MASTERING TIPS & TRICKS
Once your mix is done, the final part of producing a track professionally is mastering. Here is some advice for you.
It's not just loudness
Mastering is much more than achieving loudness. It is the final stage of the track before it gets released. Therefore it is important to try bringing up the best the track has to offer and masking the uglier parts. Usually EQs, multiband compressors, limiters and stereo imagers are included in mastering, but the plugin choice varies for each mastering engineer.
What's the right loudness?
Depending on the purpose on your track, the loudness levels you want to achieve might vary. For example, Spotify recommends to upload tracks at -14 LUFS. If you are mastering for a CD, depending on the genre, you maybe might want to go for a higher or lower loudness. You have to be informed about what's required/wanted for the specific track, regarding loudness.
Auricular volume
Fletcher-Munson curves are frequency curves describing the way the human ear perceives sound. The human ear is designed for survival (hearing potential threats) and communication (hearing other humans talk), meaning it is most sensitive to the frequencies ranging from about 1kHz to 5 kHz (this is where the human voice is most pregnant). Frequencies in this range seem louder than others to us, when listened to at equal volume. This also explains why low and high frequencies need more energy to be equally impactful. Adding to that, we perceive the frequency spectrum differently at different volumes. The louder it gets, the more flat the curve seems, meaning a felt increase of bass and high frequencies.
Invest into room treatment (or make some yourself)
Basic room treatment normally isn't very expensive but helps your sound a lot. Phase issues are not what you want to have in your studio, as they change the picture you get of your song. There is a bunch of tutorials on YouTube on how to build your own room treatment, if you don't want to buy it and also some that explain what kind of room treatment would be suitable for your room.
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Treating your room even increases in importance for mastering, as it is the final stage of the track before release. You need to hear what's going on as accurately as possible.
Use your options
Being a mastering engineer has quite some similarities to being a movie director. You are the person that has to take care of the 'big picture' and get the whole production to work out the way it is supposed to.
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This also means; if the final product sucks, most people will say it's your fault.
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Given that fact, you should do everything you possibly can to get the sound on point. For example: if the mixdown has flaws that cannot be taken care of in the master (or would be a mess to take care of), try to identify the problem and give the mixing engineer advice on how to adjust his mix to solve the problem, before you master it.
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Dealing with issues in the mix is way simpler and leads to better results than cleaning it up in the master.
LUFS & Streaming normalization
There are two ways to measure levels of audio signals; peak and RMS. Peak meters measure the highest level the audio signal reaches, even for incredibly short moments, while RMS quantifies the average level of the signal. If you were to master an album and would want to match track levels by peak, you would probably not be very successful, since the perceived loudness varies. If you were to use RMS values for the leveling, some tracks would peak over 0 and you would end up leveling it by ear after all. That's where LUFS comes in quite handy.
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LUFS stands for Loudness Units (relative to) Full Scale. This is the industry standard unit for measuring the loudness of tracks.
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Loudness Units are the unit of measurement used in the process of quantifying an audio signal's perceived loudness by analyzing the average RMS value over time. This is a quite secure way of determining in which way the perceived loudness of different tracks will relate to each other.
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Streaming normalization is simply a function many streaming platforms have started using, to bring all kinds of different tracks to an equal level of loudness. It analyzes the audio content and measures the LUFS values to level them equally according to the rest of the tracks. This might be one more step towards ending the loudness war.
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Listen to your master on as many playback systems as possible
Even if you have a pair of monitors that is top notch hardware - in the end, it sounds different on all other speakers. Meaning, it is important to check how your master sounds like on as many speakers, headphones or other playback devices as possible. In an optimal case you would have more than one pair of monitors in your setup and have an interface which allows you to switch between those while mastering, plus headphones.
Practice, practice, practice
You can read about mastering (and mixing) as much as you want to, but if you don't actually practice a lot, you will probably not get decent results. Having properly trained ears is extremely important for mastering.