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Mastering an album


Hog

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Mastering is the last stage before commiting your work to a glass master. Here you address things like final EQ, track order and overall volume of each track (so you don't have to keep adjusting the volume between each track).

The object is to achieve a sonically balanced and pleasing mix of songs and to make your album a complete package.

It's a specialist skill and mastering engineers compete to make the loudest tracks while still maintaining the dynamic range.

You should never both mix your tracks and master them yourself-do one or the other.

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im no expert myself but i know for a start that it makes the elvels similar for all players. In other words, if you put on a cd you've just bought into yoiur cd player, then play a demo, at the same set volume, you'll hear a dip in sound on the demo compared to the first. Mastering the demo/album stops this from happening because it sorts out the volume levels.

As you can tell fromthat description, i dont really know what Im talking about.

Edit: Doc beat me to the post! probably for the best... that explanation is a lot better!

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As "Doc" said, mastering is post-mixdown treatment of your tracks, to acheive a polished and consistent sound before committing the mix to vinyl/cd/whatever media. This typically involves multi-band compression/limiting and EQ, applied to the whole mix, rather than individual elements such as the drums, guitar, vocals etc, and also takes into account the limitations of the media the music is destined for - for example, vinyl has physical limitations which can result in a record which will skip on playback, and badly "mastered" tracks can even damage the cutting head during production.

"Loudness" is generally sought after these days, and is acheived by the use of limiting, but comes at the expense of dynamic range. If you compare the waveforms of a good classical music recording, and a contemporary pop record, you can see just what damage can be done to your music when you try to get it "as loud as possible".

So yeah, mixing and mastering is an art in itself, it's best left to a professional, but you better have a good sound engineer in the first place to acheive a good recording and a balanced mixdown, because, as they say, you can't polish a turd.

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If you need any mastering done, Let me know. The main thing to do in mastering is not to over cook it, It is so easy to push up the compression too much. I have had to send quite a few masters back to be re-done because the mastering engineer has done too much when not needed.

A good Master can really make or break an album..

Mark..

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If you need any mastering done' date=' Let me know. The main thing to do in mastering is not to over cook it, It is so easy to push up the compression too much. I have had to send quite a few masters back to be re-done because the mastering engineer has done too much when not needed.

A good Master can really make or break an album..

Mark..[/quote']

Aye may in touch in the future man, cheers

Yeah so mastering can actually affect the overall sound too! I dont think I would like to do that job, sounds stressful!

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If you need any mastering done' date=' Let me know. The main thing to do in mastering is not to over cook it, It is so easy to push up the compression too much. I have had to send quite a few masters back to be re-done because the mastering engineer has done too much when not needed.

A good Master can really make or break an album..

Mark..[/quote']

would that be mr mark nicol?.....

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