Many people still find mastering to be some mysterious process and don’t understand what it’s for. When starting out it can be confusing to understand why mastering exists.
There are many different reasons and goals for mastering. Most importantly is offering a fresh perspective to a song or set of songs. The mastering engineer typically won’t be very involved throughout producing, recording, and mixing so they haven’t heard the song hundreds of times. Typically a mastering engineer’s monitoring system is as good if not better than the previous systems used in the process so they are able to make more informed decisions such as making any necessary changes to the tonal balance of a song. Then there’s the more traditional aspects of preparing a song to be released which includes getting it to the proper levels for various methods of distribution as well as sequencing an album and making sure that the songs in an album all work together. This also includes the final quality control of a song to make sure that there isn’t anything technically wrong with the files being released.
There is a lot more that could be said about the role and responsibilities of a mastering engineer but in this post I’d like to focus more on my general workflow and approach.
On some projects I will be involved from pretty much the start and may hear some material throughout the process to make any suggestions I might have but more typically I’ll only be brought onto a project at the very end once the final mix is approved or very close to being approved.
The first step after receiving files is to load them into my template. The template just includes things like routing and exporting operations prepared rather than any predefined processing and plugins. Files imported include the main mix and any alts (instrumental version, TV mix, etc.). It also includes the limited ref mix. If the project includes multiple songs then I typically work on all songs in a single session. The exception to this is if an album requires more complicated sequencing where I’ll print all of the processed songs and bring them into a new session just for sequencing.
The very first thing I do is sit back and listen through the ref mix in its entirety. This will usually be the first time I experience the song. While listening I’ll be thinking about the intentions of the song, perhaps the direction that it’s trying to go, and if there’s anything that sticks out as an issue I’ll make a mental note of that to address later.
After this first listen through I’ll have a pretty good idea of what I think might need to be done and what tools I think will work. At this point I start to play around to see what works and what doesn’t. A tool that I thought might be perfect to push the song a step further or to fix an issue might not work at all. After a few minutes I’ll settle on something that works well and then I’ll start fine tuning. At this stage it’s very much a matter of A/Bing small changes to try and hone in on the song. Of course sometimes I might end up not being happy with where I am and take a few steps backwards to try a different approach.
It’s important to mention that throughout the entire process I’m constantly A/Bing with the ref mix. This is both to make sure that the decisions I’m making are actively improving the song (taking it closer to what I envision it being) and to make sure that I don’t make things too different from what everyone else on the team has gotten used to. The intentions of the song and mix need to be preserved. Having said that, on some projects the client will want the mix changed drastically while others might want me to barely touch it. Figuring out how much room I have to play can be difficult and usually takes either talking to the client about what they’re looking for me to bring to the project or I can do what I think is best on a first pass and risk doing too much or too little which can then be refined on a second pass.
Once I’ve gotten everything refined and am happy with where the song is, it’s typically been around 45 minutes. At this point I’ll usually take a short break of 5 to 10 minutes. After this I’ll listen to the song entirely through and see if I’m happy with it. After making any necessary adjustments I’ll jump around the song and A/B with the ref mix to double check that everything is still good in relation to the ref.
If I’m working on a project with multiple songs then at this point I’ll move on to the next song. When working on albums then I also frequently jump around to compare the current song I’m working on to other songs and make sure that they work well together. Once I’ve gone through all of the songs then I’ll sequence them meaning that I determine the flow of the album. After this I’ll listen to the album all the way through and make any notes of anything I want to go back and adjust. This is often the very first time an album has been listened through entirely which is quite exciting to have that honor.
The last step in the session is for me to listen though again on headphones. This is the first QC step for me. I make sure that I didn’t miss anything on the speakers and if I had doubts about something will use this as a last opportunity to make a change. Because I get a lot less detail on headphones than my speakers, I’d say that 98% of the time I don’t make any changes following this headphone listening.
After exporting the masters at the highest resolution I bring the files in to RX for SRC and bit depth reduction. Typically the highest resolution masters are either at 96kHz or 48kHz and 24 bit. I normally use RX to generate 44.1kHz files at 24 and 16 bit.
At this step all of the masters have been created and just need a final round of QC. Usually I’ll listen through the 44.1kHz 16 bit files since any issues on the higher resolution masters would be present in these. The full mixes get listened through in their entirety. For alts I don’t always listen through entirely. If that’s the case then I’ll at least open every file in RX to compare with the full mix and make sure it all looks good. I’ll also skip through each file to make sure that something like an instrumental is actually an instrumental all the way through with no vocals accidentally left in. A 4 minute song with 4 alts would take 1 hour to listen through all of the files at all of the formats so it’s just not possible.
The only times I’ve ever had issues show up in my final QC is when I’ve used new plugins so normally there aren’t any issues here but I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending out masters that haven’t been listened through. Just because it plays fine in the DAW doesn’t mean that exported files are fine. Because of this, any time I use a new plugin (or update a plugin) I’ll either do extensive testing in testing sessions or I’ll then listen through every alt file exported until I’m confident that the plugin isn’t going to cause any issues when printing masters.
The last step is to upload the masters to Dropbox and send a link to the clients. If any revisions are necessary, then after making changes all of the exporting and QC steps are repeated.
With all of these steps, mastering a single usually takes me around an hour and a half from when I download the files to when masters are sent out. I try to make that at least an hour of listening before QC. Any revisions will add to that. The range of time for working on a single ends up being 1 to 4 hours and so my rates are essentially an average reflecting that. Projects with multiple songs typically start to move faster as I get a sense of the album.