So you're a musician that just recorded your first album. You most likely went into a recording studio and played all your parts a couple of times, together with the audio engineer handling all of the technical stuff. As far as you understand, they must be in a position to take each of the components they recorded, burn it to a disc, and then it must be ready to press. When this is not absolutely incorrect, most skilled musicians take their mixed down recording and pass it off to somebody else for mastering.

What is mastering?

Mastering is the final step inside the production of an album where they add the final "polish" towards the recording. That is accomplished by technically enhancing the clarity on the mixes. This makes the compilation of songs sound additional coherent, additional "together". This also guarantees that the mixes sound effectively on all listening devices.

Effectively, that's all fine and dandy, but does a professional mastering technician do when mastering a recording?

1. Volume Level Maximization

That is to be sure that all audio is at maximum volume, in order that all songs are in the same volume level. Ever watch late evening Television, exactly where the volume of your commercials are a couple notches higher than the show you had been watching? If an expert mastering engineer was involved, they would raise the volume of Television show to match the volume with the commercials.

2. Ensuring a Constant Balance of Frequencies

This guarantees that all frequencies are accounted for inside the recording; bass, mids, and treble, so that there are no places where there is certainly no bass/mids/treble.

3. Noise Reduction

This can be the approach of removing noise from an audio signal. When utilizing analog technologies, sound recordings exhibit a style of noise known as tape hiss. That is related to the particle size and texture used in the magnetic emulsion that's sprayed around the recording media, as well as towards the relative tape velocity across the tape heads.

4. Encoding

An expert mastering lab may well also take your recording and encode the UPC (Universal Solution Code), ISRC (International Normal Recording Code), CD Text (more facts concerning the CD, e.g. album name, song name, and artist name) or other PQ data.

5. Error Checking

This ensures the integrity from the information stream through CD duplication / replication at any CD manufacturing plant.

Nevertheless confused about what an expert mastering engineer does to your CD audio recording any time you hand it off to them? Don't be concerned, audio mastering is really a really difficult approach. I just hope that you simply far better fully grasp why experienced mastering is an integral part of the whole audio production procedure. It might make a world of distinction!