What is Mastering?

Let's say you have been using nuendo for recording some songs you have written. You use many instruments and audio channels and also many Vst plugins and other stuff. The first thing you know is that all these need to be mixed so you can have a decent sound. Now what is mastering and what is it needed for? Well imagine that the mixing of all these channels was just a start. Mastering is needed to make all these mixes you will end up with to fit together in an audio cd. It makes them all have the same feeling. There are cd projects that more than one sound enginneer works on and more than one recordings are made. So the sound is different. Mastering can achieve the same feeling through all the tracks.

Mastering is made with equalizers, multiband limiters, with compressors, with many tools you can imagine and can make the sound wider and bigger, smoother and tighter. We are talking for tools that aim to similarity and volume power.

All these things I wrote are just a baby aspect of mastering. It is like we could say "mastering for dummies". But you get the picture. mastering is a tool of great importance and it is needed through the years more and more.

Here is a tool known for mastering (izotope ozone).