Mastering Audio and Music tracks – Tips and Tricks

I’ve talked a little about Master and what it is, and now I want to go further into the subject. Mastering Audio tracks is the final stage of the engineering sound precess. Mastering audio and music tracks can be long and difficult so I just want to give you a few tips and tricks of the trade. Earlier I talked mentioned that you should set all the levels from each song so they are the same. You don’t want one song to have low levels and the next one to be extremely high. Look at you meters of each song and make sure they are peaking at the same spot. If they are not, you will need to do some adjusting.After you have all of your song’s levels adjusted, you are going to need to do some more work with them. What you want to do is make sure that all of your songs or tracks have the same overall sound. This can be hard to achieve especially if your songs were recorded at different times, with different set ups, or in different studios. Each studio room has a different room tone, and its important to match things in the overall album. Remember you don’t want any one song or track to stand out over the others; you want to blend them together as if the were one piece of work.

Go through all your songs and listen to the low end base levels. Using EQ, try to match the overall base from one song to the next. Do this again with the mids and the highs. You are not trying to change the feel or the mood of each song, but simply to match the overall tone. If you need to add some highs into a song that doesn’t have any, use a harmonic enhancer. If you just push up the a high end EQ, it will only add hiss and other high end noise. The harmonic enhancer will add harmonics into the high end and will fill out the highs in songs where they are lacking. Remember, the purpose of mastering an album is to polish it up and balance it out; its not to change or remix it.