About : Nick Powell : Mastering engineer

Mastering Questions Answered

With over a decade's worth of experience working in audio, both as an artist and a studio engineer, Nick has found that there are some questions people often have on mastering.

Below, he's tried to answer some of the more common questions he receives. If you'd like the answer to something more specific, feel free to drop him a line.

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What is Mastering?

Summing up mastering is both simple and complex. It’s often described as the dark art of mastering and it really doesn’t need to be that mysterious!

For me, I always find it useful to look at the context of mastering, where it began and how that informs where we are now. Back in the day, audio was largely recorded to tape but released on vinyl. So the primary job of a mastering engineer was to get that audio onto vinyl and ensure it played back.

Fast forward to now and we have multiple formats of release; CD, vinyl, cassette, streaming services. How does mastering fit into this landscape?

I see the role of mastering as the following:

Getting your music sounding as you intended on it's release format. Making sure it plays back well next to other tracks of a comparable genre or sound.
Giving a fresh perspective to your music and making adjustments tastefully and respectfully. It’s so important to enhance what is there, in a way that is not disrespectful or overrides the music you have created.

What is the difference between mixing and mastering?

Simply put, mixing involves working with multiple stems of audio to create the song or track, whereas in mastering, I’ll be working from your left/ right stereo bounce after the mix has been completed.

In mixing, you can generally be more detailed and your changes can often be bigger and more targeted. Mastering is much more subtle. I can’t adjust individual tracks precisely, but I can make tonal, dynamic and spatial adjustments, to get your music sounding as close to your artistic intention as possible.

Is mastering necessary?

I get asked this question all the time! In short, I would say that it is, though of course, I would say that, I’m a mastering engineer….

In most cases, I believe it’s an important step in the record making process and can really take your sound to the next level.

Of course, there is nothing to stop you bouncing your song out of your DAW and uploading it straight to streaming services, but what mastering is fantastic at, is giving a fresh perspective on your mixes.

Having your music heard, on a new system, by someone who has never listened to it before can really help to elevate your productions, getting your music to it's best (sonically) and ready for release.

How do I prepare my mix for mastering?

Everyone will have their own preferences here, but I always like to receive two files for mastering:

A reference master: so a mix that sounds exactly as you’ve been hearing it. Even if that’s slammed to heck with loads of limiting, so I can hear how you’ve been hearing the song.
A premaster or file that’s been prepared for mastering. I was always taught to do this the following way and it’s worked well for me:

Leave any compression or EQ on the master. You’ve been mixing with this and are most likely happy with it as is. I want to start where you leave, not try to play catch up. Keep your limiter plugin switched on, don’t bypass it, but move your gain/ threshold to zero. This retains the tone of the limiter. After that, see where the track is peaking. If that value is around -2dB/ -3dB, you should be good to bounce it out. If not, bring that master fader down by -3dB and export!

You can export at whatever sample rate and bit depth you’ve been working at, don’t worry about exporting at a specific sample rate/ bit depth.

Final top tip: turn any normalising tick boxes off! Keeping normalisation on makes the export extremely loud and undoes everything above.

Having some headroom/ a file that’s not peaking at or above zero is useful for mastering as it allows me to control the dynamic information of the track in a way that is both loud (if needed) and and still musically coherent!

Should I put a limiter or compressor on my mix bus?

Contrary to popular believe, I would say that this is fine.

Limiting and compression are an important part of modern music production and if you like how it sounds, roll with it! The most important thing is that you like how it sounds.

What I will see is to make sure you like what the limiter is doing. Sometimes, very heavy handed limiting can cause certain elements of a song to jump out in a way that feels very out of place. Keep an ear out for that. It happens to the best of us!

What's the turnaround time for mastering?

I can turn around masters pretty quickly. If you need them back the same day and I have space, I can certainly send them over to you straight away, though I do often like to take a bit of time with them before sending over.

This is just in case I want to make any edits before sending things over. Either way, I’ll work to a schedule that is best for you and fits your deadline!

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