Mastering is the final step after mixing, where a stereo file gets processed to sound balanced across all playback systems: streaming, radio, car speakers, high-end gear. It's not mixing continued. The goal is to fix frequency issues, get the loudness right, and make your track fit with other music anywhere it plays.
Okay, so what is mastering? Let's go through just really quick to get us on the same page. Let's go through the kind of process that we do to make a track, okay? Skipping the hardest part, which is the actual art of making the track. So you sit down to make music, you make track. In whatever software you make a track. Hooray, you wrote the music, you. You're happy with it. Cool. Now what happens after that? And this is the typical thing that happens after that. After you write the track, then typically what people will do is they'll say, great, I've written a good track, I'm happy with it. Now it's time to mix it. So you're going to spend a bunch of time mixing. That is getting all the levels just right, getting the relationship of one sound to the other just right, and getting it sounding exactly how you want it. Chef's kiss. So you've done that. Okay, I have a whole separate class on that process. After you do that, then what you do is the mastering process. Okay? So you take your mix and you export that out of your daw. You export that as stereo audio track. So two channels left and right. The kind that we stream, the thing we hear. And you could call it done there. And sometimes people do, sometimes people say, like, this is my mix, it sounds great. I'm going to send it off to Spotify and that's going to be great. However, you could do this last step, and you should do this last step. You really should master your tracks or have your tracks mastered by somebody else. So mastering is one last layer that we do in order to get the tracks ready for streaming, for putting on a record, although I'll talk about that in just a second. But that is something that has to happen. Putting on a cd, playing in your car, playing on crappy speakers, playing on great speakers. It's a way to make sure your track is going to sound great in as many different places as possible. It's a way to make sure that when your track is being played on the radio, no one reaches for the dial to turn it up or to turn it down. It just fits in with what music is being played on the radio station. It's a way to make sure that there's no kind of oddities in the track, like a whole bunch of low stuff that you didn't hear in the mix or some weird high stuff that you didn't hear in the mix, just to kind of put a shine on the whole thing and make sure it's going to work on all of these platforms and it's going to sound its best. That's what mastering is. So the main thing I want you to take away from this first video is that mastering means we are working with a stereo track. Okay? Two channels, like this. Like, look at this track here. Okay? This is two channels, you can see. And this is not all part of one session. These are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 individual tracks. Okay? This is not one session. I just pulled in seven tracks here to show you something that we'll talk about in a few minutes. But these are completed tracks that I have in a session and I'm mastering these tracks. So we look at this one. It's stereo, it's got two files. This is not the mix. If you are mastering something, you are done with the mix, you are not mixing it anymore. It is gone. So our mix is written in stone. We've bounced it down to stereo track and now we're moving on to the mastering phase. So that's what mastering is, and that's what we're going to learn how to do in this class.
