Once you begin the mastering stage, keep in mind that what you’re doing is entirely optional. Then, before you get stuck into mastering, try to play them back on a few different sound systems - home hi-fi, car stereo, ear buds and so forth - to see if anything leaps out as problematic. When your tracks are finished, park them for a few days without listening to them. The best way to do this is to make the mastering process properly separate from the mixing stage.
If you’re mastering your own music, there is no real substitute for these things, but it’s certainly a good idea to try to come at your own music with fresh ears. A professional mastering engineer also has years of experience, access to a specialized monitoring environment and, perhaps most importantly, the disinterested perspective of someone who’s hearing your tracks for the first time. But just because you can have access to similar tools, doesn’t make you a master (excuse the pun). High-quality software plugins provide mastering-specific tools at very accessible prices. Just as you can record and mix music from the comfort of your home, so you can also use the same tricks that mastering engineers employ from (almost) anywhere. Yet the idea that mastering is an essential stage in the production of music lives on, and so does the reputation of mastering engineers as wizards who can take any mix and make it sound better. Most of us bounce out our final mixes as WAV files, and that’s what most online portals require, so there is no need for format conversion. Today, especially if your music is only being distributed online, the original function of mastering is redundant. They also made artistically significant decisions, such as how long the gaps should be between tracks on an album, and how loud each track should be compared with the tracks that came before and after it. Each distribution method had its foibles, and mastering engineers would apply equalization, compression and other processes to the music to make it sound as good as possible in every format.
As time went by, however, mastering came to mean more than just transferring music from one format to another. Mastering thus began life as the job of taking recordings made on one format, and creating something that could be used as a source for duplication in another format. Music mixed to quarter-inch tape would be distributed on vinyl, on cassette or on compact disc, and the machines that manufactured these products required a ‘master’ copy to start from.
Historically, the copies were sold in a different format from the one that was used to record the music. To sell music, we need to make copies of it. The Dos And Don’ts Of Self Mastering Your Music
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