Audio Mastering - Essential Practices

Improve the sound of your recordings. Mastering is the art of optimizing the sound of a recording, finding the ideal levels and tonal quality, and addressing all the details necessary to produce a professional quality distribution-ready master. This book discusses the essential tools and concepts of audio mastering. It will provide you with a foundational technique for working in commercial and home/project studio environments.

Technical discussions address gear, studio setup, methodologies, goals, and other considerations for making tracks sound their best, individually and in relationship to other tracks. The accompanying audio supports two detailed case studies where readers can follow an engineer's manipulations step-by-step through real-world mastering processes. This second edition includes updated material on loudness and level, and on AI and its place in mastering.

You will learn to:

• Use the tools, techniques, and setup of a mastering studio
• Assess and improve sound quality by using meters, EQ, compression, limiting, and other sound processing tools
• Understand the goals of mastering, and how the engineer's toolset is used to achieve them
• Produce masters customized for their target media, whether for digital downloads, CD, vinyl, or other formats
• Assess recordings to determine how to improve their sound