How do I master my mix?
In professional circles (and now increasingly for non-pro/bands 'doing it themselves' as well) - hmm... generally you don't. The reason for this is that the mastering process involves a mastering engineer listening to what you produced on a reference system that is well-known to him. Based on what he hears, he makes very small adjustments to either enable one track to sound sort-of magically 'better' than it was, or to several tracks to make them sound as though they are all sonically related. Sometimes this is easy for the engineer to do, sometimes not. The important part of this is that he has a fresh pair of ears listening to your mix, and is much better equipped to be impartial about it - because he didn't do it. You have to bear in mind that invariably, his system
is better than yours - it's in an acoustically designed environment, and probably cost a small fortune. And it's designed to be
very revealing - in the way that only really expensive monitors can manage.
Mastering engineers tend often to use analog EQ systems, and very decent D-A converters to listen on, and often prefer to receive 'stems' of mixes, often with a separate vocal, because it means that they can be rather more accurate about relative levels of change between instrument groupings, without compromising others. So you send a reference mix, so that they know where you're coming from, and they take it from there. You don't have to do it this way though - they can take the best mix you can do, and work with that as well.
There are plenty of establishments doing this sort of thing 'on line' now, and some of them do introductory rates.
But, if you think that the foregoing is not for you, then you can make a start at doing it yourself, although you have to be aware of the pitfalls - which you can work out from what I said above. You need to give yourself several weeks between finishing a mix and mastering it - this way you get at least a
little more impartial about it, and you need to have fresh ears - don't start something like this in the evening, or after listening to a lot of loud music. Take your time; don't start early and finish late, because that's bad too. Spend shorter sessions working on it, and always listen to your final result afresh the following morning. Get used to what commercial mixes sound like on your system - that's the closest you'll get to any sort of external reference. When your mix sounds similar to a commercial one from the same genre, you'll be at least some of the way there.
There are some tools that can help you - iZotope's Ozone, and HarBal spring to mind as the obvious ones, but there are other options too. The important thing is not to over-do anything; if your mix was pretty close in the first place, then not much is going to be required. In fact, a really good mix simply doesn't
need mastering at all - obviously! But if you have a mix that comes back either with a complaint, or sounding completely different, then clearly it wasn't a very good mix in the first place... and it all gets a bit circular at this point.
The process derives from vinyl days, when the mastering engineer had to haul back many of the excesses of studio engineers in order to get back to a signal which was actually capable of being cut without the replay stylus leaping out of the groove every few moments - and this was often primarily to do with where the bass ended up, and at what levels it was. Thankfully the days of this being a major issue are behind us - the people cutting dub plates nowadays break every rule going, but they are only trying to put a few minutes onto a disc - they'd never have got away with this otherwise.
We can't tell you exactly what to do, because we haven't heard any tracks, but generally mastering involves small EQ changes, multiband compression sometimes, and the judicious addition of bits of magic fairy dust, like localised enhancement, and small timing and phase changes across audio bands.
There is a
helpful guide available from iZotope, and several other threads about this, which you can find by doing a forum search simply using the term 'mastering'.
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