Online Mastering, The Procedures Involved.

Audio mastering should be an enjoyable process for an engineer.It is after all sitting in a room listening to music all day. There is a focus on both the musical and technical aspects of music and this focus can take considerable energy. In fact it is a very interesting interplay between the musical and technical aspects, I suspect that mastering engineers will each have a slightly different approach. My personal preference is to listen to an entire piece of music from the beginning right through to the end. This allows me to understand what the music is conveying in terms of overall feel and it also gives me a sense of the dynamics of the music. You cannot master music without excellent listening skills.

During this first listen I tend to make some mental notes about any very obvious sonic defects like clicks, bumps, bad edits etc. It is very important that these do not make it to the final release medium. In addition there is quite often tonal problems that jump out at the ears. These grab attention and need to be corrected. Then, in the digital audio workstation of my choice I will focus on the areas which have sonic issues.I will often play over the same section a number of times with a good run in, and out to keep context of what I am listening to. In many instances there is a combination of both analogue and digital tools put into place. Sometimes you require the "3D" sound of an analogue equalizer and sometimes you require a more pure tonal adjustment, such as that offered by a digital eq. Digital eq tends to sound as if it rests on top of the audio rather than be within the audio. So there is a qualitative difference between analogue and digital. This contrast is good, as sometimes you do not wish to make obvious changes to stereo imaging as a high quality analogue eq can do. The tweaks are often quite small and yet the warmth of the analogue eq can lend itself nicely to the tone of the track.

Compression is another tool used in mastering, again the digital and analogue counterparts sound a little different from each other. There is a certain "fullness" that high end analogue compression imparts to audio which is not quite emulated in digital form. There is a certain smoothness of action which cannot easily be described but when you listen, the difference is there. An important aspect of mastering audio is being organized and meticulous about the details.You may have to deal with multiple mix re-submissions and multiple software types and also hardware processes.You must keep track of what happened to any given piece of audio. Dealing with information in an effective manner is a very important aspect of being a mastering engineer.

If you think a career in mastering might be for you I suggest taking any audio engineering job to help you on your way to becoming a mastering engineer as it does not happen over night.All audio work will feed into the process of learning the skill sets required.