Album mastering basics

It has become quite common these days to release individual singles instead of albums. At the album mastering it requires a lot of sensitivity and effort than when the tracks are actually delivered separately and released as singles and not put together on an album. In this article we would like to give you the album Mastering bring work a little closer. This is about the technical perspective packed with the musical and compositional preparatory work.

Album mastering basic ideas

Basically, you should deal with the album in detail before planning the release date, that applies to the mastering engineer as well as for the artist. Close cooperation and consultation should definitely take place here in order to make an album really worth listening to.

 

Album Mastering – When is an album worth listening to?

A well-produced album is primarily characterized by a good clarity out of. This means that the listener can comfortably retreat to a location of their choice and want to hear the album from start to finish. So that you want to listen to it, it is of course important to have a certain Dramaturgy in the album through the order of the tracks and taking the listener on a little journey, similar to a movie. So you shouldn't start with the mastering, but with the Music production make sure to produce the titles in such a way that they convey the message well, i.e. what you want to express with the album.

So you should think about it what emotions you want to evoke in the listener and how best to pack them musically. This not only affects the general sound, but also the arrangement and choosing the right lyrics and melodies. This is often called substantive red thread designated. The common thread can be a story divided into different chapters that is presented musically, but it can also be one sequence of emotions, a single emotion that is repeatedly increased and then reduced again, or a biography that is divided into stages of life.

The selection of possible scenarios for creating this common thread cannot be limited here, but should be carefully considered. Because that often decides whether someone really likes the album after listening and wants to listen to it more often, or whether they just pick out certain tracks because they like them.

The "red thread" in album mastering

On the producer side, for example, the common thread could be the use of an instrument that runs through the whole album. But it could also be a certain loop that is placed in one place over and over again and a Recognition across all titles.

However, in mastering, the common thread means that a consistent, well-formed Sound image through all titles must be guaranteed. As a rule, this should initially be the tonal balance of the different frequency ranges. Ie no title should eg be too little bass, middle or treble have compared to the rest. Small differences are always okay, but the scissors are allowed

Otherwise the listener quickly gets the feeling that this is no longer an album but a compilation.

An important factor in album mastering of songs with vocals or rap is the uniform perception of the loudness of the voice. A good album mastering is characterized above all by the fact that the voice is as constant as possible across all titles. The listener never has the feeling of having to turn a track up or down and can fully concentrate on the listening pleasure.

Would you like to learn how to master an album properly?

Mono compatibility in album mastering

To a good one mono-compatibility To ensure this, it is highly advisable to listen to all tracks in mono at the end of the album mastering process.

Listening to mono and making adjustments to mono compatibility if necessary has the advantage of ensuring that all titles fit together even on small mono loudspeakers such as a smartphone and here, too, the volume control of the respective playback medium does not have to be turned.

In the same breath, the conditions in the side signal should also be checked separately. Certainly there will be titles or productions that, for example, contain a great deal or very little side signal. Here it is always important to weigh up the extent to which the side signal is raised or lowered or through in each individual case compression amplified or brings more airiness into the piece of music to be processed through expansion.

If you have now set both signal components independently of each other for all tracks, it is advisable to listen to all tracks again in the order of the track list and in random order in order to recognize any discrepancies in the sound and to adjust them if necessary.

Loudness of the individual tracks in the album mastering

The loudness of an individual song within an album is highly dependent on where the track is in the track listing, how many instruments and musical elements it contains, and what the overall emotional build-up within the album is intended to be.

An For example, a ballad should sound a little calmer than an uptempo song. One should always keep the overall context in mind, both the title that comes before the ballad and the title that comes after the ballad.

The emotional increase is also similar to that of a feature film. After an introduction with the first tracks, more and more tension is built up to the climax, which is usually shortly before the end of the album and then leads to the end of the album in the final part.

As an example, you could take an intro as the first song, which consists only of an instrumental, and then arrange the order of the titles bit by bit from ballads to uptempo songs to the actual hits of the album so that here a clearer Tension arises. Of course, this also affects the volume and dynamics within the mastering process. While everything sounds very, very dynamic at the beginning, the dynamic component can be reduced in the fully charged songs in order to captivate the listener to the maximum.

And finally ...

In summary, it can be said that mastering an album requires much more sensitivity and time than mastering each individual track on its own. So it's a big challenge here to get the maximum out of a track and still let it sound homogeneous to the other tracks on the album.

Chris Jones

Chris Jones

CEO - Mixing and mastering engineer. Has been running Peak Studios since 2006 and is the first online service provider for audio services. More about Chris

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