Mastering is one of the most mysterious aspects of music production. Today, a media composer needs not only deep knowledge of composition and music theory, but also needs to be able to make his/her tracks sound good. After mixing, „mastering“ describes the process of creating a production-ready final stereo mixdown. Mastering is an art and in an ideal world is left so a third party professional. But we don’t live in a perfect world and it is a fact that most of us need to master most of our tracks ourselves. Even for just demos and quick „show-off sketches“, you should always spend time making it sound as good as possible.

I use iZotope Ozone 4 for mastering, which has proven to be a very powerful and versatile tool. iZotope, the makers of Ozone have written a very good introduction paper to mastering in general, but focused on Ozone called Mastering with Ozone. It is based on Ozone 3, but everything works perfectly with version 4, too. Even if you do not have Ozone, this pdf is well worth a read if you want an easy to understand introduction into the world of mastering.

I will touch on mixing and mastering in later posts - and I’ll do my very best to keep them coming at a steadier rate. Work went in the way, which is a good thing, after all :)

Tags: iZotope, ozone, mastering, pdf