Thinking of mastering your own music?

Mastering is one of those things that can really drive people mad. Everyone wants to know how to get their tracks sounding like the pros, but it's just not that simple. You cant just feed the final mix into a limiter and expect good results. Mastering is an art and it's very difficult to explain it, the process can greatly differ between engineers and genres.

Many experts will tell you that it's wrong to master your own tracks; a fresh set of ears and high end tools are essential to get your track sounding its best. So sending your track to a professional mastering engineer is the way to go.

However, I don't think this is always the case. Sending every track you make to a professional engineer is expensive and counter productive (you want to make a little money from what you've created).  Many of us don't have the money to get everything mastered professionally and we just want a quick fix before sending them out.

If you're sending your tracks to record labels I find that it's best to do a rough final master before you send it out, nothing too complex, just something to give it that shine. A bit of light compression and EQing can make a world of difference. Sending everything through a limiter will also make your track sound louder so that it stands out from other submissions.

If you do choose to do a rough master then you need to be careful. Don't make drastic changes and only apply a small amount of compression and limiting, driving everything on the master bus to the limit can completely destroy your work. Their's tonnes of video tutorials on YouTube that can help you with mastering, so I recommend you familiarise yourself with the process before you attempt it.

If you're not confident enough to master your own stuff then don't. Record labels won't look over you just because it's not been mastered. If your track's good then they'll take it and if they do they'll probably master it for you.

Below I've embedded a video from Future Music, it features mastering engineer Mazen Murad who talks us through the mastering process. This isn't a tutorial though; it's more like an inside look at how the pros do it.