What is Mastering?

Mastering is the process of finalizing a song by applying subtle technical touches that allow it to compete commercially with other songs in the market.

A mastering engineer is also responsible for preparing and submitting files to labels and various digital stores and platforms for ingestion. Mastering should be done by a professional engineer to achieve the correct end result and professional/commercial sound.

Question: Isn't Mastering just making the song louder?

Answer: No, it involves many stages of processing (saturation, eq, compression, multi-band compression, limiting, stereo spacial enhancement, adding harmonics, limiting etc).

It is true that Mastering does make your song louder but there is a lot more to it than that.

The goals of mastering

When creating a master, there are a few things you should look out for.

Here are some key points:

• The master should sound good across a wide range of systems (laptop speakers, earbuds, hi-fi systems, etc.).
  
• The master should sound like a finished product.
  
• The master should meet technical specifications presented by labels/artists.
  
• The master should be able to compete commercially in the market.
  
• The master must not sound worse than the mix.
  

Ultimately, your master should exceed and enhance the quality of the mix.