The Dark Art Of Mastering

Mastering is one of the most crucial elements when it comes to audio production. It is the final step before a mix is distributed. Mastering started when the invention of the vinyl record called for special guidelines to be followed when creating the MASTER disc that would be duplicated for release. For the last 4 week we have been learning and practicing mastering in both the analogue and digital domain.

The purpose of mastering is to finalise a range of problems that comes when distributing audio material. Probably most importantly, mastering brings the peaks up to 0bd (or just under) and brings the level up to an RMS average of -10db. Of Course there are exceptions to this when it come to the intent of the track but this is a good hard and fast answer to the question. Mastering can maintain consistency of a record, when listening to a record from start to finish it is important to maintain consistency. You don't want any one song jumping out at you. In that same vein you also want to leave room for your hardest and ‘loudest’ song to be just that. If your mellow song is at 100%, the next song on the album, being your heaviest has nowhere to go and it leaves the listener feeling disappointed. Mastering can also unify the sound of a record. If all the songs on a record are recorded on the same day in the same studio it is easy for the collection of tracks to sound unified and gel together, but recording rarely happens like this and an album can be recorded in multiple studios with different microphones and gear. Mastering an album can bring all of those songs together and can average out some of the recording differences to ensure consistency throughout an album. Mastering can also prepare the audio for distribution by giving it tonal qualities needed for the different mediums it will be published on, for example mastering for streaming services calls for a different sound than mastering for vinyl.

Traditionally, mastering was done with analog outboard gear on accurate monitoring speakers in an acoustically treated room to give the best possible result. But with digital platforms becoming more common in audio, mastering is being done in the digital world more often. The pros and cons of mastering with digital is still debated between engineers. As digital programming and digital simulations of Analog gear becomes more accurate, the need for analog gear is becoming less. As it stands at the moment, Analog Mastering is still the preferred method of mastering for 2 main reasons, characteristics can be bought out of analog gear with driving them too heard or pushing them in ways that they're not designed to do. Because the digital equivalent is all programmed you can not push the sound outside of the box that is programmed into it. Another reason for the justification of Analog gear is the tactile hands on approach that comes with it. You can feel the music and come up with a better result when mastering with analog gear more often than if you were dragging a mouse around a screen. I can see in the future that Digital will eventually become more flexible and have less limitations making analog mastering null and void or a niche market.

My experience with mastering is brief but i now understand the basics. I understand its intent and a process to loosely follow. Mastering is something that i wouldn't follow as a career path just because i feel like my creativity is limited to what i am given and to what the consumer wants. It is more of a ‘follow this recipe’ rather than a ‘here are your ingredients, make whatever you want with it’.