Make a music supervisor happy: masterful mastering
Photo: unsplash, pixabay
Great music performs a balancing act. Even if the creative ideas behind a track are powerful, the technical side can still let it down: well-mastered music is simply more pleasant to listen to, and can appeal to a wider audience. It’s easier than ever to attain a high level of mastering quality in a home studio. Give your tracks the polish they deserve, and help them fulfill their potential!
Sync music production standards
Like preview tracks, a poorly-mastered track will never make it through the submission process. Remember that you are competing and presenting yourself at a professional level and that MUST extend to your track’s final audio quality. Consider the standards of audio heard on television and radio and in cinemas – this, after all, is where you want your music to end up.
Professionally produced music both sounds great and does what it says on the tin – if your track is labelled as an instrumental, for example, it should not contain a stray backing vocal recorded through the drum mic. Ensure that your final mix is well balanced (if you know you’re, say, a kick drum fanatic, get a second opinion or two to make sure you’re not over-favouring one instrument track) and suitable for multiple speaker configurations, including stereo!
Polishing your music production
If you’re just starting out with your home studio setup or feel you could use a few pointers on where to go next, there are plenty of handy resources out there – try a few on for size.
If you don’t feel you’re using your production software to its full potential, several companies offer online tutorials to help users refine the use of their programmes – try Ableton‘s extensive back catalogue, Logic Pro’s videos or Bitwig‘s posts and youtube channel. There are also countless informal resources and forums out there which cater to both the absolute beginner and the seasoned audiophile – two inexplicably Z-heavy options are tweakheadz and the gearslutz forum.
As a final note: though we can deal with many file types, the higher the audio quality the happier we’ll be. Our all-star, ideal file type is .wav. Don’t worry about file sizes on the client end: uploading a .wav to our platform automatically creates an MP3 of your track, so clients have the option of both quick-download and top-quality listens.
