The days where it was necessary to go to a studio to get your music mastered, are over.
It can be done at home. But of course, there are some things you should check before and while mastering.
Here are 4 tips for mastering at home!
Before we get started, I want to mention that TEAMMBL has its own pro mixing & mastering services.
So if you're looking for the best results and want a fair price, check the service over here!
Ok, let's get started!
Table of Contents
1. Environment
1 - Environment
This part depends on your situation. If you're mixing with headphones, acoustic treatment is not as important. Anyways, it's always good to have room to check your mix/master on some proper speakers in an acoustic treated environment.
So what should you do?
First, make sure you get some good room treatment. Just use some sound-absorbing elements. The best way to do it is probably getting some foam material on the internet to build your own sound-absorbing elements or you already buy some pre-build home studio elements.
Both ways work and don't have to be expensive!
When we're talking about the environment it's also important to mention that your speaker placements are super essential to get the best results.
I don't want to talk about speaker placements too much in this blog because there is going to be a new blog post about this topic soon!
2 - Monitor Level
You should make use of a fixed monitor level. After some time, you will get used to the sound of your room and speakers.
To make the right choices while mastering and mixing, you should use a fixed monitor level otherwise your decisions will get inconsistent.
So basically, if you use different monitor levels every time it will be hard to get a feeling for the mix.
If you mix at low volumes at first, you might bring up the low frequencies. Later when listening at a louder level you probably bring down the lows.
So listening at consistent loudness levels will end in better and more efficient results.
3 - Check Your Mix
Checking your mix is not just about using different plugins. It's also super important that you listen in different places and audio systems.
Places where checking your mix is most needed are your car, your TV sound system, and if it's possible even in a club where you have a gig for example.
So try to get as many different audio systems on your checklist.
For checking the more technical details, you should use some VSTs.
For this, you can use plugins that came with your DAW or even some third-party VSTs. Make sure you use loudness meters and phase correlation. In addition, spectrum analyzers can also be helpful to make sure you covered the whole audio spectrum or for detecting unwanted frequencies.
For loudness meters, I can recommend YouLean Loudness Meter. For phase issues and spectrum analyzing, Voxengo Span.
Both are free to use!
4 - Reference Tracks
You have probably heard about reference tracks before but especially when you try to master your own songs and you are just getting started, reference tracks will give you a feel for what you're looking for.
At first, make sure you bring your own song and the reference track on the same loudness level.
Again, you should use a loudness meter for this.
Another thing you can do with reference tracks is analyzing the spectrum. You can do this with an EQ or a spectrum analyzer.
And when you're just about using an EQ, you can even listen to both tracks and add some boosting or cutting in your own track if it's needed, but this always depends on your situation!
Mastering at home doesn't have to be hard if you know how to do it!
If you want to learn more check out our other blog posts about music production!
If you're looking for a pro and affordable mastering service click here!
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