Mastering
24
Tutorial
Mastering
Once you have completed the mixdown, you will per-
form mastering before writing the song to a CD-R
disc. Mastering is the process of making overall
adjustments to the song mixed to a stereo track. It may
seem as though the song itself is essentially complete
when you finish the mixdown. However, this does not
guarantee that it will sound right when played back
on a CD player. For example, it may be that the over-
all volume is low, so that you will have to turn up the
volume further than when listening to other songs on
CD, or the overall tone may be muffled, or there may
be too much low-range sound so that the speaker dis-
torts when you turn the volume up a bit.
Instead of simply writing the mix to CD-R, you per-
form the mastering process to adjust the overall bal-
ance so that the song will be more “listenable.”
Although this is sometimes thought of as consisting of
“fine adjustments,” it is actually a very important step
that determines the overall quality of the sound.
Normally, EQ and compressor are used to adjust the
sound during mastering. Professional engineers some-
times add a tiny amount of reverb to the overall sound
to create more depth, or pass the digitally-recorded
sound through an analog device to give it the warmth
characteristic of analog processing.
When multiple songs are recorded on one CD, signifi-
cant differences in volume and tonal character
between songs can make it unpleasant to listen to the
CD. Thus, the mastering process also includes adjust-
ments to the volume of each song, and determines the
spacing between songs.
In this section we are going to explain the process
from making mastering settings through writing the
song to a CD-R disc to make a CD that can be played
back on a conventional CD player.
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Accurate monitoring is essential!
Although this can also be said for the mixing process,
a good monitoring environment is essential for mas-
tering. This is because not only the amp and speakers,
but also the room and everything in it will affect the
sound. If we wanted to be more particular, a great
deal more could be said about this. If you use differ-
ent equipment and a different room for monitoring,
there will obviously be differences in the sound you
that hear. For example in your private home studio,
you might feel that the bass is weak, and boost the
low range, but may be surprised to find that you hear
nothing but bass when you play the song back at
someone else’s home.
The ideal mastering environment is one with as little
reverberation as possible, and in which the recorded
sound and effects are reproduced as faithfully as pos-
sible (the technical term is “with a flat frequency
response”). However in reality, only real professionals
are probably able to do their mastering in a large
recording studio.
So how can you create the best sound during master-
ing? Through their experience in mixing down and
mastering at a particular studio, professional engi-
neers have gained a sense of how the music heard in
that studio will sound on an average stereo system or
“boom box.” In other words, the best mastering is that
which results in a song that sounds good when played
back on any system. You should make an effort to lis-
ten to your song in a wide variety of locations. Listen
to it on expensive stereo systems, cheap cassette play-
ers, portable audio devices, on a car stereo, ...and you
will begin to see where your mastering is excessive
and where it is lacking.
Setting master EQ and dynamics
It is not necessarily a rule that you must use EQ and
compression when mastering. In this example, we
will apply only a compressor to adjust the sound, and
will not apply EQ.
Press the STEREO channel [SEL] key, and use the
MIXER section [DYN] key to access the dynamics
parameters. On the AW2816, you can adjust the mas-
ter EQ and dynamics settings while listening to their
effect on the overall sound.
While you are mastering you may feel like returning
to the mixdown and changing something. For normal
recording it is not possible to redo the mixdown once
you are in the mastering process, but on the AW2816
you can recall scene memories and automix settings
to go back and forth between the mixdown and mas-
tering processes whenever you like.
In general, mastering is a matter of “fine adjustments,”
as mentioned earlier, so if your mixdown has been
brought to a high level of completion, you will have
less to do during mastering. If mastering causes an
abrupt change in the sound, you may want to recon-
sider the mixdown.
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Equalizer (EQ)
Mastering EQ is used sparingly, in cases where you
want to adjust the overall outline of the sound after it
has been mixed, or if the low range just doesn’t sound
quite sufficient. Conversely, you might cut the appro-
priate frequency range a bit to make the sound
cleaner if the low range was excessive, or if too much
sound ended up in the mid-range.
In this example we will not be applying EQ to the
demo song, but we recommend that you adjust the
parameters while the song plays back, and notice how
the sound changes when adjust each frequency
region.
