Engineered for Greatness Part III: Mastering

For our final installment of this blog series, I'll shed some light on what exactly "mastering" is. A critical but often misunderstood aspect of recording, mastering is the process whereby our royalty free music clips are prepared to sound professional when compared to other recordings. In the mixing stage, as discussed last week, the musical instruments within a song are optimized to sound their very best in context with one another. In the mastering stage, however the songs on an album are optimized to sound their very best with one another. As Aaron Willis, owner of SPI Studios in Plano, Texas puts it, "Mastering ensures that levels are consistent from one point to the other. A busy video editing team needs to be assured that the music tracks they pull into their video have a consistent volume levels so they don't feel the need to duck the music in and out of the VO." Says Willis, "Even better, the volumes will be consistent not only across a CD, but across an entire music collection of royalty free audio CDs. It just makes the library a more 'well-behaved' product. Also, producers are responsible to ensure the compression and limiting on a music track leave enough headroom for TV and radio compression. Broadcast stations inevitably compress all audio and you don't want your audio to become 'squashed' unnecessarily. An experienced mastering engineer knows how to make the levels strong enough for a CD, but light enough for broadcast."

To hear an example of our exemplary mastering, check out our new CD of public domain music, featuring well-known tracks such as "Amazing Grace," "Sunrise Serenade" and "Don Quixote."

---