Congratulations! You have made it to the final phase of producing your own music. The last phase in the project is known as mastering. Mastering in many instances is considered as its own stage and can be uncommon for smaller artists. However there are many bedroom producers (that’s you) that will consider this as the last step of the mixing stage. While seemingly redundant this information is worth pointing out and worth noting.
When a musical artist produces music, it is not uncommon for them to use various studios, producers, and engineers for different tracks. With this being noted, each individual song will typically have different sounds. Mastering is the process of taking multiple songs and putting them together to form an album where each song fits into a theme. A great mastering engineer will typically have incredible ears and high-end equipment. A mastering engineer will put each and every song into a mastering software and adjust each track to about the same level, this entire process makes each and every song sound like it is coming from the same album. Do you have any interest in potentially working as a mastering engineer?
I previously mentioned that for bedroom producers, this process is much shorter. This function is simplified into making a mix sound accurate. What this means is the sound of the song is scaled to translate sound as intended on various playback hardware. This can bring the sound to whatever level the artist wants. Unless a budget is layed out to hire a separate mastering engineer, many people will let their mixing engineer take this final step. Again, if you happened to be following along with this information over the past few days, congratulations, and make sure to let me know how your projects have been going below with a like and comment below. What was your favorite part of the entire production process?
I will catch you in the next one. Stay Classy!