Create Professional Sounding Audio Using Mastering Processors
If you are a home studio owner or even just a garage band musician knocking out songs on a digital audio workstation, with a good mastering processor you can create CD quality (or better) sounding recordings. Mastering a recording is still a fine art. In the days of vinyl, you had to take your tracks to a mastering expert. The voodoo that they would perform seemed like some secret ritual and voila, your recordings would come out sounding perfect.
In essence, these professionals simply had the proper signal processors, analogue mixers and outboard effects at their disposal to allow the perfect response of each track to be optimized. It also helped that they had finely trained ears that they used to listen to each track and perfect its dynamics, as well as other aspects that rendered it pleasing to the ear.
These days high resolution audio mastering and music production can be done in a garage, a bedroom or even a garden shed, thanks to inventions like digital mixers and outboard gear like an effects processor. A project studio can be located almost anywhere and produce top quality audio.
Tools of the Trade
One of the elements of a good recording is making your listener feel like the musicians they are listening to are standing directly in front of them, playing live. In a live performance, you can use a live vocal processor to sharpen the vocal lines and get great sound. In the studio, you can use the same types of tools to solidify the vocal lines and the accompanying instruments. And the most important tool of all is your ears.
When someone says, "you have an ear for music," they mean it. And a mastering technicians ears are their most precious tools - and the reason is obvious. Protecting and coveting your hearing is an important part of your health and contributes to the ability to create a great master recording.
Now that we have covered the most important tool, lets discuss the equipment you need to begin the mastering process. You will find you will have very little if any need for the tools you used to record your audio project. Things like vocal processors, pop filters, condenser mics, your synth's sound module have already done their work by helping to eliminate those unwanted sounds that made it to your final mix down. It is now time to employ tools like your parametric eq, a high pass filter and even your favorite multi effect processors and create a rich, pleasing audio you can use to create your CD copies for your friends or to send to pressing.
Time to fire up the computer and load your favorite audio software title - like Cubase, Sonar or Performer. You can even get mastering software like IK Multimedia's T-Racks to knock out your music.
Use your audio software to create a great mix. Typically you will want to have everything already mixed down into two tracks before making your final master, though more and more people are trying to combine mixdown and mastering into the same step. For the highest quality result, you want to separate these steps to simplify the process. Once this is done, you are ready to start the mastering process.
The purpose behind mastering is really fairly simple - create a final cut paying attention to the panning, signal levels, effects and the overall aural quality of the project. Make sure you have the right headroom coming into the audio interface. Use tools like a mastering equalizer to manage the frequency spectrum and gain control to make sure you aren't overdriving or clipping the processor.
Use your ears
Your ears won't lie to you if you just LISTEN. If it doesn't sound good to you, then it won't sound good to your listener. Trust your instincts and experiment with the different settings. Whether you use a hardware or software mastering processor, in the end only experimenting (and experience) will get you the best results.
