Music Mastering
Music mastering is often seen as being a mysterious part of the recording process, but this is just because people don't understand how it works and what you do. So lets take a look.
Music mastering is the last step in the recording process, once it's over with you will have a CD that's finished and ready for the shops shelves. So what exactly is involved in mastering?
Mastering Made Easy:
Mastering is the process of getting your music ready for duplication. It takes your songs from being individual pieces to being a uniformed CD album.
This is done by making sure the dynamics and tonal balance of the songs are equalled and by making sure they are all matched in volume. To achieve these results you will use EQing, limiting, compressing, and expanding. During the mastering process you will:
Optimize average and peak volume levels - Signal Processing - compression & EQ
- Arranging tracks in final sequences
- Timing of the space between tracks
- Remove unwanted noise like clicks, pops, hiss etc...
- Clean-up start and ending of each track(including fades)
So how long does it take? A general rule of thumb within the industry is an average size album should take about 8-12 hours.