Do You Really Need to Have Your Music Mastered Professionally?

By Caro Churchill

Most of the commercially manufactured and popular music you may hear and buy will be produced with a healthy budget and to high professional industry standards. Which most likely will involve sending the album or single to mastering engineer, to put the final polish and tweaks on a mix before it goes into mass production. But so many independent albums and self-made creative music is now composed, produced and mixed in more budget environments - maybe even using only a laptop and one microphone. So what is the mastering process and does it really matter?

Well I would argue that it does matter and if you feel strongly about your music and want to get it played on radios, car stereos or hand-held devices such as phones. I always find if nothing else it is invaluable to bring in a fresh pair of ears to my creative music and an experienced pair at that. Before going to print CDs or even just make available a download release, one of the jobs of a mastering engineer is to consider that the music will transmit favourably on most music listening systems and devices. Of course if you are pressing to vinyl this is even more crucial as frequencies do weird and wonderful things to the grooves of the record.

Someone who has experience of listening to lots of different music in detail can make the difference if you want a professionally sounding track or album. And someone who is creatively more detached from the material can give you a more objective view and space for reflection - for example do you want the vocal to be very in the foreground or more submerged in the mix? Bass frequencies can be particularly tricky to get right, especially for the most often used listening platforms such as computer speakers and MP3 players.

A professional mastering studio will have highly specialized studio equipment such as frequency and spectrum analyzers that can pick up rogue or problem frequencies. For my latest album it was only at the mastering stage that we noticed there was a very slight constant hiss at around 14 Khz due to printing all the mixes to 2 inch tape. Other problems may be picked up and remedied that can help compensate for budget home studio equipment - perhaps some phase was picked up by the microphone that had gone unnoticed, or a noise click or two occurred while rendering the final mixes.

So my conclusion would be mastering matters and save up or budget for going to a pro if you can. If you produce and mix your own music you can learn a lot during the mastering process. It has helped me develop as a recording engineer and as a composer and producer of creative music releasing independent albums. And as an independent artist it can give you a seal of approval before sending out your music to the public domain.

Caro is a recording engineer and has self-produced independent albums available. The album was mastered professionally by Blacklisted Mastering.