In this second installment of our three part series, Tom Volpicelli of The Mastering House answers three need-to-know questions about mastering.

4. What are some tips to help ensure the best possible master?

Audio quality can be very subjective. Before hiring a mastering engineer for a project you should have a clear objective on how you would like the finished project to sound.

Communication of these objectives between client and engineer is a key component to the success of a project. The language used to describe the character of audio can be ambiguous.

Terms like “brassy,” “fat” and “present” mean different things to different people.

One of the skills of a great mastering engineer is to able to translate this loose terminology into the specific technical processes required to achieve the client’s goals in a non-obtrusive way.

Some mastering engineers find reference tracks from clients to be helpful. Reference tracks can be worth a thousand words, because they serve to demonstrate the sonic objectives of the client.

My personal preference is to receive mixes that are as close as possible to what the finished product should sound like, but with enough leeway to be able to manipulate the sound in order to mold a cohesive album. Some general tips toward achieving this are:

Knowing your room and monitors. If you are using smaller nearfield monitors for mixing, be sure to listen to the mixes on a system that has extended bass to ensure that there are not low end bass problems.

If your monitors or room “color” the sound in any way be sure to compensate to ensure that the mix will translate well on other systems.

Fix track related issues before mastering. Listen for issues like excessive sibilance, uneven or exaggerated frequencies, phase or polarity problems, bad edits, depth and width of the sound field, and the relative levels of instruments and vocals.

I recommend listening to a mix in mono in order to hear if anything disappears or becomes exaggerated as well as listening to the mix at different levels and positions within your room. This can sometimes make an issue more obvious due to a different perspective.

Leave enough of the mix dynamics intact so that the engineer can make adjustments not only in the overall level but in the punch and clarity of the transients.

Don’t use any processing on the master bus that will interfere with processing that is best performed while mastering. This may include exciters and harmonic enhancers, EQ, normalization and limiting used to achieve a higher overall volume.

Leave the heads and tails of a mix intact so that there is room ambience before the music starts and enough of the music at the end to be able to tailor the fade out.

Having a bit extra at the start and end can also be useful so that a “noise profile” can be created for noise reduction systems that use this as a technique for removal of broadband noise.

Use mute and volume automation to remove extraneous noises from the individual tracks.

Noises include: headphone bleed when the vocalist is not singing, hum from electric guitars during breaks, and a drummer who may lay down his sticks after the cymbals fade at the end of a song, but before the final fade out of other instruments.

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