Mastering

What is mastering?

Mastering is a final process for preparing your audio before submitting for distribution.  It is essentially the final step to ensures that each track on your album sounds about the same level without having to constantly adjust your volume or EQ when listening back to it.  Think of a song you hear on the radio that is predominantly acoustic guitar, then it is followed by a song that has drums, electric guitars, synths, and tons of other sounds, and yet the radio doesn't need to be adjusted for volume.  Or better yet, a single song that contains massive contrasts in dynamics and instrumentation, such as Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".  (Freddie sings softly over a piano at the beginning, but later on, he's wailing over a guitar guitar solo with bass and drums and chorus of voices backing him, and it all sounds perfectly fine without adjusting the volume or EQ.  That's what mastering does.)

Should you do it?

There is a lot of debate over the necessity of mastering and its benefits, or even detriments.  Shouldn't a properly-mixed song be complete upon mixdown? Personally, I recommend mastering for a few reasons.  One easily overlooked aspect is that mastering puts a fresh set of ears on the project, so an engineer in one studio might hear offensive tones that were not prominent enough to notice in the other studio.  Even after mixing, all the songs on an album might have different volumes, and mastering "fixes" that, makes the album more cohesive. It also ensures that you get the maximum volume.  Granted there is some loss of dynamics, but one thing to keep in mind is that most of your listeners will probably be listening on poor-quality speakers (such as a laptop or dashboard speakers) or poor-quality headphones (like Beats) in a noisy environment (car, subway) from a low-quality source (MP3), so you probably don't want too large a dynamic range in the first place.  It would frustrate the listener.  Or if your song is played between two other songs by other artists, and their songs have been mastered, you probably want your music to "keep up" with theirs, at least in overall volume.

There are a number of other reasons to have your songs mastered after mixing, a lot of them overtly obvious and many of them more nuanced, but these are the usually the most dominant.

Where do I do it?

Unless you've recorded an album before, there's a good chance you've never even heard of mastering, much less know someone who does it, but your engineer probably has someone in mind.  Personally, I refer all my clients to Safe&Sound in Memphis because the engineer does good work, he's fast, and inexpensive.  Plus, we've worked together for over 20 years, so we have our own workflow efficiency of sorts:  I know how he wants his files processed and labeled, and he knows how I usually need them returned.  Once a song or album is mixed, I usually upload uncompressed audio files at high resolution for Safe&Sound to download, master, and re-upload for either my client or for me to give to my client.  Often, my clients never have to talk with the mastering studio; I simply pay the mastering studio (ie. Safe&Sound) then add that cost to as a line-item in my fees at the end of a session.

A word about vinyl.

If you plan to press vinyl, talk to the vinyl guys about it, ie. the people who are doing the actual pressing.  Usually, bands that press vinyl need to get two masters:  one for digital distribution (CD, USB drives, cloud services, etc.) and another for vinyl, usually through the actual vinyl pressing company via their in-house mastering.