Mastering is the very last, and therefore the final, treatment to your music before forwarding it to your distribution service. Mastering is the always the final polish that either makes or breaks your song completely.
You, as a Music Producer or a Mixing Engineer, absolutely want to make sure that your Mastering Engineer clearly understands the intention behind the song, your arrangement / mixing decisions. A mistaken mastering step would simply KILL all the possibilities of your song becoming the next award winning Masterpiece.
You, as a Music Producer or a Mixing Engineer, absolutely want to make sure that your Mastering Engineer clearly understands the intention behind the song, your arrangement / mixing decisions. A mistaken mastering step would simply KILL all the possibilities of your song becoming the next award winning Masterpiece.
What is Mastering
Well, let’s start with the definition IZOTOPE published on their phenomenal Ozone Pro product page. Check this article to know more about Izotope Ozone as a Mastering plugin.
A song specific master is the overall Frequency Balance, Loudness, Compression, Limiting, Stereo width, of a specific song. The primary objective behind this form of mastering is to make the song translate fairly evenly on different speaker systems, both mono and stereo. On the other hand, an album specific master attempts to create an overall sonic similarity for the entire album. This sonic similarity is usually in terms of Frequency Distribution, Stereo Width and Loudness.
Mastering is the final stage of audio production—the process of putting the finishing touches on a song by enhancing the overall sound, creating consistency across the album, and preparing it for distribution.This is the truest definition of Mastering that covers both the aspects of a Song Specific Master and an Album Specific Master. Let’s quickly check the differences between a Song Specific and an Album Specific Master.
A song specific master is the overall Frequency Balance, Loudness, Compression, Limiting, Stereo width, of a specific song. The primary objective behind this form of mastering is to make the song translate fairly evenly on different speaker systems, both mono and stereo. On the other hand, an album specific master attempts to create an overall sonic similarity for the entire album. This sonic similarity is usually in terms of Frequency Distribution, Stereo Width and Loudness.
How is Mastering Carried out
Mastering is generally carried out in specially crafted studios that allows a mastering engineer get a taste of the audio not only through the finest Studio Monitors, but also through a varied collection of speakers like tiny earbuds, car speakers, smartphone speakers, bluetooth headsets, mono speakers, boombox speakers, small 2.1 channel speakers, sound bars, home theatres, surround monitors, PA systems – the entire range of speaker systems through which the potential audience would actually consume the songs.
A mastering engineer would often depend on his experienced ears to be able to drive his mastering decisions in favour of the Genre, Intent of a given song to enhance the overall listening experience.
But as days go by we are getting equipped with more and more tools on and off our computer systems. The mastering tools are designed to prepare a visual representation of the audio using Spectrum Analyzers, Frequency charts, Loudness meters etc. This virtually eliminates the necessity of testing out the audio on a huge collection of systems and still be able to come up with more than decent quality masters that translate everywhere almost similarly.
A mastering engineer would often depend on his experienced ears to be able to drive his mastering decisions in favour of the Genre, Intent of a given song to enhance the overall listening experience.
But as days go by we are getting equipped with more and more tools on and off our computer systems. The mastering tools are designed to prepare a visual representation of the audio using Spectrum Analyzers, Frequency charts, Loudness meters etc. This virtually eliminates the necessity of testing out the audio on a huge collection of systems and still be able to come up with more than decent quality masters that translate everywhere almost similarly.
What is Masterchannel
Masterchannel is an online mastering service for music producers, powered by Artificial Intelligence and advanced audio technology. Masterchannel simplifies mastering by instantly delivering professional sound, optimized to perform its best across all devices and streaming platforms.
We tested several Automated Masters of songs of varied genres generated by Masterchannel and they sounded very close to our expectations. Especially, taking into account the cost associated in using Masterchannel compared to getting a master worked on by a real engineer in a real studio, one could really appreciate the quality Masterchannel offers.
We tested several Automated Masters of songs of varied genres generated by Masterchannel and they sounded very close to our expectations. Especially, taking into account the cost associated in using Masterchannel compared to getting a master worked on by a real engineer in a real studio, one could really appreciate the quality Masterchannel offers.
How Masterchannel uses Artificial Intelligence
In a closed room meeting with an executive from Masterchannel, we identified how Artificial Intelligence is implemented to carry out the Mastering process.
There are two phases of work that plays the role here. Phase 1 deals in training the model, which simply means making the software aware of how “good” masters sound like by feeding a LOT of “good” masters to its training dataset. This phase, if properly executed, would create an analyzable set of qualities or attributes that the software can refer to later while mastering a song.
Phase 2 deals in a classification activity which is carried out when this software is asked to master a song. In this phase, the software tries to analyse the given song to figure out which “genre” it could be classified into. This genre may or may not be the same as a music producer usually classifies a song into. This “genre” not necessarily has a name like Rock, Metal, Classical etc. Instead it is a hexadecimal non-user-friendly codes that the software understands well enough to carry out its operations.
When a given song is classified into any of the prior known genres, the software then applies a treatment onto the song to make all its attributes equal to the standard songs it had been trained with earlier within the same genre.
This, very interestingly, is the exact same way a human being learns a skill. The AI is making the software learn the skills of mastering and apply it on our mix tracks.
There are two phases of work that plays the role here. Phase 1 deals in training the model, which simply means making the software aware of how “good” masters sound like by feeding a LOT of “good” masters to its training dataset. This phase, if properly executed, would create an analyzable set of qualities or attributes that the software can refer to later while mastering a song.
Phase 2 deals in a classification activity which is carried out when this software is asked to master a song. In this phase, the software tries to analyse the given song to figure out which “genre” it could be classified into. This genre may or may not be the same as a music producer usually classifies a song into. This “genre” not necessarily has a name like Rock, Metal, Classical etc. Instead it is a hexadecimal non-user-friendly codes that the software understands well enough to carry out its operations.
When a given song is classified into any of the prior known genres, the software then applies a treatment onto the song to make all its attributes equal to the standard songs it had been trained with earlier within the same genre.
This, very interestingly, is the exact same way a human being learns a skill. The AI is making the software learn the skills of mastering and apply it on our mix tracks.
Checking a Before After
We did an extensive set of Before/After tests as we mentioned above with a help from a Masterchannel executive who made a way for us to test the mastering service for free. We included one among those tests in a recent Masterchannel review video that was published on our YouTube channel. You can watch the video below and would surely be able to find out the difference Masterchannel has made on the track.
Also, find below a 30% off coupon code for your 1st Master with Masterchannel.
Also, find below a 30% off coupon code for your 1st Master with Masterchannel.
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Following are some attributes of Masterchannel
- Premium mastering in studio-grade quality
- Affordable price
- A song will sound competitive
- Mastered in less than 10 minutes
- Increased chance of getting picked up by playlists due to higher sound quality.
Verdict
After extensively testing the Masterchannel platform with several different mix tracks belonging to different genres, we have decided to recommend the services to the Home Studio based musicians. Home Studio based music producers often lack a properly designed and acoustically treated room with proper monitoring systems. These can negatively affect the quality of the master producers come up with, which calls for a help from a proper mastering studio. But cost too shall often become a factor for independent artists and projects. There, as a solution, we see Masterchannel really filling the gap, making the producers equipped with an easy revisable solution for a guaranteed result.