Mastering is becoming more and more important as recording budgets are dwindling and mixes are often in need of major help to make them sound as good as possible and meet the loudness levels required by the current market.

In an ideal world with a perfect set of mixes, the job of Mastering would be a simple technical one: creating a Master for CD, Vinyl or Online Distribution that meets exact specifications. In that case the Mastering Engineer would leave the mix untouched or only apply subtle EQ or compression to ensure good translation on most listening systems.

But over the past two decades, the role of the Mastering Engineer (ME) has progressively evolved into a more "creative" process involving sometime obscure or "secret" techniques used to transform mixes in something "bigger/ more expensive sounding/louder/punchier/more polished/more airy, etc..." Mastering engineers now have to use a whole new range of skills to improve or correct the presentation of mixes and often draw on many decades of experience to produce amongst other requests very loud masters that can still sound relatively free of distortion.

With lack of resources or experience as engineers, many artists turn to mastering as the last chance to make their music acceptable in terms of sonic presentation, challenging Mastering engineers to use all their knowledge and expertise to perform the occasional miracle. What can be done to improve the overall sound of an album in the right hands can be spectacular on certain material, making low budget productions sound expensive, or poorly recorded & mixed tracks sound even acceptable. In the wrong hands, it can wreck a mix or at least push it in a wrong direction.

One of the many skills of top MEs is to know just how little to do to a mix when appropriate. Sometimes "less is more" and being able to do this often shows the difference between great & average MEs. Inexperienced MEs often can't resist the temptation to use too many toys & too many processes.

There is a some confusion and misinformation floating around about mastering and many musicians/artists don't understand fully what Mastering can do, except that they need it (true for most commercial releases or for demos meant to impress) and that it can perform miracles on flawed mixes (generally untrue as the best masters come from the best mixes).

Mastering is sometimes confused with Mixing. But Mastering starts when the mixes are completed to your satisfaction or best abilities, and sound as good as possible. With mixes with serious faults it is better to remix the tracks to address the problem than try to fix it at the mastering stage. Mastering can perform global corrections to a mix, but problems like poor instrument separation, badly controlled volume of individual instruments or voice, excessive sibilance, distortion/clipping....cannot be dealt with easily or satisfactorily at the mastering stage. When this is the case with a track, we usually request a new mix.

A common bad practice is to send for mastering mixes that sound as loud as commercially mastered releases. This is often done using a limiter on the master bus set to a very high threshold, hence squashing all the waveforms and softening the transients with often verses louder than the choruses. Or it is done by cranking up the faders so that everything goes over 0db (clipping) resulting in digital distortion. Both these processes damage the waveforms and limit seriously what can be done at the mastering stage. Louder and more punchy masters are usually achieved from clean mixes with no clipping and plenty of dynamics.

Most MEs recommend removing limiters from the Master bus and leaving at least 3db of headroom. This is to avoid clipping. Compressors can be left in provided you are satisfied they help the overall sound without damaging the dynamics. If in doubt, do a second version without the compressor, and give the ME the choice.

While we can do Stems Mastering, this technique is not often used in mastering. It adds time & cost to the mastering session as it is akin to mixing, and we generally won't recommend it as the results are rarely better than working from a stereo mix. It is only worth considering if you are unsure about a mix and a remix is not possible or practical.

Formats for submission:

We recommended 24bit 44.1Khz Wav on a Data CD or DVD (audio CD truncates higher bit files to 16bit) but can work from most other formats. It is generally better to send us whichever file format & bit rate was used for mixing rather than trying to convert the files as we can probably do this with less artifacts.

We normally add CD-Text info on Masters and can also include ISRC codes when available (see PPL). These need to be supplied to us in text file or by email, in the exact form to be displayed (use of Capital letters, hyphens, contractions, spelling...) to avoid typing errors.

CD-Text (only displayed on CD-Text equipped CD players) is not to be confused with information submitted to the Gracenote database (usually via the iTunes software) that enables computers connected to the Internet to access title tracks and album & Artists' names.

Delivery Formats:

For Albums and EPs we supply a Red Book P&Q CD Master (often wrongly called PMCD) and a CD Listening Copy (also called Reference CD). For Vinyl, we produce a Vinyl CD Masters ready for cutting.

We can also supply DDP Masters, and produce high quality MP3s Masters for Digital Distribution.

(Text copyright Flow Mastering)