An Indie Musician's Diary VOL. 1

Mastering Alternatives

Mastering is the final "cooking down of the soup" mix to get that amazing audio"flavour"we love on the radio.

As each day passes, I am getting closer to being done with the mixing part of the Change My Mind project. Now I'm starting to look at my options for mastering. Money, or the lack thereof is forcing me to start to look into doing it myself - something I was hoping I would not have to do.  (Oh, to have the funds to be able to send my songs off to a professional studio.) I just long to get this album done. In one way or another this will get done. (Grit mentality!) The question is: Who should do the mastering? A professional mastering studio, a robot mastering service or me, myself? It is worth comparing alternatives and the YouTube audio engineering gurus are not in agreement on this either. 

Some say that mastering is not that difficult for an indie musician to learn - mixing is about 95% of the job while mastering is the remaining 5%. (A tough 5% at that.) So, if I have come this far and have learned so much about mixing, I figure that I can learn mastering as well. It's just so scary when you've never done it before. But can I do it with the room, the headphones, the monitors and programs/plugins that IO already have?

Keep in mind that I haven't mastered yet. I am just summarising all the stuff that I need to think about before I make a decision on whether or not I am going to attempt to master my album. 

Cost/Quality/Time

Every indie musician has the project triangle to weigh in when it comes to mastering, (cost, quality, resource triangle). Robots are fastest, proffs are best and you are the cheapest.  There are many options and it is good to take some time and think about what will work best for you. 

As I consider my alternatives, I've been listening to Ian Shepherd's podcasts about mastering on Soundcloud. I watch videos about mastering and take notes. Because Patreon hasn't picked up yet and I don't have any other income I'll probably have to master all by myself. While I am preparing for the worst, I am taking price quotes from various studios just in case the money works out. I'm not looking at a robot as an option because an album has to flow from one song to another and I don't think I'll get that flow unless all the songs are mastered by the same person in one flowing project. So I am left with sending it to a professional studio or doing it myself. This project is already taking too long and eating so much money but I can't stop now. So, in many of the following chapters I am going to share how I come to a final decision about where to master my songs, given my specific situation. 

Here follows a short presentation of some of the different options for mastering available to indie musicians today. This is always changing. 

Let a robot (or algorithm) do it:

Even if you use a mastering service like eMaster, Landr, or other mastering robot, you still have to make the decision if the end product is good. Don't load up mp3s. Load up accs or wavs of at least 16 bit. Follow their recommendations.

Advantages: it's quick and relatively cheap those times that it works. You can always test and see. But it does cost money.

It is a cheap and easy way to fix a quick demo. You drag the file into Landr and test the vauations. Then download after paying a humble fee.

Disadvantages: I have only tried Landr. There, you are given three algorithm variations to choose between and that's it. If it doesn't work for you, you don't pay and you are back to the drawing board. you lost some time. No big deal. But know that you have only thise three variations.