4 Important Aspects For A Successful Online Music Mastering Service

Music mastering is the highlight of any artists’ career because the final lay down of tracks and songs will either ‘make’ or ‘break’ your career. When your song needs to be perfect and created just the way it is intended to be heard by the audience, you want to the very best tools, equipment, and experts. When you need to reach out for an expert – contact the TinyThunderAudio.com engineers for the best in the industry.

To understand some basic constructs of music mastering, we must first know the difference between mixing and mastering.

Mixing - this is the process of combining and blending separate tracks into a recording for creating a song which is balanced both spectrally and in regards to gain or amplitude. This may include the balancing of levels for each track, fine tuning of each instrument or voice with compression and equalization and limiting, “panning” the tracks between speakers, and reverb.

Mastering - this process involves combining a collection of songs into a CD, album, playlist, or podcast and is also known as the ‘final master.’ The mastering aspects are a means to balance the songs or list whereas mixing involves doing the same except it include individual tracks to create a song.

eMastering – typically this refers to online mastering or ‘electronic’ mastering. Additionally, this process may involve a digital download of you mastered songs to CD such as 16-bit, 44 kHz format or another format, tweaks, clarity, stereo image enhancements, matching levels throughout each song, and then adjusting the timing.

CD Mastering – this is similar to mastering, in general, except that the overall levels should be evened out, equalization of the individual tracks performed, correction for minor changes, elimination of noise in between tracks, and adding of the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) and other data including the artist, title, and track names are included.

Stem Mastering – this involves mastering in which you deliver tracks in a few layers such as busses or stems and each may contain either in whole or part, some combination of parts for mixing. For example, you may include stems such as bassline, synths, vocals, bass drum, percussion, and general mixing.

Mixdown – the engineer or producer may begin this process by first determining how the sonic characteristics might need to be mixed so that the direction of the mix is ensured to be the correct one. An initial play to listen to the tracks would be important before deciding to import stems or setting the faders and gains to zero. Before mixing down, the fine tuning should have already been complete so you can avoid having a ‘patch’ job on your hands. Organizing your workflow will become very important – independently setup the mute, solo, fader, and bypass groups which will keep everything simple. Once done, you can route tracks to buses and then those tracks to the master fader and if needed, you can pull all faders down and start over.