Frequently asked questions

Very briefly, Mastering is the process of "finishing off" your fully recorded and mixed song. This finishing off process makes sure that your music is polished and ready to present to the streaming platforms at its very best, with a little sparkle and clarity added and at the correct volume. If you want to hear an example check this out >> 

If you have an EP or Album's worth of songs, it's great to ensure that they all share the same volume and tonal balance, so they sound like they belong to each other and not just a few random songs thrown together. One of the jobs of Mastering is to achieve that. 

You can definitely send your music to streaming services without being Mastered, but it will lack that final piece of brilliance and finesse that Mastering will provide.

If you're selling your music on CD or Vinyl then Mastering is a must because it technically readies it for those mediums. 

Mixing is, of course, where all your recorded tracks are put together and optimised so that each track is balanced correctly creating the overall song.

A good mixing engineer is not just setting the volume levels so that the guitar doesn't drown out the singer and the drums don't sound too quiet in the background. Yes, that is a huge part of it, but there's more. The mixing engineer is also thinking of the spacial elements like where each instrument sounds like its coming from in the speakers, as well as creating space for the instrument's frequencies to sound clearly without masking each other.

A lot of these decisions can also be made in the recording phase too. The choice of instruments and effects can make a huge difference when it comes to mixing those sounds, and Mastering the entire track.