You’ve recorded your masterpiece, captured great performances and capped it off with a fantastic mix. But you’re not finished: There’s mastering, the final link in the recording chain. Its two primary goals are enhancing the mixes to make each song sound as good as possible and—if working with a collection of songs—assembling them into a pleasing listening experience.

With those goals in mind, here’s an inside look at the process—and advice on whether or not you’re qualified to tackle it.

THE MASTERING PROCESS
Technically speaking, there are three main aspects to mastering:

Equalization: It’s generally best if all songs have a consistent tonal balance. Some cuts may have problems, such as excessive bass from recording or mixing in a room with bad acoustics; or, you might want to add a bit of overall “brightening” to give a more present sound. Mastering is your last chance to fix these issues.

Dynamics control: A little compression or limiting can help “glue” a song together, as well as give a louder sound that cuts through in a car, on the dance floor or over the radio. Unfortunately, some mastering engineers overuse compression to produce a cut that places sheer volume over dynamics. We’ll address this subject in greater detail below.

Sweetening: There are tools that can widen the stereo image, add high-frequency sparkle, “warm up” the sound, emulate the effect of mastering to tape, and do other “tricks” to enhance a song. You need to use these effects sparingly, though.

One objective of mastering is creating a “transportable” mix—one that sounds good whether you play it over an audiophile system, a cheap boombox or iPod earbuds. Most studio pros will listen to a mastered recording over different systems before signing off.

Assembling the cuts into an album involves putting the proper amount of space between tunes, determining a good order (for example, you usually don’t want two songs in a row in the same key), and, if appropriate, adding crossfades if one cut fades out while another fades in. Although the standard spacing between songs is two seconds, consider tightening that up or adding a longer pause to let the listener “breathe” between tunes.

CAN YOU DO YOUR OWN MASTERING?
Of course … the real question is whether the results will be any good!

Back in the days of vinyl, mastering was a far more demanding and esoteric art due to constraints of the medium and the cost of the gear required. Today, thanks to the digital revolution, anyone with great ears, experience and quality equipment can do it. However, a pro mastering engineer brings experience and objectivity. Both are crucial elements, so if you’re making your first CD and plan to press 1,000 copies, you definitely want a pro on your side. Also, a mastering suite’s room acoustics are vitally important—if a room colors the sound, you can’t hope to create an accurate master. Though mastering ultimately comes down to the engineer’s ears, that doesn’t minimize the importance of good gear.

You need to shop carefully for a mastering engineer, as these days anyone can buy two-track editing software (like Peak, Wavelab, Audition, Sound Forge, etc.) and plug-ins. One of the best ways to choose a mastering engineer is to note who mastered albums that, to your ears, sound great. Don’t assume that just because someone is a staff engineer for a label that they’ll be unapproachable or expensive; it’s always worth asking. Find out in advance if they’ll re-do some cuts if you’re not happy and if they’ll charge extra.

Mastering will cost you—a typical low-ball rate for a standard CD is around $600. That price will go up depending on the engineer’s reputation, whether the mastering requires a “salvage job” and the facilities. While hiring an ace engineer is cheap insurance to make sure your CDs don’t become coasters, it still might not be in your budget. Or you might just be running off 100 copies of a concert to give to friends or promote your band. In that case, it might not be cost-effective to go to a pro.

D.I.Y. MASTERING BASICS
If you decide to do it yourself, there are advantages: You can try different approaches without watching the clock, play the results over a variety of systems and get feedback from others. You can keep at it, producing master after master, until you finally end up with something that sounds right.

Mastering is about small changes. If you’re adding, say, an EQ boost to a track in a multitrack recorder, you can get away with fairly big changes. But if you’re boosting a final two-track mix, you’re boosting every instrument at that frequency. EQ changes of 1dB or less are common. In fact, if you make a change you like, cut it in half—if boosting 3dB at 10kHz adds a nice feeling of “air,” cut it back to 1.5dB, live with the sound for a while, and see if you need any extra boost. One of the biggest mistakes neophyte engineers make is they’ll boost one range like the treble, but then the bass doesn’t seem loud enough, so they boost the bass, but then the midrange sounds low … and you’re back to where you started.

Don’t use excessive compression. The current fashion is that clients want the loudest possible master recording, to the point where there’s no dynamic range—only “really loud” and “even louder.” This sounds dramatic when you first hear a super-hot cut, but after a few minutes, listener fatigue sets in for two reasons: The sound will likely have distortion components that become grating and, more importantly, dynamics are a crucial component in creating emotional responses. So feel free to limit the dynamics a bit, but don’t go overboard. You’ll be trading off a dramatic first impression for a CD that’s essentially unlistenable over a long period of time.

Mastering is a vital part of the recording process. Don’t rule out hiring a professional, but don’t be afraid to learn something new, either. If you want to do your own mastering, give it a try. And if everyone who listens to your music says, “Wow, that sounds absolutely fantastic!”—consider yourself a mastering engineer.

For more, get the latest Issue of Performing Songwriter, ISSUE No. 109