Mastering: You Can Do It Yourself (With a Little Caution) — Audio Plus

Jul 1st in General by Joel Falconer

In this week's Audio Plus content, Bobby Owsinski brings us the first of two tutorials on do-it-yourself mixing — the common pitfalls and techniques you can use to make your own mastering efforts sound that much better than the average mixing engineer's attempts. Bobby is the author of many best-selling audio books including The Mixing Engineer's Handbook.

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Author: Joel Falconer

Joel Falconer is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and frontman. While Joel's first love is writing and performing songs that touch on important and personal issues, programming, engineering and producing music in the studio are also strong passions.

"Just like everything else in music and recording, it’s now possible to master your own material. The tools are readily available and are very inexpensive compared to previous audio generations, but just because you own a hammer doesn’t mean that you know how to swing it.

Mastering is a basically simple process, but like all simple processes, it’s a lot more involved than it seems. As long as you know a few tricks and don’t have beyond-reality expectations for the end result, it can improve your program material by varying degrees, or just as easily make it a lot worse than what you started with."

Table of Contents

• What is Mastering?
• The Difference Between You and a Pro
• The Mastering Technique
• Perceived Audio Level
• Competitive Level
• Hypercompression — Don't Go There!
• How to Get Hot Levels
• The Signal Chain
• The Limiter
• The Compressor
• 4 Rules For Hot Levels
• Mastering Compressor Tips and Tricks
• Frequency Balance
• Summary

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