One of the less discussed processes in music production is music mastering. It is all about balancing sounds and applying the last polishes without messing up with the dynamics of the entire output. Bree Noble dives deeper into this process with Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer, who discusses the importance of mastering when producing albums or creating songs for online streaming. He breaks down its step-by-step process to produce the best sounds without losing its emotional touch. Ian also explains when to use AI tools to do the mastering yourself and when to let a professional do it for you.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Art Of Music Mastering With Ian Shepherd

Musical Background

In this episode, I’m excited to be here with Ian Shepherd from Mastering Advice. We are going to talk about mastering. I’m so excited to have an expert here because this is not my area of expertise. I don’t think I’ve even had anyone on the show talking about this piece of the production puzzle. I’m excited to talk about that. I always start with finding out about your background and musical background, how you got from here to there, and that kind of thing, Ian. If you could let them know, that would be awesome.

Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I played trombone as a kid. There’s a trombone somewhere behind me in the background, which I don’t practice anymore and wish I did. I was classically trained in orchestras and that kind of stuff. I didn’t want to do physics in the university so I ended up doing physics and music, which was unusual back then. Now, there are loads of music technology courses and stuff but back then, there were only 2 or 3 courses that you could do.

I got halfway through that and was depressed because I was like, “I’m not good enough to be a professional musician. I don’t want to be a music teacher. What am I going to do? I could be a sound engineer.” I got lucky because most people get into mastering on the back of either being a musician, producer, recording engineer, or something later on in their career.

I sent out a load of letters to studios here in the UK, including to this company SRT. They were a mastering company but I didn’t know and realize that. I ended up getting a job there pretty much straight after college, which as I say was young. I was lucky that I had mentors. It’s hard to get people to help you get a career in the music industry. Having got my foot in the door, they trained me up. I worked for them for fifteen years as a Professional Mastering Engineer. We can talk a bit more about what mastering is.

I did some recording and production as well. There were enhanced CDs back in the day. We’re putting videos on the end of the CD so that you can have the music and the video. From there, we moved into DVD and then Blu-ray. That’s when I moved to set up my company. About the same time, I started blogging and a YouTube channel. Since then, I’ve started my podcast and developed some audio plugins to help people get better results at doing this stuff. I’ve got all kinds of different areas of the production process that I’m involved with. I feel lucky.

Music Mastering

It’s so cool that you found someone to train you up in the stuff and you’re using that science knowledge and the music together. Back in the day, I was in music and business. That was weird, too. Now, it’s a lot more normal, which is great because musicians need that information. Let’s get into mastering and start at the ground level here. There may be some people here who don’t know what mastering is or there may be people who think they know what mastering is but maybe they need a little more nuanced definition.

I have three different explanations. There’s the super short one, the dry technical one, and then the long, more interesting one. The super short one is that it’s making the music sound the best that it can be. Mastering tends to be the stage after you’ve recorded and mixed all the songs of an album, an EP, a project, or whatever it might be. It used to be making a production master to go to have vinyl pressed, cassettes, or CDs. Now, it’s much more about releasing it for online streaming services.

It’s taking a step back and looking at the whole collection of songs. I always say when you’re mixing a song, you’re balancing the channels in the mix to create a final song. Mastering is balancing the songs in an album, a group, a playlist, or a group of songs to create something convincing whole. The dry technical one is that. You’ve got to create something suitable for whatever format it’s going to be replicated in. That’s about the right file formats and loudness. All those kinds of different specifications are needed for online delivery and distribution.

 

The more interesting one is I always think of it as a bit like Photoshop. Everybody has a camera on their phone. Every so often, you take a picture that you’re proud of and you think, “I’m going to print that out and put it on the wall,” or maybe use it as a card for somebody’s birthday. You then look at it and go, “There’s a blob of food on my face or a power line in the background of my landscape.” You might open it up in Photoshop and try to fix those problems. You might rebalance the colors and brightness. You might change the aspect ratio or the crop of it to zoom in on somebody’s face and all those things.

Mastering is the same thing for music, except that instead of contrast and brightness, we’re balancing loudness and dynamics, how lively it sounds, how impactful it is, or whether it’s got the right punch and impact. Instead of color balance, you’re dealing with the overall sound of it and the amount of bass, treble, mids, and highs that might be in there so that it’s going to translate and sound well on as many different systems as possible right from an earbud or a phone speaker up to a club PA or whatever it might be.

You could even take it a little bit further and say that it’s almost like presenting an exhibition of photographs or pictures. At that point, you’re thinking, “What order are they going to be in when people walk around? How big am I going to print them? How am I going to light them? Am I going to have 2 or 3 on this wall?” The same thing applies to mastering. It’s about, “What’s the running order going to be? What are the gaps going to be? How does this song relate to that song so that they balance well? This one sounds big and loud and this one sounds soft and intimate.” It’s all of those decisions. That’s my usual way of explaining it.

I love that description and that makes a lot of sense but that brings up the question that I’m sure you get all the time. When people aren’t necessarily releasing full albums at the same time, should they be mastering singles? Does that make sense when it’s not in comparison with other things? Maybe they’re releasing singles as they go and it is eventually going to be in an album with other things but you don’t have all those pieces yet. This landscape makes it a little bit different. I was wondering if you are balancing against some standard on Spotify of songs that they might be next to on a playlist or something.

I prefer to master an album or at least 2 or 3 songs because that’s when it starts to make sense. Having said that, I usually like to come to a project cold. I like to listen, try to have empathy for what the artist or producer is trying to achieve, and bring a fresh perspective to it. I will do that first and then start comparing it to other things.

If somebody tells me, “This is going to be the first one and there’s going to be an album to follow,” then I always say to them, “I will do what I think is right for this song.” When we’ve heard the other songs that are in the project, maybe there might be some little tweaks that are needed. Sometimes there are but they’re usually quite minor. I don’t always have an idea in my head of how I want things to sound but I always have an idea of what I don’t want things to sound like.

As soon as I start hearing something, it’s like, “I want to improve it this way. I want to help that. That’s not quite working but if we do this, it’ll get better.” Sometimes people come to me with reference tracks. They say, “I want to sound like Taylor Swift or Metallica,” whoever it is. Based on what I know about those artists, that tells me this about how they want this to turn out. We can have a conversation about that. I will still not usually listen to those things first. I usually come to it fresh and then I’ll go back to the reference and think, “Based on that idea, maybe I need to move it in this direction.”

The other thing that I like is thinking about how it might sit against things in a playlist. Lots of people are hoping that their music will get picked up and featured in the top ten country artists or whatever it might be. I will then check my work against other similar stuff. There’s an interesting tangent that we don’t have to get into too much, which is how loud the songs should be and what happens when things get played back online.

A big thing in the music industry is this thing called the loudness wars and this idea that you need to have your music be super loud to be successful or popular. I understand that. I know people feel a lot of pressure about that. The reality is most people listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever it is. With all of those platforms by default, if a song is super loud, they turn it back down. People don’t like being at sudden changes in loudness. Many people complain about the ads on YouTube and they’re suddenly jumping way too loud.

Most people who hear super loud music on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Music will turn it back down. No one likes sudden changes in loudness. Share on X

To try and improve that, they do this thing where they measure how loud things are and turn the loud stuff down. That completely changes the way that things feel. When we hear them, you might have mastered it so you thought you were as loud as Taylor Swift. When you hear the two loudness matched, it feels completely different.

An important part of the process for me is how it sounds on its own. How does it sound in comparison to other things that I imagine it might be next to? How will it sound when people hear it in that way with the loud stuff evened out? Those are all the kinds of things I think about. To get back to your question, if it’s going to be part of an album, it can evolve. If it’s a single song, it is harder. Even when you need to make changes, usually for me, it’s a 5% or 10% thing. It’s not a dramatic shift in the way that something sounds. It’s like, “Now that I hear that it’s going to come after this song, I’m going to have the introduction come a little bit quieter. That one was super loud so we’re going to do this instead.”

This is the way I always encourage artists to create anyway but the best way to go about it is I recommend EPs a lot. Create your whole EP. It’d be 4 to 6 songs. Have those all done, get them mastered, and then start releasing them as singles. You’ve not got it all mastered together as one project but they can still be released over time and you can take advantage of all that promotional opportunity. In your opinion, a good way to do it is to have that group of songs and then they’re all mastered together. When it gets to eventually being that cohesive thing, it will sound that way.

I think that’s the ideal. I appreciate people. The reality is it can take so long to write and produce a song and get it to the point where you’re happy to let it go. I understand where people feel impatient and want to get it out there. Either of those will work. Certainly, I’ve seen more and more mainstream artists releasing things in the way that you described.

For example, I’m a big Peter Gabriel fan. He released one song a month for his last album over the course of more than a year. He was touring, performing the songs from the album, and then the album came out as a whole. I saved it up. I listened to the first song and then was like, “No, I’m going to wait for the album.” I put it off for an entire year. I come from that. I used to love going out, buying a record or CD, and listening through to it as an experience. All of these things can get great results.

Vinyl

Many Gen-Zers, especially, are into vinyl. That may come back. There may even be a huge surge in mastering the whole album because of vinyl.

It could be. It’s still a fairly small slice of the overall pie. I don’t know how true this is. I hear lots of people buy vinyl and never play it. They just like the artwork, which I do as well. Mastering is still super important. In some ways, I almost feel like there’s too much emphasis put on it. An important thing for people to understand about mastering is it’s an opportunity to make the music sound as good as it possibly can but you need to be at a decent standard going into it.

It used to be a thing that nobody knew about when I started. Now, it’s almost like everybody knows about it. They want to focus on the mastering instead of the recording and production. The best way to make mixing easy is to do a fantastic recording and the best way to make mastering easy is to do a fantastic mix of a fantastic recording and performance as well. Keeping everything to the highest possible level all the way through is always going to get the best possible result.

Bad Mix

I’ve heard that, especially from mixing engineers. You can’t fix things in the mix if the recording is not getting the best quality. You can only do so much. It’s like building upon each other. We need to think about all levels of what’s going on. Is there anything you can do with mastering if the mix is bad or do you say, “You need to go back and remix this?”

I’m always cautious about calling anyone’s mix bad.

You don’t have to say that but like, “We benefit from a new mix.”

The funny thing is that new technology is coming out all the time. Back in the day, let’s say the lead vocals weren’t quite loud enough. If you have a vocalist who’s a little bit shy and says, “Don’t make it that loud,” and it needs to be up there, you could bring the vocal out a little bit in the mastering stage. That would help but it would always be better for them to go back to the mix and tweak it.

Now, there’s tech that will enable you to, within reason, lift the vocal out, pull the drums back, or boost the guitars from a stereo mix, which is science fiction to me. Those are no longer necessarily deal breakers. You’d always get a better result if you go back to the mix. That’s always what I’d encourage people to do. To give an example of something that can sometimes happen, sometimes people want a wide piano sound. They can hit the phase invert or the polarity invert button on the mixer. It’s a circle with a line through it.

You will always get a better music result if you back to the mix. Share on X

It’s a technical thing. It’ll take something that’s fairly mono-sounding and spread it out. Initially, it seems exciting and cool until you hit the mono button or you play it back on a phone speaker where there’s only one speaker. What happens is the waveform has been flipped upside down. When they get recombined, they cancel out. I’ve had albums with a bass where you hit mono and the piano more or less disappears. It was pretty much in the center.

With those kinds of things, there’s nothing you can do. You have to go back and fix that in the mix or you have to live with it, which sometimes because of deadlines happens. A lot of other stuff you can help with. On the one hand, you want your mix to be as good as it possibly can be. On the other hand, it’s amazing what you can achieve in mastering. One of the reasons I find it enjoyable and fascinating is the power.

One thing is if you’ve got some real imbalance. Sometimes, I’ll get a mix where I love the vocal but I want to open out the high frequencies and give it more sweetness, air, and space but the drum sound is bright. You try to do that for the vocals and the drums get uncomfortable and too much. The opposite applies where you want to brighten up the drums and the vocal is already quite bright. You brighten up the drums and the vocals are suddenly making your ears bleed. There’s not a heck of a lot that you can do in the mastering that’s going to need a mixed tweak.

It’s interesting because there are some mastering engineers who the first thing they do is say to their client, “This is wrong. Go back and do it again.” Their clients love them. Apparently, that’s not me. I don’t get those clients and I don’t tend to do that. I will always try to have respect and empathy for what’s given to me. Even if I think it sounds a little bit unusual, I will still do what is best for it and say, “Here’s my master. I can’t help being curious that maybe if we backed off that compressor a little bit or opened out the guitar sound slightly, maybe I could get an even better result. If you’d like to try that experiment, I would like to do that.”

In that case, sometimes they will come back and say, “Let’s go for it.” Other times they’re like, “No, I’m sick of this. I’ve been working on it for two years. I want to get rid of it. We can’t afford to go back into the studio,” or whatever it is. That’s fine as well. There are lots of things you can do but only up to a point. You can’t get something exceptional if it’s not great and you can’t sound great unless it’s good already. There are always limitations.

You cannot get exceptional music if it is not great already. Share on X

That’s cool to know that there are some things you can do. I’ve been in a band before where the production mixing was done or overseen by all the instrumentalists. I felt like they always overblew the instruments over the vocals and you couldn’t hear them. It sounds like that is something you could fix in the mastering phase. You could probably do it without them even realizing that you did it but making it more balanced.

With modern technology, there’s something you can improve. There are limits because all of this stuff is the same science that goes into making MP3 files. If you’ve ever heard of a low-quality MP3 file, you can get this swirly metallic sound to it that is not very pleasant. If you go too far with trying to, for example, lift a vocal out, you can get side effects that are similar. If the vocal is way too low, then you’re probably going to have to go back and do it again.

Another example is if somebody has a live recording, it was straight out of the sound desk so there is no real mix. It’s what there is. In that situation, for example, quite often the drums will not be in the PA that much because they’re loud on stage anyway. In the recording, there may not be as much as you’d like. There are things you can do to help with that. There’s all kinds of stuff that can be done. New tech is being thought of every day.

You think about The Beatles documentary Get Back. The reason a lot of that footage didn’t get used in the original film Let It Be was that the instruments were obscuring the voices. With this modern technology, Peter Jackson and the guys were able to separate these things and rebalance them to make them more usable. It’s amazing what is possible.

Visuals

I want to ask you about the visual part of mastering. The reason I’m asking this is because I record a music show. I see the waveforms all the time. I can tell when a song hasn’t been mastered because it doesn’t have that big chunk. The drums are all delineated and the levels are clearly all over the place. Is part of what you do visual or is it all audio? When you look at the visual, it looks mastered.

It’s a bit of both. One thing I would say is we need to be careful with the waveforms. I know exactly what you mean. Unmastered stuff is all spiky with lots of variety. If it’s gone too far, it looks more like a sausage or a brick.

The brick is terrible. Sometimes those even have distortion.

That can be the case. I did a video for my YouTube channel that people might want to check out. You need to be careful looking at waveforms. You can tell a certain amount and then when you start getting towards that point where everything is much more dense, it gets less useful. You can have something much louder and they look pretty much similar. Having said that, there’s other stuff that you can look at.

One of the plugins that I developed is a thing called Dynameter, which gives you an idea of how much compression and limiting the technical terms have been used on the song. That gives you much more useful feedback than looking at a waveform to get this stuff right. To rewind slightly, I never master or mix with my eyes. It’s all about how it sounds. If the waveform looks scary, it doesn’t look solid enough, or the dynameter is showing me something but it sounds good, I’m always going to go with what my ears tell me rather than what I see.

 

Having said that, when you’re starting, all of these visual aids can be super helpful. I’m sure people have seen a frequency response curve, which gives you an idea of how much bass, mid, and treble there is, for example. We have loudness meters. Back in the day, I used a VU meter, which had a needle. I’m old school so I still use a plug-in version of that.

There are ways of visualizing how much stereo spread there is in a signal. It can all be helpful, especially when we’re trying to figure out what should something sound like, what we should be doing with this, and what the effect of changing it is. It gives you some perspective on it. The final decision should always be based on the way that it sounds rather than the numbers or the visuals.

Self-Work Vs Professional Work

There are so many tools and you were talking about even tools that you develop to be able to do this yourself. In my experience, I even learned how to mix my stuff but I always sent it off for mastering because I did not feel confident. What is your opinion? Being a master engineer yourself, what is your opinion around sending off your stuff to be mastered by a professional versus trying to do it yourself?

I’m a mastering engineer. To get the absolute best results, you should use a professional mastering engineer. There are a lot of advantages to doing that, especially if you’ve recorded a mix yourself. One suggestion that people seem to find helpful is that the mastering engineer could be the only person outside of you who gets to hear it and give you an opinion.

The whole thing about mastering is that rather than working for months and weeks on songs, typically you’ll master an album in a day or maybe a day and a half. You’re hearing the first impressions and trying to optimize for that. A mastering engineer will have mastered a lot of albums over the course of their career so they will hopefully have a lot of experience to come to that. If they’re successful, then hopefully they have good taste. Their opinions are going to be helpful to you.

Mastering is fun. It’s another part of the creative process. There are lots of people who don’t want to go to somebody else. They want to learn how to do this stuff themselves. On the podcast, website, and YouTube channel, I have all kinds of stuff to help people get better results doing this themselves. I was lucky enough to have mentors back in the day and that’s so much harder to come across now. The reason I started my blog originally was that I saw so much bad advice online in my opinion. I wanted to help people do things more the way that I was taught. I knew from experience that I was going to get them great results. You can master music yourself.

One thing I like to say is that mastering is simple but not easy. One of the things that I see a lot on YouTube and everywhere else is people getting way into the weeds. At the end of the day, mastering for me is about deciding how loud it’s going to be, balancing the EQ, and then thinking about the dynamics, which is the contrast between the verse and the chorus, how hard the drums hit, and that kind of stuff.

If you get those three things right, even if you get the EQ and the loudness right, don’t go any further than that, you can get 80% to 90% of the value from the process, which is not to say that the final 10% isn’t also super worthwhile but to do that is not easy. You need to have a good listening environment that you can trust. Having a lot of experience helps. It’s hard to get perspective on our music when we’ve been working on it for so long. It’s easy to tell yourself stories about, “It’s fine that the drums sound a bit dull because of this.” Whereas a mastering engineer might come to it and say, “I don’t care about all of that. You need to do this.” That’s helpful input.

Both things are valid. It’s interesting because I get a mix of people doing my courses. There are people who do the course and go on to become professional mastering engineers. There are people who come on and do the course and say, “I don’t want to do that,” but still feel that it’s valuable because they understand much more about what is and isn’t possible, and where they need to go to get a good result. There are people who take the ideas, go back, and use those to record the production stuff that they’re doing. There are professional mastering engineers who come along to see what I’m doing.

Listening Environment

It makes total sense. I always say that if you’re going to hire someone to do something, you should know the process so you know if they’re doing it right. Whenever you’re paying someone for something, it’s good to know or at least understand what they’re doing so you’re not going to be screwed or get a not-good result. You mentioned the listening environment. I wanted to ask this. Do you recommend listening with headphones, speakers, or both? How do you get the right feel for what you’re going to hear in general?

That’s one of the hardest things. I mentioned about perspective. Another thing that’s hard is that even if you’ve set up the best possible recording and production room at home that you can, another value of going to a mastering engineer is that they will have a very fine-tuned accurate monitoring system to listen to things on that will give them a very pragmatic view of how things sound.

 

Mastering to some extent is a reassessment. It’s like, “We did all of that. Did it work? What do we need to change to improve it even further?” If you’re listening to it on exactly the same system that you made all those previous decisions on, you’re going to think it sounds fine already. Let’s say you have a room where you’re not hearing quite enough bass and you’ve ended up putting more low-end than was necessary into the mix. You’re still not going to hear quite as much low-end so you’re not going to realize that.

One thing I suggest to people who do the course is that you could take stuff out and listen to it on another playback system that you know well, which could be earbuds, a smart speaker, in the car, a Hi-Fi, or whatever it is. Make notes and go, “Is this song a bit bright or loud?” Go back into the studio and think about it again. Another great option is to get a good pair of headphones.

I’m editing a video for the YouTube channel about Audeze headphones that lots of people are talking about, especially in mastering. They’re super expensive but they’re also very good. People are asking me which ones they can use. That can be helpful. One benefit of headphones is that you don’t have to worry about the room because they’re speakers that sit on your head. However good your speakers are, it’s useless if the room doesn’t have acoustic treatment.

Some panels are up behind me at the other end of the room. I spent a lot of time tuning this so that the speakers can sound as good as they can in the room until I added this treatment. This room didn’t sound right at all. It can be a real challenge to get a speaker system that works well for you. I prefer working on speakers myself but there are top-end mastering engineers who work solely on headphones. They’re both great options. If you want to get a different perspective, then a high-quality pair of headphones is a good option.

Artificial intelligence

I see a lot of people, especially people who send me music, that have used AI-type tools for mastering LANDR and the like. The only reason I know that is because they forget to change the name and it says, “LANDR.” I see this and it’s very interesting to see how many people are using these. What are your opinions on these? If you think there are good ones, what are the top ones?

They’re great because they’re super quick and affordable, especially in comparison to going to a pro engineer. They can get decent results. To go back to the Photoshop analogy though, I have a bit of a problem with them because they say, “Get professional mastering for your music.” That annoys me because that’s not what mastering is. Mastering is a conversation with a person who understands the emotion, lyrics, and intent of your music, what you’re trying to do, has empathy for it, and can talk to you about it and say, “The tambourine is loud in that section.”

There are no AI systems that can do that. It’s more like a magic wand tool that you click on your phone. You’ve got a picture and it looks okay. You click the magic wand and it looks better. Is it the best it can possibly be? Probably not. It’s probably better. I had one that was taken in a studio somewhere. I pressed the magic wand button and everything went green. It was completely wrong. I’m going to do a video where I demonstrate that because it was so hilarious. The same thing can happen with the automated mastering.

Another thing to say is I did a talk at a college here in the UK, where they were asking exactly this question. We had the same thing mastered by me and 2 or 3 of these other mastering services. Lots of them sounded okay if you listen to individual songs. They sounded different to my master but not necessarily drastically better or worse, just different, except that this was an album.

When you played from song 1 into song 2, song 1 was meant to be loud and song 2 was meant to be quiet. All of the automated ones made song 1 loud and song 2 loud. The song that was meant to be quiet and gentle was right up there. When you listen to them, it makes no sense. It sounded wrong. That as well is something that the AI doesn’t have a grip on. They will probably improve it. It will probably come.

The other thing is that people are using it in creative ways. There are people who will send it off to LANDR or wherever. It comes back and they go, “I’m not quite happy.” They’ll tweak what they sent and send it again. They might do it 4 or 5 times until they get a result that they’re happy with. You come back to what we were talking about before, which is it’s still you listening on your system. None of the automated systems are at the point where they can give you an opinion like a person can.

I would encourage people to go and experiment with them. If you get results that you like and then you take them out, play them everywhere, it sounds fantastic, and everybody loves it, then great but be cautious and aware of the limitations. Music is about people and communicating emotion. The machines don’t get that. I’m not 100% sure they ever will.

I hope they don’t.

That might be slightly scary. If you’ve spent months writing and crafting these songs and then months recording them and mixing, you’ve got the best possible result you can, and then you go, “That’s fine,” that doesn’t make sense to me. Why scrimp on that final step? Don’t you want somebody to go, “There. How about that?” You’re like, “That’s what I wanted.”

I agree. It’s like putting an expensive Christmas present that you put a lot of thought into. You spend a lot of money on it and then you put it in a paper bag and give it to somebody.

I might steal that if that’s okay. That’s pretty good.

Episode Wrap-up

I don’t know why I thought of that but it’s so true. You took it all the way to the end with all the most care and expense, and then you put it in a paperbag. This has been so great. You clarified to people what mastering is, why we need to care about it, how it’s different from mixing, which is one big question that people have, and how it’s not just about loudness. This has all been so helpful.

We’re going to provide some resources from you to help people go even further. I want to mention first of all, you have a podcast called The Mastering Show, which is such a great name. We’re also going to provide some resources at ProfitableMusician.com/Mastering that you can check out from Ian to go even further into these subjects. How else can they connect with you online?

You can search for me. I’m on Facebook and a little bit on Instagram. I used to be on Twitter but not so much now. If you search for Ian Shepherd Mastering, you’ll find something. It’d be great if people want to come along and say hello.

You’ve got a YouTube channel as well, right?

There’s a YouTube channel, Production Advice, and also the website.

Thank you so much, Ian. It’s so great to get your perspective on this. I always try to tie this into profitability because that’s what the show is about but like I said with the whole paper bag thing, if you have worked so hard and put so much money into an album, and then you don’t take it to the final step in the most professional way that you can, then you’re doing yourself a disservice and you’re not going to be as profitable.

That music is not going to land as well. That’s going to be a cascade effect. That’s how I pull this into profitability. Also, knowing how you should spend the money that you have. Should you spend it on a professional engineer or learning how to master yourself? There are different directions you can go. You can use some of Ian’s resources to figure that out for yourself. Are there any last parting words you want to say about mastering?

You’re right. You can do mastering yourself but you’re going to have to invest a lot of time to get good and get a result that you’re happy with. That might be something that’s fun and that you enjoy. In that case, that’s fantastic but maybe it’s better to invest a bit of money in getting somebody who does it day in and day out to help you and know that that’s the best result.

There have been a few times in my career where people have said to me that when they heard the mastered version, it made them cry in a good way. To me, that is a real success. The goal is to help the music connect directly with the listener or the fan. It’s such an important part of the process. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s dramatic but it’s good and fun. It’s satisfying to do.

I love that perspective. All this technical talk is all about generating the emotion that we want to generate from the music that we’ve created.

When people connect with emotion, that’s when they connect with you as a performer and they’re going to want to buy more of your music, come to the gigs, buy the merchandise, and all that stuff. It’s profitable. Maybe not even just in a monetary sense but in a communication sense, connection, and all of those things.

Thank you so much for all of your time and sharing your expertise with us. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me. I enjoyed it.

 

Important Links

• Mastering Advice
• Dynameter
• Mastering on headphones with Audeze ??? – YouTube
• The Mastering Show
• Ian Shepherd on Facebook
• Ian Shepherd on Instagram
• Ian Shepherd on Twitter
• Production Advice – YouTube
• The Home Mastering Guide

 

 

About Ian Shepherd

Ian Shepherd is a British mastering engineer who has worked on thousands of releases for all of the major record labels, TV stations and independents.

He runs the popular Production Advice website and hosts The Mastering Show podcast, helping people get better results recording, mixing and mastering their own music.

He has also developed the Loudness Penalty website and several acclaimed plugins with MeterPlugs.