Mastering: The Basics
Mastering has three jobs and they are worth keeping apart: a final judgement on the mix, the technical preparation for distribution, and making a set of songs feel like one release. The first is an opinion, the second is craft, the third is direction.
- 3 jobs
- LUFS
- louder no longer wins
Where you run into this
- Production
- Releasing
- Streaming
In short
Loudness normalisation changed the game. Streaming services play everything back at a comparable level, which means a master squashed to be louder is simply turned down, and arrives with its dynamics gone and no advantage to show for it.
Knowing that louder no longer wins is the most practically useful fact in this whole subject.
How it works
LUFS is the unit loudness is measured in, and it is designed to correspond to how loud something actually sounds rather than how high the peaks are. Integrated LUFS measures the whole track; true peak measures what happens after conversion back to analogue, which is where clipping hides.
Where you run into this
- A master that is loud and lifeless and gets turned down anyway
- A quiet, dynamic master that holds up next to anything
- A track that clips on playback despite never hitting zero on the meter
In practice
Ears and room first. Mastering decisions are small, and small decisions require that you can actually hear what you are doing. A treated room and familiar monitoring matter more here than any plugin.