Music Mastering Tips and Tricks for a Professional Sound

As an artist, your focus is on creating great music — as it should be. But, in the modern music landscape, great work isn’t always enough. Most creators also need to have the technical skills necessary to produce the professional sound that distributors and audiences expect.

Someday, you’ll be able to hand off your music to a pro audio engineer to master your tracks. In the meantime, you’re on your own. Fortunately, you probably have all the tools you need for effective mastering — you just need to know how to put them to use.

In this article, we’ll give you a few music mastering tips and tricks to help you get started as your own mastering engineer.

What Is Music Mastering?

Music mastering is the technical process of preparing your work for distribution. It’s the final quality-control step before your content goes out to the world, so it’s your last chance to make sure your tracks are optimized to sound balanced, clear, loud, and professional.

In other words, the goal is to remove technical barriers so your art shines through. The last thing you want is some industry insider wondering about a technical problem when they should be focused on the music you worked so hard to create.

Mastering is also about ensuring your tracks sound correct on a variety of sound systems and in a variety of acoustic conditions. And not just within a single track, but ensuring a consistent and cohesive sound across an entire album.

As an analogy, imagine selling a car covered in mud. It doesn’t matter how great the car is if the buyer can only see a muddy mess. The car must be cleaned, detailed, and prepped for the showroom floor. Detailing isn’t going to magically make the car better, but it gives it a chance to be judged on its real value.

Mastering is like detailing a car. It’s not going to make your music any better, but it will help ensure your work has the best chance to be heard as you intended.

5 Music Mastering Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks to help you become your own music mastering engineer and achieve the professional sound you need.

1. Establish a Mastering Chain

Music mastering requires a specific chain of events, each step building on the previous one to reach a final result. You’re not just randomly tossing ingredients in a pot and hoping for the best. Every engineer has their own mastering chain; you’ll find yours over time.

Like polishing a diamond, the mastering chain uses increasingly subtle effects to achieve the final output. Here’s an example of a simple mastering chain using some common tools:

• Equalization (EQ) allows you to adjust the volume of individual frequencies in a track. Almost all audio software has an EQ system built in, and this is usually the first step in the mastering process. Remember, the adjustments here must be subtle. The goal is to achieve harmony, balance, and clarity within tracks and across the album.

• Compression helps to optimize dynamic range by reducing louder sounds and amplifying quiet sounds. This is especially important for playback on inferior sound systems (e.g., smartphones). It’s important not to overdo compression as you’ll end up with a lifeless, muddy mess. Constant A/B comparison is essential.

• Soft Clipping helps to additionally limit and smooth out peaks to avoid harsh clipping and distortion (the tell-tale sign of amateur work). Again, the effect here should be subtle. 

• Final Limiter will add a hard level ceiling to your track. The effect should be almost nonexistent after the previous steps, but it needs to be in place anyway. If the limiter is clipping frequently, you have a bigger problem.

As you develop as an audio engineer, you’ll find additional tools and plugins to expand your mastering chain, but the main purpose remains: to slowly polish your tracks until you end up with a final product that is ready for the world.

2. Create an Optimal Listening Environment

If you’re going to spend money, this is the place to do it. Invest in the best speakers, headphones, and monitors you can, then ensure they’re calibrated as precisely as possible. Effective mastering requires a true baseline for what your tracks sound like. If your compass doesn’t point north, you’re going to get lost in the woods.

You also need to create the best listening environment you can, which should be a dedicated room with neutral acoustics, flat frequency response, and minimal reflective surfaces. Again, the goal is to hear the truest possible output, which is essential for the accurate and subtle adjustments of the mastering process.

3. Use Various Devices to Test Your Master

While an optimal listening environment is crucial for baseline mastering, you also need to check your output through various sound systems including speakers, headphones, car speakers, earbuds, smartphones — everything you can.

Modern audiences rarely listen in an optimal environment, so you need to know what they will hear in suboptimal conditions. While you can’t optimize for all possible conditions, you can at least understand the limitations of each system and find an average. While this back-and-forth process can be tedious, there’s no other way.

Even within your mastering room, you shouldn’t rely on a single point of reference. For example, no two audio meters are exactly alike. Use two or more and establish an average. This is especially true if you’re using consumer or less-than-professional gear.

4. Reference Tracks Are Your Friend

Pro engineers understand the value of a good reference track. You need a reliable example to know if you’re hitting the mark. Specifically, you want to try to match the dynamic range, frequency balance, and loudness of a high-quality reference.

Find a track that’s similar to what you’re trying to achieve (in both sound and genre) and do your best to try to match your track to the reference. Listen carefully and critically and train yourself to hear the details. Go back and forth between your track and the reference, making subtle adjustments until you achieve the desired end result.

5. Great Masters Require Great Mixes

Effective mastering depends on high-quality mixes. It doesn’t matter how good your mastering skills are if your track mixes are bad or incomplete. If you’re trying to do mixing work at the mastering stage, you’ve made a mistake. Go back and fix your mix first. Mastering is about subtle fine-tuning, not fixing big problems.

Good mixes have clear vocal and instrument separation, distinct bass, crisp highs, defined mids, good levels, and effective stereo panning. Mastering is about making sure your audio files will sound more balanced and professional in all listening environments. 

Takeaway

You’re not going to become a professional audio engineer overnight, but we hope you have a better understanding of how the mastering process works as well as some useful tips to get started on the path to mastering excellence.

Remember, in the modern music landscape, you need to be more than an artist. Distributors and audiences expect professional work, regardless if it’s from an L.A. mega label or from your basement in Wisconsin. Learn the music mastering skills you need to make sure your work shines through the noise — literally and figuratively.

If you’re ready to get published and send your music out into the world, it’s important to partner with someone whose expertise you can trust. Sugo Music Group has been helping artists distribute and publish their musical works worldwide for over 30 years. By working with one of the industry’s top leaders, you can get your music the exposure it deserves and become the musician you’ve always wanted to be.