Increasingly, songwriters and composers are finding themselves wearing extra hats that extend far beyond their creative leanings. With many finding themselves in charge of final deliverables, can creatives deliver using engineers’ tools?

Many Hats

Younger songwriters and composers take many jobs in their stride that used to be the preserve of professionals working within single disciplines. The democratisation of recording and mixing means that even high profile artists are the authors of their own sonic and public destinies. Similar shifts elsewhere have also seen a diminished role for other supporting professionals. Of these the mastering engineer is one, with their work increasingly undertaken (either whole, or in part) by mix engineers or even the artists themselves.

While no audio professional would pretend that the mastering professional is redundant, the fact remains that on some levels others are instead reluctantly finding themselves navigating the finer points of audio and mastering.

What Mastering Isn’t

For many seasoned mastering pros, a great day at the office is where a project arrives with very little corrective work needed, if any. That way, they can concentrate on the whole gamut of other mastering jobs including sequencing and quality checks, as well as those around the finer points of producing deliverables. Certainly, mastering is not ‘making it loud’, or in any way trying to add magic that isn’t already there.

Self-Produced Masters

Forgoing the luxury of a dedicated pro carrying out mastering duties, those carrying out the process further back upstream must, if nothing else, have a handle on a couple of essential tasks:

Loudness

Deliverables need to fulfil the target loudness for the service being used. While engineers understand the destructive potential of limiting, self-mastered music must be protected from limiter misuse, with easy-to-read integrated values available. Creatives can then easily deploy only the necessary level increases.

Formats And Codecs

If there’s one thing that artists find less interesting than loudness, it must be the intricacies of codecs and how they can affect the final product’s sound. Being able to easily audition not only their sound, but also their artefacts can empower creatives to invest in their audio’s digital wellbeing.

By concentrating primarily on loudness and codec auditioning, in the video we use tools from NUGEN Audio’s Modern Mastering bundle to produce deliverables in a way that creatives can relate to. At the front of a chain of tools, we use ISLst into MasterCheck, applying limiting to achieve a specified target loudness, before trying out MasterCheck’s Offset function to the same end. We then see how easy it is to audition different codecs thanks to MasterCheck’s Delta function. When then instantiate Visualizer to get the whole picture, post-codec.

In Summary: NUGEN Audio Modern Mastering bundle

• Mix and master for today's playout technologies

• Audition for today's play-out services in real-time

• Check and compare dynamics

• Essential loudness and codec analysis

• Produce for iTunes, Spotify etc

• Full suite of audio analysis tools

• Precision True Peak limiting

More from NUGEN Audio:

When mastering for digital music services, podcasts or digital radio, MasterCheck Pro is an ideal tool for detecting potential codec distortion, and for directly comparing your loudness and dynamics with appropriate reference material.

The risk of distortion from down-stream codec conversion (mp3, AAC etc.) is eliminated with ISL on the master bus. Master with confidence that your audio will be delivered the way you intend, without downstream distortions introduced by inter-sample clip reconstruction errors.

Visualizer offers detailed analysis of stereo placement, which can be particularly important for centering lead vocals, and for low end control. It can also be used for visual A/Bing of stereo spread and sonic fingerprinting.

Can Creatives Self-Master Effectively?

When mastering is taken as both a creative and a technical process, there must be the realisation that the creative side requires qualitative decisions that the artist themselves may not be best placed to make. This is simply a consideration of perspective (or lack of it). However, if a project possesses well-judged mix decisions, mastering can then become a more technical process concerned with fulfilling loudness considerations, and avoiding damage to audio from limiting or transcoding.

Creatives are frequently invested as much in audio considerations as they are in creative control. With the right tools, the technical side can be achieved effectively by the creator, even without the perspective offered by a third party. While the artist can absolutely take their artistry straight to the listener, for those who can, using a dedicated mastering engineer remains much more than just a luxury.