Mastering is the final step when in it comes to ensuring your music has the best audio quality and sounds amazing across all audio systems. A good mastering engineer will respect the natural differences in each song while doing their best to improve the overall sound.
Hiring a professional mastering engineer to make your songs commercial-ready will help save you from lots of headaches and heartaches. It’s kind of depressing when you do all the adjusting and tweaking on your songs only for them to end up sounding like a hot mess.
Here are some of the benefits of hiring a mastering engineer to professionally master your music.
1. Save Time and Effort
Mastering your own music is time-consuming and takes a lot skill and knowledge to get it right. You can spend most of your day just tweaking the bass frequencies of your song for it to sound loud enough without overpowering your vocals or high frequencies.
Mastering engineers have spent years in finding the right sound that works. And as a musician it makes sense to focus on what you love most, that is creating lots of music that your fans would enjoy.
2. Competitive Edge
Nowadays, music lovers prefer to stream their music online instead of downloading it. This becomes crucial for you as a musician as your music is placed among thousands and thousands of songs all fighting for attention. You don’t want your music drowning in a sea of mediocre music. Mastering will give you a competitive edge when it comes to comparing your music to others.
3. Audio Improvement
Nobody wants to listen to music that drains your ears with fatigue after minutes of being bombarded by loud, harsh or lifeless sounds. It is the job of the mastering engineer to add depth, punch, clarity and volume to your music. Most mastering engineers have access to the latest technologies and equipment such as analog gear which help in giving better results.
This will involve the use of certain techniques such as EQ, Compression, Limiting, and Noise Removal. This will considerably improve the audio quality of your music and make it sound amazing and ear-friendly.
4. Consistency Across Platforms
Have you ever listened to music in your car stereo where the bass slaps real hard but when you listen through your headphones the low end suddenly disappears or becomes barely audible? Your music should be able to allow listeners to hear all sounds on the audio frequency. It’s the job of a professional mastering engineer to ensure that your music sounds good whether its heard on a high-end stereo system or a pair of earbuds.
5. Good Level Of Dynamics
It’s sometimes sad to hear music that sounds lifeless or flat. A good mastering engineer will do little to squeeze out the life out of the varied level of dynamics and still be able to make the song loud enough. It would mean going easy on the compression or limiting between the loudest and quietest parts of your song in order to maintain a vibrant sound. This will become evident when compared to other commercially released songs.
6. Achieve Smooth Flow From Song to Song
Listeners sometimes get annoyed or startled when they always have to keep adjusting the volume from song to song. One time they are listening to a smooth ballad or slow paced tune and suddenly when the next song comes in everything jumps into an abrupt, fast-paced banger that is loud enough to rapture your ears.
A good mastering engineer will ensure that there is a smooth flow between songs. This would involve rearranging their order or adding fades in order to give enough time between two tracks. This is especially critical when you are compiling a large project like an Album or EP where you want each song to make sense when played back to back.
7. Proper Formatting
Music streaming platforms or digital distributors reject songs which are in the wrong format or do not offer the highest quality possible.
It’s important to make sure that you submit the proper format required by the distributor. When the mastering engineer is finished with all the tweaks on your music they’ll be able to produce a ‘master’ track which will then be used to make files such as WAVs or MP3s and be uploaded online or even be used on CDs or Vinyl.
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