Let’s talk about mastering, because it’s not just about making stuff loud. Mastering is way easier in a referencing environment where you can hear everything you’re doing, but mastering essentially uses all the same tools we use when we mix. So in many ways, it’s way more straightforward, because you don’t contend with every creative option under the sun.
Your goals in mastering are a lot better to find. Your job with mastering is threefold. You have to make it perfect, you have to make it pretty, and then you have to make it loud.
And actually, you don’t always have to make it loud. Either way, don’t worry about loud until you’re happy with perfect and pretty. Make it perfect by getting rid of any imperfections, clicks, pops, defects in the audio.
Make sure you’ve truncated the front and back. Have you gotten the fades right? This is the last stop before it goes into the hands of the consumer.
Now your job is to make it pretty, and it’s never going to be pretty everywhere, but you shouldn’t flinch at making your best attempt. It’s important to use a reference track, something of a similar genre, preferably something that well and something that translates in other environments. Here’s the important part.
You can’t compare them until you get them to the same level. You almost certainly can’t get your track to the same level of the reference, so you’re going to have to bring the reference down to the level of your track. Use loves metering, match the levels, and then and only then are you going to understand what you actually need to do.
You’re probably going to be working with tools, like EQ, making small broad boosts, or narrow surgical cuts. You might have to resort to fancy tools like multi-band dynamics, DSers. You may have to work in sections, but you might not have that much work to do.
Don’t worry about making it loud until you’ve made it perfect and pretty, because once you start using things like peak limiting, you’re going to compromise pretty. The art is finding a balance between these two.
