After a song is written, recorded, and mixed, the final step in the production process is referred to as audio mastering. Many everyday people as well as artists themselves are unfamiliar with what goes into audio mastering or even why it is important, and while it’s not an absolute necessity before you release your music, it can seriously improve your recordings in a number of ways.
First, audio mastering significantly improves the quality of the sound of your audio itself. The mastering engineer makes use of digital and analog effects such as reverberation, compression, and equalization. These effects give your music more depth, atmosphere, and can even smooth out and correct imperfections in the audio itself.
This is the most important aspect of audio mastering in terms of why you need to get someone with a good ear who knows what they are doing and how to artfully apply these effects to improve the quality of your sound. Many mastering “engineers” will just compress your recordings to raise the overall levels of it as this is generally one effect of mastering. Needless to say, you do not want someone like that handling your songs as after you’ve put as much time and effort into your music you should ask for anyone else who works on it to do the same.
It is also nice because sending your music to an audio mastering engineer offers a fresh and unbiased ear a chance to listen to your music and decide what needs improvement when it does come to the audio quality itself.
In addition to simply improving the quality of your recordings, the audio mastering engineer is also in charge of prepping your album as a whole for replication. This is not as important for smaller artists these days as less and less people are purchasing CDs and nowadays many artists are forgoing the idea of even making a CD and are just getting their songs mastered for online release only.
Still, if you are planning on releasing an album complete with transitions, a table of contents, etc., the mastering engineer is in charge of putting the album file together so that it plays exactly how you want it and is ready to be sent off to the CD replication plant for copies whether that’s in a physical CDR format or in a digital DDP file format, depending on whichever CD replication service you are choosing, meaning it is generally the artist’s call.
The best engineers all offer free test masters so that the artist can experience the improvement in their music without having to spend any money ahead of time to decide if that engineer is the right fit for them.
Music Guy Mastering offers all potential clients a free test master so that they can experience firsthand how much better their music can be sounding after being in the capable hands of the Music Guy himself. Click on the link for free test master above to get yours today.