Although a great master can make a song sound more professional and pleasant to the ears of the listener by adjusting certain frequencies, If a mix is bad and the levels and effects don’t match, even the best master cannot fix a bad mix!
In order to prevent our mastering engineer to freak out and help him do his job as best as he can, we need to make sure that our mix is nailed down before we send the track over.
Maybe we master the track ourselves and get frustrated because it just doesn’t sound right and we cant figure out why. It may be time to go back and rework our mix down.
Why Can’t Mastering Fix A Bad Mix?
Even before we want to consider mastering our track we need to make sure everything is already in place and sounds good. Why is that? Why can’t we fix certain issues within our tracks at the mastering stage?
Think about it this way. When we do our mixdown we can control each element of our track by itself and really fine-tune the effects, frequencies, and levels of a given sound or element in our track.
Once we hit render and export our track we lose that control over the single elements and can only apply effects, filters, and frequency adjustments to the track as a whole.
Let’s say we are mastering our track and realize that the vocal chain just doesn’t sound right or we may forget to add some effects.
There is no way we can fix this with the master. We need to go back to the mixdown and fix the issues there.
Furthermore, when we let a great mastering engineer master our song and it sounds more terrible than before, it is not the fault of the engineer.
A good master will bring out the bad parts in a mix as well as the good parts.
How Can We Prevent A Bad Mix?
The ears of everyone are different and we all react differently to certain sounds and frequencies. Therefore it is never a bad idea to let someone else listen to our mix and give us feedback.
This way we can make sure that we get two more fresh ears to listen to our track and we aren’t solely relying on our own perception of how things sound.
Furthermore, it is really important to take breaks and let your ears rest for a while and let them recharge. Listening to the same thing over and over again will get our ears to a point where they just can’t recognize certain things because they are getting used to the sounds and may perceive them as okay even if they aren’t.
Accept the fact that we don’t have to make it perfect!
Especially when we are just starting out with music production, it is hard to accept the fact that we just can’t get it right at the moment.
There may be things in your track that you perceive as terrible that other people might not even recognize. It is a learning process and the more often you practice the better you will get over time.