Reference tracks are songs that the artist or producer has chosen for you to refer back to for the master. Does a frequency pop out and hurt your ears? Or does the mix seemingly lose all of its life in this one section? Is this something you can fix at this stage or does it need to go back into the mix?īefore you start making any changes, take listen to your reference tracks. Make timing notes like - how long is this a problem? A mix can be fine and then a new element comes in that wasn’t properly taken into account and it skews it off. Start making notes of where things are going wrong in the song you are mastering. If you’ve given it all, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get it there. Focus on the best result for what you’re given.
While there’s always the “most optimal way” of getting a result, it’s important to not let yourself get fixated on the optimal result. Luckily, most modern digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Apple’s Logic Pro X have most if not all the tools you’d need to solve any problem you could run into while mastering! It’s just a matter of whether you have the knowledge for it. The whole process of mastering one’s own record is great, but as soon as it is for someone else, those problems that were easy enough for you to fix suddenly aren’t. Sometimes songs get “normalized” on the streaming service and then the whole mix goes to crap.
To further complicate things, not every streaming service treats audio the same. Sure loudness plays a role in how “good” we think a record may sound, but then as soon as someone mentions dynamics or transients we get kind of lost. While it can be a challenge for newer engineers to get down, in time you’ll find that getting a song up to competitive loudness isn’t really too difficult - the real difficulty being much more nuanced than that. Mastering is often referred to as a dark art on the internet.
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