Why You Need Your Tracks Mastered
In today’s day and age, mastering is more important than ever. And also, it’s not. Let me explain. There was a time when you literally couldn’t get music turned into a vinyl record without first going through a professional mastering house. But now, anyone can master their own music with free plugins and a little help from YouTube. Before you flame me, I’m not saying a kid in their bedroom is every bit as good as a mastering engineer in a purpose-built high-end professional mastering suite. I’m saying they can both master, even if one is unquestionably better than the other. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning so we can see where we came from, where we are, and why it’s important.
History
The very first mastering engineers used hardware compressors, equalizers, and limiters to reduce the overall dynamic range of an audio track to prevent two things when it came to physically making a vinyl record:
Burning out the disc cutter head. Too many highs or lows or excessive volume jumps would literally burn out the disc cutter head with too much electricity.
Causing the stylus to pop out of the groove when the record was playing. Many people never stop to actually consider what the stylus on a record player is “reading” on the vinyl record. If you zoom in on the grooves of a vinyl record you can actually see the jagged little edges of the wave form along the left and right sides of the groove. Those are literally the left and right channels of the audio etched into the vinyl in the form of grooves. If you were to cut unmastered audio into vinyl, the sudden jumps in volume would cause the stylus to literally jump out of the groove and stop playing. By compressing and limiting the audio before cutting it to vinyl, you can eliminate those excessive volume jumps entirely.
The Loudness Wars
From the 40’s to the 70’s, mastering engineers weren’t just completing these tasks to get the audio onto the vinyl, they were pushing the overall volumes of the vinyl louder and louder. Why? The same reason commercials on your TV are always so damn loud. To get your attention! Record labels wanted their records louder than their competitors so when it was played back on a juke box or the radio, it would stand out above their peers. But they were still limited by the limitations of the physical waveform grooves in the vinyl discs. There was only so loud you could go before burning out the cutting heads or the stylus jumping out of the grooves.
Luckily for us, the mastering engineers didn’t need to completely neuter the audio tracks and destroy all their transients to master for vinyl so our favorite records didn’t get squashed into oblivion.
The Digital Age
Once the 80’s came around and the invention of digital media in the form of the CD was upon us, that physical limitation was removed and the loudness wars were taken to a new level. The most sought after mastering engineers were the ones who could get your songs louder than everyone else's. Unfortunately for the listener, this meant that every single peak and spike and transient had to be completely squashed to get that kind of volume out of the audio. Luckily, it wasn’t enough for the average listener to notice. But the true audiophiles were super unhappy.
The 2000’s
Many consider this decade to be the peak of the loudness wars with albums being completely obliterated by mastering engineers to be louder than their peers. Even the average listener started to notice. Everything started to sound like a wall of noise. To get masters this loud, mastering engineers had to reduce the subs, the lows, and even the low mids to create more headroom which really meant bass guitar became almost useless as an instrument in rock and metal music. Or, to keep the lows, the composition needed to be sparse and thin. Think of Hip Hop and EDM. Lots of low end, but lacking in the mids the way your average metal guitar would fill up the space.
The 2010’s and beyond
I hate to say it, but Spotify actually did us a solid and just about killed the loudness wars altogether. With the invention of Spotify’s normalization algorithm, their app was turning mixes up or down to achieve an even playback volume between all genres and bands regardless of which decade they came out. At first the industry hated this because they couldn’t just make their product louder to beat their competitors, but as time went on, they realized how much better the music was for it. More lows, more transients, and a wider dynamic range makes for a much more enjoyable listening experience. Besides, mastering engineers trying to get their mixes super loud were actually punished by the algorithm because the louder the mix, the more the algorithm turned it down. Super loud mixes were coming out of the algorithm quieter than their more conservative counterparts.
Bad mix = bad master
But what about the mix? Is it still important? YES! Without a good mix, a great master is useless and downright impossible. It’s similar to the saying “a mix is only as good as its song”. You have to start with great music, written and performed by great artists, recorded by great engineers and producers, and mixed by a great mixer before you even think about mastering. What most people misunderstand about a mix engineer and a mastering engineer is pretty simple: A mix engineer processes the individual tracks and mixes them together into a single stereo file and a mastering engineer takes that stereo file and maximizes it for public distribution. If nothing else, hiring a mastering engineer is like hiring a second set of professional ears to lend feedback to the mix itself and improve the release through a fresh perspective.
How it works
There’s a lot that goes into modern mastering. Not every project requires the exact same things to be done to bring the final product to its audience. The goal is to optimize sound quality and consistency across playback systems. Let’s break it down into two categories:
Audio
Equalizers are used to shape the tonal balance by targeting and boosting or cutting specific ranges of frequencies.
EQ balance between songs so all tracks are of a similar frequency balance when compared to one another.
Balance song volumes so all tracks are of similar overall volume when played back to back..
Multiband compression to keep each region of frequencies in check independent of each other.
Transient shaping to increase or decrease the impact or sustain of the audio.
Stereo imaging to adjust the perceived width and image of the sound field.
Compressors, limiters, and expanders are used to adjust the dynamics of a mix. Each of these either increase or decrease the overall volume in subtle or not-so-subtle ways while remaining transparent or adding color as desired.
Saturation or harmonic exciters add an edge or “sparkle” to the mix by adding harmonics to the frequency and giving the mix a sense of “energy”.
Clipping can help transients push louder or can even saturate when driven really hard.
Limiters/Maximizers limit peaks to prevent clipping or distortion at higher playback volumes.
Dither is used to convert higher bit depth recordings to lower bit depths for CD without losing dynamic range while minimizing distortion.
Applying noise reduction to eliminate unwanted sounds such as clicks, dropouts, hum, and hiss.
Other
Trimming and fading each song in and out.
Adjust the length of the silence between songs while also adjusting where each song actually starts and stops when playing back on physical media such as CD.
Sequencing the tracks into the order they will appear in on the final release.
Creating different file types such as WAV, MP3, FLAC, AIFF…
Inserting metadata such as artist name, album name, song names, track list into the final digital files.
Creating alternate masters for vinyl, spotify, MP3, and broadcasting.
Conclusion
The bottom line: don’t skip mastering. Whether you master yourself, or hire your mix engineer to master, or hire a dedicated mastering engineer, you need your product mastered. Period. And if you want the best master possible, hire someone who sits in front of tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear in a professionally treated room with a set of well-trained ears to give you a second opinion and give your project that last push over the finish line towards a high-quality product.
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