What is the main thing that you should focus on if you want to get better at mastering and improve the sound of your music? As we see it, the one thing that by far will give you the most result is listening. Focus on learning what to listen for!
You can learn all the tricks in the book, understand exactly how they work, have all the plugins in the world, have expensive analog gear, have a fantastic control room and so on. These are all good things.
But if you don’t know what to listen for, then the results will still be somewhat random.
If you want to consistently produce masters that sound great next to any other song in a playlist, then you need to have solid, fundamental methods and strategies that are based on listening.
The reason you enable an equalizer is because there is something that needs to be fixed. When you tweak the EQ successfully then you will get the effect that you are looking for. But you will also inevitable get some sort of side-effect. A simple example is that adding low-end also will make the high-end less prominent.
All processing has an intended goal as well as one or several unwanted side-effects.
This is true for EQ, compression, deessing, limiting and all other processing that can be done during mastering.
If you know what to listen for when tweaking a compressor, and also recognize the artifacts, then you will get all of the good things while minimizing the bad things from compression. And you will also know when to bypass the compressor.
If you know how to set a limiter by balancing the artifacts, then you can make the limiter sound good on any material. You will find that some artifacts that need to be minimized on certain materials will actually improve the sound on others!
The more you recognize both the effect that you are looking for, as well as any side-effects, the more you can let your ears guide you when tweaking the settings.
When mastering you will often do several smaller tweaks that add up to a huge improvement. Learning what to listen for will help you to optimize each step and get that huge total improvement without ruining the original mix. You will find that mastering is not a black art. It’s a skill that can be learned!
We believe that the best way to learn a new skill is to go down to the fundamental principles. This will make it much easier when dealing with new situations. Most problems in mastering are solved by using basic methods and strategies, mainly EQ and compression. These are then combined into solutions that are specific for each track.
There are very few methods that “always work” or that consistently solve several problems at once. This is why preset-based workflows or randomly trying out a lot of tricks usually lead to results that are very hit-and-miss.
If you know some basic methods and strategies, know what to listen for, and know how to avoid the artifacts, then you can also create great sounding masters. Consistently and with confidence.
💚 Sofia & Thomas
- Part 1 – How to make your music stand out on Spotify
- Part 2 – Tonal balance – The key to a natural sound
- Part 3 – How to use compression for shaping transients
- Part 4 – Getting that smooth high-end
- Part 5 – The most important thing when learning mastering
