What is mastering?

In a nutshell:

• Mastering is the final stage before manufacturing. It’s done in order to ensure all the tracks on an album have a consistent sound. An important goal of mastering can also be to get your recording in the same “sonic ballpark” as current recordings of the same genre.
• Typically, the mastering engineer will start by listening to your 2-track mix in order to identify problem areas. S/he’ll then try to correct these problems using volume controls, EQ, and dynamic processing equipment (compressors, etc.)
• Finally, the mix gets transferred onto a format that will be accepted by the manufacturing facility and information such as start IDs and track info is encoded into the subcode.

Should you do your own mastering, or leave it to the pros? The answer is: it depends! I’ll cover this in another post… -kf