A Note from Joe...

Thanks for downloading this PDF. The following was written by

my good friend Ian Shepherd, a veteran mastering engineer from
the UK who has over 15 years of experience as a professional
mastering engineer. Thankfully, he has decided to share what hes
learned with home recording folks like you and me.
The majority of what I know about mastering came from Ian
Shepherd. I am a better mastering engineer because of him, no
question.
Do yourself a favor and read this carefully. It could transform
your masters.
Sincerely,
Joe Gilder
Home Studio Corner

Top 10 DIY Mastering Mistakes

by Ian Shepherd
Despite what anyone tells you, you can master your own music at home with plenty of time and
effort. There are a lot of places to go wrong though, so this post aims to help you avoid some of
the most common pitfalls.
Here are my Top Ten DIY mastering mistakes:

1. Tracks are matched, not balanced

People often talk about matching levels and EQ in mastering thats not what its about.
If you match all the levels and EQ , everything will sound the same ! Your goal should be to
balance them instead so that the loud stuff kicks, the soft stuff is sweet, but at the same time
everything hangs together.
Aim for consistency but not uniformity.

2014 Home Studio Corner

2. The EQ doesnt translate

Weve all been there you spend hours working on your songs, finally burn a CD and head out
to crank it up in the car and it suddenly sounds boomy, dull and muffled. Why ?
Its because even though youve balanced the EQ and levels from song-to-song in the studio, the
overall EQ itself needs to be balanced in comparison to everything else thats out there in the
real world.
If the overall sound lacks top in comparison to most other music, people will think it sounds dull,
even if it sounds great in the studio. This is one of the major advantages mastering can bring
the right overall EQ balance will allow the music to translate well between the widest range of
replay systems.
To achieve this, your monitoring needs to be accurate, and probably the room will need some
acoustic treatment or, maybe a great pair of headphones will work for you. Most of us cant
afford a dedicated mastering room or monitors though, so heres the next best thing:
My top mixing tip no effort required
(Its a mixing tip, but works for mastering, too !)

3. Too much compression

Youve heard all about the Loudness Wars before, so I wont spend much time on it here but if
loudness is your goal, this post will help:
How to make your music loud (without killing it stone dead)
Too much compression is a different thing, though your music could be heavily compressed,
even if the overall level isnt that high. Dont get me wrong, I love compression and for many
genres its an essential part of the sound but make sure you dont overdo it by mistake only on
purpose : ) How can you tell the difference ?
How to avoid over-compressing your mix

4. Not enough compression

If you followed those last links youll have spotted that Im not a big fan of over-compression!
Having too little can be just as bad, though. If the dynamics of your song are too wide, then the
loud stuff will blare out at you, and the quiet moments will get lost in the background.
Before you reach for the SSL buss compressor though, think through the alternatives
automation and gain-riding, parallel compression or some tasteful multiband compression might
give a better result.

2014 Home Studio Corner

5. No eye on the big picture

All the points so far have been about getting the right balance between the different elements of
the songs thats what mastering is, really. I always think of it as like finding the centre of
gravity for an album a common thread or line running through all the songs, leading you from
one to the next, telling a story.
Which means you have to have your eye on the big picture.
Hopefully the songs are already sequenced in a satisfying order, with some variety and contrast,
some ebb and flow mastering is the stage where you can make sure this works and tweak it to
perfection.
So keep flicking back and forth between different songs, comparing each one to all the others.
Track Two might have sounded great when you worked on it, but maybe now youve heard the
finished versions of four, five and six it suddenly sounds too big, too soon Track Nine is meant
to be the high-point.
Keep an eye on the overall shape of the album, and keep adjusting the levels and EQ to suit.

6. The Gaps dont work

People usually fall into two camps when you say right, lets do the gaps, theyre either the ones
who say huh ? and look confused, or the ones who say OK then! and get out their
notepads : )
Once you get into it though, everyone sees the point and usually they agree on what the perfect
gap is between any two songs ! Gaps play a crucial role shaping the flow and feel of an album. If
a gap is right, youll never even notice its there if its wrong, itll stick out like a sore thumb.
Take a little time to get the gaps right. To help you, here are my two favourite rules of thumb to
try:
Roughly two seconds from when the first song feels like its finished.
Two bars from the end of the first song, at the out-going tempo

7. Sample rate disasters

This problem can occur without you even knowing it.
It doesnt matter what sample rate you recorded at CDs need to be 44.1 kHz. So the final stage
of mastering for CD should always be to convert to that sample rate. You need to be careful
though not all sample-rate conversion (or SRC) is as good as it should be. Symptoms of poor
conversion can include metallic-sounding aliasing distortion or harsh, gritty added noise.

2014 Home Studio Corner

You can see a comparison of many different sample-rate conversion options here:
SRC Comparisons
The good news is that theres a free piece of software called Audacity which gives excellent results
if your DAW doesnt have graphs that look similar to its results on the page above, it might be
better to use Audacity instead. Wave Editor also has superb SRC options too, if you use a Mac.

8. No dither
This is a subtle but also very common problem. Dither is a very low-level noise signal added to
the audio to remove quantisation distortion when processing. If the audio isnt dithered properly,
you can end up with subtle but nasty distortion it makes things sound edgy, brittle and glassy.
In fact, I sometimes think many peoples adverse reaction to digital audio in general when it was
first introduced may have been a reaction to dither problems, as much as anything.
Now, most DAWs use floating-point processing these days, so if you work entirely within one
piece of audio editing software, you dont need to dither until the very last minute when
converting to 16-bit for the final CD burn.
If youre moving between different audio applications though, I recommend using dither
whenever you do. Not a fancy noise-shaped dither, as multiple layers of these can sound
unnatural provided youre working at 24-bit, any simple dither will do.
So to summarise at the final stage when youre reducing to 16-bits, make sure you remember to
dither. Many burning applications do it for you automatically, but its an important detail to
check.

9. Missing Metadata
Metadata is extra information stored within different audio file formats. CDs have only very
limited metadata options track titles, artist name and title are all included in the CD Text
information, plus barcode (EAN/UPC) and ISRC codes.
mp3 files support a much larger range of information though, via the ID3 tag. Theres a great
post on mp3 meta-data here:
7 Steps to metadata utopia
Of the options on CD, ISRCs are probably the most important these are unique codes which
allow your music to be automatically logged for royalty payments by any system that supports it
for example, radio play.
(CD Text is only supported by a few players, and doesnt affect track names in iTunes, Windows
Media Player etc these need to be submitted separately, online)

2014 Home Studio Corner

10. Messed-Up Masters

The final stage in the mastering process is often audio files, nowadays mp3s, FLAC, AAC,
WAV, AIFF the list goes on. And if your distribution is online only, then getting a good master
simply means exporting those files at the best quality you can, and making sure they include all
the metadata you need.
If your mastering process includes CDs though, there are a few more factors to consider. A CD
isnt necessarily a guarantee of perfect reproduction, unfortunately.
High error rates and poor-quality burns can cause problems in players, or for masters to be
rejected when you submit them for duplication. In the worst case, you may even find the audio
data is changed on the final copies.
Here are the main factors to consider:
Use decent quality media Taiyo Yuden usually give good results and are available from Amazon
Dont burn at very high speed go for the lowest speed listed for your media. So if its listed as
8x-24x, burn at 8x. This usually gives the best results.
Dont use adhesive paper labels these can cause the disc to spin unevenly and reduce burn &
playback quality
Always check to the final master you never know when a glitch or click will have crept in. Never
send out a master without listening to it all the way through on high-quality headphones
Keep the master clean always handle the disc by the edges, and straight after the final listen,
seal the packaging so it cant get scratched or dirty
You can avoid many problems with CD masters completely by supplying them as DDP files,
incidentally but thats a whole other blog post !
So there you go my top ten mastering mistakes, and how to avoid them ! I hope you find them
useful !

2014 Home Studio Corner