Streaming services like Spotify and others normalize the volume of all the material on their platform. This is so you’re not constantly turning the level up or down from song to song. However, tracks you’ve mixed may not play back…
Mastering
Should you mix your own tracks? | FAQ Friday
Peter Doell Is One of the Most Talented Mastering Engineers Ever!
A complete transcription of the interview can be found below: Warren Huart: Hello everybody, I hope you’re doing marvelous today. Sitting here with my good friend Mr. Pete Doell. How are you? Peter Doell: I are good, thank you so…
Stem Mastering Explained
If you’ve heard “stem mastering” mentioned in recent years, you’re not alone if you’re wondering what the heck it means! We’ll take a quick look at the “regular” mastering process and how stem mastering differs from it. Let’s refresh. What…
Piper Payne: Mastering Engineer and Vinyl Technologist
Mastering In the Box – Top Mastering Plugins
If you plan to put the final polish on your mixes at home, you’ll need the right mastering plugins for the job. Some of these are specifically designed for mastering, incorporating things like M/S processing to finalize a song before…
The Best Mastering Plugins
When it comes to mastering in-the-box, you’ll want a great compressor, a limiter, an EQ, and most of the stuff you’re already familiar with for mixing. Many of the best mastering plugins combine the parameters you’ll need into a single…
Song Mastering: Preparing Your Tracks to Master
Song mastering is the final step in getting your tracks ready to release. What a mastering engineer does differently than a mixer is make final, sometimes very subtle, tweaks to make something sound polished and “commercial.” You can learn how…
How to Master a Song at Home with These Simple Steps
Mastering is the last step in preparing a song or album for release. The overall sonic aesthetic should be well established by the time a song reaches mastering. What you or a dedicated mastering engineer can do is make final,…
Optimizing Mixes for Streaming
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with the incredibly talented Warren Sokol to talk about mixing/mastering for streaming release. Some of the main topics we covered are LUFS metering, the different codecs streaming services use to encode masters,…
What is Dithering?
There’s lots of terminology in digital audio that we’ve heard before, but aren’t quite sure what it is or how it works. If dither, or “dithering,” is one of those terms for you, you’re not the only one! Dither is…
How to Master a Song: Understanding the Goal of Mastering
Mastering is the final step in preparing a song or album for commercial release. This means that it takes place after mixing, so the overall sonic aesthetic should be well established by the time a song reaches mastering. What a mastering engineer…