Audio Recording

Mastering is the last audio production process. It is the next process after audio mixing. In the mastering stage, the engineer does not concern with the mixing elements since he/she is only working on a single wave (the mix down).

Mastering is necessary to further enhance the mix down particularly to address these following audio quality issues:

1.) Lack of presence – presence is an element that makes the music as well as the vocals clearly audible in sound reproduction equipment (like hi-fi audio equipment, your CD player, etc). If this is not addressed, other strong/dominating elements like the bass and the drums will drown the important musical element like the vocals.

Luckily, the mastering engineer can sort this issue using EQ.

2.) Lack of punchy bass elements – if you are producing songs in rock and pop genre, the bass elements is very important to push the song. Unluckily during the mixing process, the job is to simply avoid mud in such as way all instruments can be heard at their specified frequencies.

However, heavy boosting of bass elements is not recommended in the mixing stage and should be comfortably in the mastering stage. The important musical instruments that are affected are the bass and kick drums.

3.) Lack of bright hi frequency elements – one of the common errors in independent music production is the lack of brightness with respect to high frequency elements. This makes the music so bassy and not been able to capture hi frequency elements properly. So if your music includes drum hi hats and cymbals, then you need to tweak these elements during the mastering stage using an EQ.

OK, once you understood the objectives in your mastering stage which is to address the above said problems. It is now the time to formulate the EQ settings for mastering. You need to know how to use a parametric equalizer.

The following are the settings I used (that is a good setting to start but it may depend on your mix down so you need to do minor tweaks):

High pass filter: 30Hz

Important: Do not apply this filter setting for rock, alternative, pop rock, pop genre as these frequencies are important). Apply this only when the song is too muddy on the sub frequency range.

70 Hz Q=0.8, 1.3dB boost (this will boost the bass guitar frequencies)
100Hz Q=2.0, 1.3dB boost (this will strengthen the kick drum)
200Hz Q=1.4, -0.5dB cut (this will remove the muddiness of the bass and guitar frequencies as well as the vocals)
3000Hz Q=1.4, 1dB boost (this will boost the vocals)
13500Hz Q= 1, 1.2 dB boost (this will boost the high frequencies to support hi hats, cymbals and vocals)

You might notice that the mastering EQ is more of a boost than cutting frequencies; it is because during the mixing stage, it is more of cutting than boosting. This will balance the things up and shape the song sonic character.

Always remember to use your ear and compare your mastering to the standard produced records of the same genre (if you are mastering rock music, you can listen to rock records and compare whether it is comparable sonic quality or not).