What Do Mastering Engineers Actually Do?

love sam

The best advice doesn't come until the last 30 seconds. "make a good mix then the mastering engineer doesn't have to do anything!" Solid Gold

Sam as always you nail it!!!

More importantly... did he just 1 or 2 take this video without 100 jump cuts? Impressive!

Wow! Apart from the very wise advice offered, Mr. Sam Inglis has the best, and most understated, sense of humour I have had the pleasure of experiencing in a long time. Sitting alone in my home office watching the video, I found myself laughing out loud several times ... The side note on Geri Halliwell was one of those moments (even if I really enjoyed the Spice Girls music with my two daughters when they were growing up). Thanks a lot to Sound on Sound!!

Wow this is boring asf

Excellent video. Thanks for posting.

The current trend seems to be more and more of the following.
Importance of mastering: 55%, importance of mixing: 35%, the remaining 10%: the actual music, the mood, the groove, the originality, the innovation. Perfectly mixed and mastered music doesn't mean anything to me if that 10% isn't there (or hardly). The other 90% is just bling bling, the music version of multi-million dollars worth of special fx in a hollywood blockbuster movie. As an example: most of Beatport's chart music sounds boring to me, everyone does their formulaic thing and calls it a day. But they're fantastic because they're on the Beatport charts, right? And the mix sounds REALLY great. And have techno producers even heard of 3/4 or 7/4 songs? I find all of that almost depressing in current electronic music, all fluff and no substance. Play it safe ...

dope video essay 👍

Mastering Engineer: "Thank you madam, I've done absolutely nothing to your mix as it sounds perfect as it is. That'll be £250." :)

thank you!

If I may add: Having a qualified outside person making the final tweaks to a project one has spent days, sometimes even years trying to bring it to the best of results, is invaluable. A mastering engineer will have no emotional attachment and a pair of fresh, highly sensitive ears which are invaluable tools at the end of a project, when ear fatigue is nigh. A friend of mine made a rather beautiful comparison: mastering is like the varnish on a painting, making all the different painting styles and paint types cohesively fit together and allowing for observing the whole as well as the intricate details. Thanks for this very useful chunk of info.

Long time SOS reader here. From 2009 to 2012 I bought SOS regularly on paper, then I moved to a remote area and I've only discovered this channel last week. It can't be overstated the influence SOS had on me back in those days, as I was also seriously started getting into Logic and Ableton, coming from a Cubase crack and a TASCAM digital 8-track. I can honestly say the basis of my knowledge on home recording, engineering, mixing, etc. in those first years has been Sound On Sound magazine. So thanks heaps for getting me started over a decade ago and keep up the rather splendid work

Music wasn't always recorded onto 2" tape. You skipped over a period of time when music was delivered on Compact Disc and that was when a good deal of music I produced and recorded got totally destroyed by the so-called 'Mastering Engineer' who was really an acquaintance or relative of one of the guys in the group who has a computer in their bedroom. Leave it to them to take all that was beautiful about your recording and bury it, while bringing out front the ugliest elements and putting them right in your face. Then there have been cases when the music does survive and manage to sound good, only to have some unknown guy get the credits. If Mastering Engineers don't use Muti-band Compression or EQ, then what the hell do they do??

Thank you for that interesting summary of mastering. As a mastering engineer, I sometimes do no processing on peoples mixes but generally I do a little bit. Sometimes I do a lot of 'repair work', many of these jobs I first suggest they remix it and provide direction as to what needs to be changed but invariably the customer has no budget to remix it so I repair it as much as I can.

Just like you don't "fix it in the mix", you will have to have a good mix and not "fix it in the master"

Amen on everything but particularly the "arms race" that mastering plugins (and chatter) have become. I can Finalize (master) a track with nothing more than a Clipper :-)

I think Geri Halliwell actually snuck in my studio and laid down a vocal and I can’t seem to remove it. Anyone know of a mastering engineer specialising in GHV removal?

That makes sense why mastering engineer sets the runtime for music.

Good, that means I can easily master my own stuff!

The times I have a go at mastering my own songs, it teaches me to be a better mixer.And to want to send it off to get it mastered.

this is precisely why the very idea of even using a mastering process is even absurd ... when the format of recording and distribution are the same ...

people are willing to the money simply to compensate for their shitty speakers and amplification

Very good advice

As much as I would like to hear that my mix was so good that it didn't need mastering, I would hope that if the mastering engineer decided not to do anything to my mix he would not tell me because I still have to pay for it.

He just have god like wisdom in those last 30 seconds

FINALLY! Thank you for reminding this buzzword-happy world that "mastering" simply connotes "optimizing a master recording for the end medium of presentation". There is a special skill set required for this process. When you've mixed a song/album it is quite likely far better for one's own productivity and sanity to entrust the work of creating a final master to someone who specializes in the process!

I can't tell how valuable a thing you have mentioned at the end, that a good mastering enng, will do nothing to a good mix. This is sometimes not valued, but it is one of the most important traits of a "Real" good Mastering Enng.

Great info to know.

lol to sum it up, mastering engineers do nothing

Thanks for intelligently articulating the topic, without verbosity...by far the best I have seen, though I would have liked a little more detail. But then I must not expect you to give away your trade secrets, the insights you developed along the way that constitute the magic of good mastering.

Great advice but please make sure the image is sharp next time....

Thank you very much, I think you explained mastering in such a way that I finally fully understand their job and impact they make,again thank you!

...Now I want a Brown corduroy sofa in my studio!

As a freshly-graduated audio engineer who's been cutting his teeth on up-and-coming artists who often don't provide me the best mixes, I find that what is expected of me when I play the role of the mastering engineer is increasingly including mixing work and becomes a total abstraction of what a mastering engineer is supposed to do. I must admit I was surprised when you said mastering engineers, in the typical sense, don't use tape emulators or saturators -because I find that transforming a mix tonally, to be in line with what one might expect from the end product, with these plugins feels like the majority of what I do. Food for thought on my part -might be sending a lot more tracks back to the drawing board before I touch them from now on.

Mastering engineers bear the brightest light in the darkest of nights. Simple as.

Thanks you can clearly to make it more understandiable, Sir. That was journey of mastering and truely long experience ( logict !! )

Thank you!!

Um why would I pay to do nothing???

The dumbing down of home audio systems is killing the industry.
The mix should be optimized for the best quality audio playback only.

I'm old school.
A finished mix just that, FINISHED. And an entire album should be FINISHED in the recording studio.
A good mastering engineer needs to do NOTHING except prop the FINISHED mix for the given distribution medium.
Bill P.

I would love for you to work on my track.
How to contact you?

"they don't use saturation plug-ins..."

I've got some news for you... you have any idea how many Grammy Winning ME's have been using Neve 542's, bouncing to actual tape machines, or using Saturn 2 ?

I mix THROUGH mastering.
When you master, it changes everything individually and you have to compromise. When you mix through it, you mix as you go.

No talk about making glass masters at home.

This is equally informative and hilarious. I love it.

The section about what mastering engineers don’t do seems almost 100% incorrect.

Good times when every artist, before releasing vinyl, had to look for an experienced mastering engineer with analogue equipment. I remember when I was young, while listening to vinyl, I would read the liner notes to find out where it was mastered.

Wow 😊