What is a Mastering Engineer? Here’s something from Wikipedia…
“A mastering engineer is one skilled in the practice of taking audio (typically musical content) that has been previously mixed in either the analog or digital domain as mono, stereo, or multichannel formats and preparing it for use in distribution, whether by physical media such as a CD, vinyl record, or as some method of streaming audio.”
Mastering is something I’ve really come to love doing. The industry typically gives most of the credit for a great sounding record to the mix engineer, but since I’ve started mastering I have to say that a lot of that credit can also go to the mastering engineer. If you listen to a track pre and post mastering you will immediately notice that the post mastered track sounds more like a professional record. The tools I’m using to create my digital masters are:
- Apple’s Wave Burner
- Izotope Ozone 4
- IK Multimedia’s T-Racks Deluxe Mastering Suite of plugins
- Apple’s Logic Studio AU plugins
- Event Audio SP 6’s monitors with a KRK Sub.
Wave Burner follows Red Book standards so the master CD can go directly to the replicator. It’s very intuitive and easy to use. If you are using Logic Studio you should look at Wave Burner. It’s comes as part of the full installation. I think it’s extremely powerful, but quite often overlooked.
