the number one essential element of audio mastering when it comes to why you should get someone with a good ear who is aware of what they're doing and how to craftily make use of these effects and plugins to enhance the quality of your sound. A lot of mastering "engineers" will just over-compress your recordings to raise the overall volumes of it as this is typically one byproduct of mastering. It goes without saying, you don't want somebody like that in charge of your tracks as after you have put as much time and effort into your music you should look for anyone else who works on it to do the same.
It is also nice because submitting your music off to an audio mastering engineer provides a fresh and unbiased ear a chance to listen to your music and figure out what is in need of improvement when it comes to the quality of the audio itself.
In addition to plainly enhancing the overall quality of your tracks, the audio mastering engineer is also in control of prepping your album overall for duplication. This is not as important for smaller artists as of late as less and less people are purchasing CDs and these days a lot of artists are omitting the idea of even making a CD and are just getting their songs mastered for internet release only.
Still, if you're planning on putting out a record with transitions, a table of contents, etc., the engineer is responsible for compiling the album's file together so that it plays precisely how you want it and is prepared to be sent off to the CD replication factory for copies whether that's in a digital DDP file format or a tangible CDR format, depending on whichever CD duplication service you are selecting, thus meaning it is generally the artist's call.
The greatest engineers all will grant you free test masters so that the artist is able to experience the change in their music without their having to spend any money beforehand to determine if that engineer is the greatest fit for them.
