Mastering Mistakes When Mastering Your Own Music

Mastering is a complex and sweat-inducing process, but do you know what’s even more complicated? Mastering your own music in a home studio! This last leg of music production is a highly dynamic and fine-tuned process that requires the skill and precision of an experienced sound engineer or an AI algorithm like MasteringBOX. If you know the basics but lack the experience, you can fall into the sticky trap of common mastering mistakes, which can affect the final results. More on that later!

But let’s first address the confusion regarding establishing a baseline on the concept of mastering. Mastering looks at the tracks with a holistic approach, considering the album or EP as a single cohesive unit. This process serves as a quality check for the final mix to weed out any inconsistencies and jarring inaccuracies. A perfect master prepares the tracks to sound extremely polished and consistent on all platforms.

However, with the costs of production rising, musicians often opt to take up mastering themselves. While mastering the music yourself is entirely possible, the lack of experience can sometimes result in minor mistakes and flaws. Therefore, in this article, you will explore the common pitfalls of mastering your own music. Once you identify and tackle these mastering mistakes, your final product will appear more professional.

Mistake 101 In Mastering: Losing Objectivity

Before you explore the technical flaws in your mastering, the biggest pitfall that can ruin your mastering process is getting too attached to the music. This attachment leads to a lack of objectivity in your perspective. Why, you might ask? After weeks or months spent producing a track and then countless hours on mixing it, loss of objectivity is inevitable during the mastering phase.

One of the essential tenets of mastering is to use a fresh set of ears for perfect quality control of the final product. Therefore, as musicians opt for a DIY approach in all production phases, they lose focus. Whether it’s tonal inaccuracies or unadjusted balances, the musician becomes immune to the issues in the track.

In a situation where you decide to master the final mix, do not jump right into the process. Once you have prepared the mix, take a long break from the track and work on something else. This strategy will allow you to return to the mastering process with a fresh and renewed perspective, enabling you to weed out mistakes more efficiently.

Top 8 Mastering Mistakes

This section will delve into the mistakes musicians often make when mastering their music in a home studio.

1. Too Loud Or Too Quiet

The secret to a perfect master is an intuitive process. With the boom of digital music platforms like Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify, there is real competition to ensure your music stands out. However, the most common issues that make your master either lackluster or inconsistent are incorrect loudness levels.

Tweaking the loudness levels on the final master is an essential part of the process. An optimal loudness level on the track will sound big, punchy, and clear. However, excessive loudness can cause distortion, clipping issues, and mess up the dynamics. Overly loud mixes leave no room for subtle nuances to shine, resulting in a muddy sound where bass and snares lose their vivacity.

To ensure that your master is neither too loud nor too quiet for streaming sites, you can use the loudness meter called LUFS. The LUFS abbreviation stands for Loudness Unit Full Scale. This standard unit allows you to measure the accurate loudness level that listeners will perceive.

A suitable loudness level for your master is also a subjective matter. Some streaming platforms like Spotify normalize to -14 LUFS, so pushing for more will not have loudness benefits on Spotify. However, not all platforms adhere to Spotify standards, meaning you will still need to achieve a decent loudness level to compete on most platforms and media.

2. Excessively and Obsessively Processing the Master

The most egregious sin in mastering is going overboard during the post-processing phase. Aggressive processing is one of those mastering mistakes that can disfigure your tracks to the point of no return. The actual goal is to process the song with a subtle touch during the mastering stage. Most novice musicians double down on compression, limiters, EQ, and tonal saturations with a heavy-handed approach. If you amplify the compression and EQ levels too much, your track may sound lifeless and flat.

An off-balance and over-processed song will immediately reveal the lack of mastering experience. As a novice in mastering, the approach of ‘less is more‘ is quite effective. During the mastering process, think about ‘enhancing‘ the mix rather than ‘altering‘ it.

When processing the mix in the mastering phase, here are a few tweaks to pay attention to:

• Look out for any inconsistent sounds, such as noise, distortions, misplaced vocals, and rumbles. Remove the noise with EQ roll-off, noise gate, or gain automation.
• Sometimes, it is better to return to the mix to fix an issue rather than trying to resolve it in the mastering stage.
• Address the issues of varying high frequencies to avoid harsh sections in the track. Sometimes, with hi-hats, cymbals, guitars, synths, and other instruments, the volume levels can become patchy. Using tools like Linear Phase EQ and De-Esser will help bring down the frequencies to acceptable levels.
• Use saturation, but don’t abuse it. Subtle saturation and exciter tools will add the much-needed oomph to your tracks.
• Employ compression with restraint because you do not want to snuff the life out of the mix.

3. Cranking Up the Monitoring Levels Too Too High

One of the most avoidable mastering mistakes is monitoring the process at extremely high levels. Yet, many beginners continue to do it in pursuit of loudness. This practice causes ear fatigue, which can completely ruin the flow and subtleties of your final master. Additionally, you do not want to damage your hearing while monitoring at loud levels. Finding a consistent loudness level for monitoring is essential for a proper mastering session. When you monitor at extremely high or low levels, you hear more distortions, leading you to over-process your tracks.

Instead of jumping between monitoring levels, we recommend selecting a stable loudness level that allows you to comfortably hear and detect all the nuances. While monitoring levels can vary for each individual, you can adhere to specific standards. For instance, 80 – 83 dB SPL is a standard monitoring baseline for mastering engineers. Additionally, if you want to monitor your master at a linear frequency, 73 – 76 dB SPL is the optimum value. If your mix sounds good at balanced monitoring levels, it will sound accurate across all levels.

To ensure you are monitoring the mix at the right level, measure the speaker output with an SPL meter. This tool is available as both a physical instrument and a digital app to measure acoustic levels.

4. Relying too Too Much on All-In-One Plugins

Plugins are helpful and make music production an intuitive and automated process. However, overusing plugins during the mastering stage can mess up the whole process, especially if you rely on all-in-one plugins. Mastering is about fine-tuning your tracks and albums. If you think cranking up or down the knobs of everything your plugin has to offer will give you a sleek master, you’re mistaken. There are tons of compression plugins and other all-in-one solutions available on the internet, but relying on them too much can lead to disappointing results for your final product.

For instance, when you need to shape the sound with a bit of EQ, you should not employ all editing modules at your disposal. Beginners often make such mastering mistakes by unleashing all their tools when a subtle compression or phasing adjustment is what the mix truly needs. Approach the mastering phase with a clear head and listen intently to find what you need to amplify and improve your production. Unleashing a host of plugins on your master will set you up for disappointment.

5. Leading Your Master in a Blind Direction

This next mastering mistake is what sets apart the novice from the experts. It would be best to decide on a proper plan of action when you start to master the tracks yourself. Simply tweaking and making changes along the way is not how you define what is mastering.

So, here comes the burning question: How do you find the direction for your master? Organize and analyze! To do that, you must prepare your tracks for mastering to make the extensive process seamlessly easier. Listen intently to the mix to identify flaws. Conduct a thorough analysis of various gaps and issues that jump out at you. Once your analysis is complete, arrange and listen to genre-specific reference tracks to steer the master in the right direction. Level match and reference check your master as you go to ensure you are improving it.

6. Ignoring the Stereo and Mid-Side Balance

Your primary aim with the master is to make it sound cohesive yet distinct. But However, among many mastering mistakes, the a common one is where you might be missing neglecting the importance of the stereo balance. A skewed volume difference between Left the left and Right right channels will compromise the energy of your master. You want every element of your production to sound crystal clear and equalized. Therefore, always make sure ensure that the loudness difference on between the L-R channel channels is not far off.

Additionally, you cannot achieve a flawless master if all the elements are clustered in a narrow master. Thus, you must also pay attention to adjusting the width of the master. You can use a Stereo Enhancer plugin for this task. However, use it with extreme caution, as overdoing it could disrupt the balance and affect the perspective of your master. The trick is to polish your master with fine processing sensibilities.

7. Messing Up the Vocal Placement

A good soundtrack heavily depends on proper vocal placement. You want the vocals to project with clarity. However, the vocals in the final master often end up either buried or overly prominent. One reason for this is over-compression.

Since the musician knows the lyrics to their song, they tend to lose objectivity when placing the vocals. There is no right or wrong when it comes to whether the vocal is in the middle, front, or behind the track. The goal is for listeners to resonate with the vocals at an optimal level. To ensure that lyrics and vocals stand out in the mix, try experimenting with different vocal placements to find the right arrangement.

8. Blurring the Lines Between Mastering and Mixing

When you are carrying out all the steps of music production from start to finish, combining mixing and mastering seems like a feasible option. But it’s not. And while it’s not entirely wrong for some musicians to mix and master simultaneously, they must have years of experience and knowledge of different mastering styles up their sleeves. If you are not a trained sound engineer with years of experience, do not risk combining the two processes.

The decision to master your own music isn’t an easy one. Therefore, do not complicate it further by combining mixing and mastering into a single process. Both phases of production require a different approach; one focuses on each reductive detail in the track, while the other takes a more holistic approach to make the music more enjoyable for the end-user. To create a proper distinction between mixing and mastering, you can explore the in-depth audio mixing published on the blog.

Conclusion

Mastering is an intricate process, and attempting it yourself is challenging without making some mistakes along the way. As you explore the common mastering mistakes that can serve as pitfalls in your final release, you must understand the different nuances and history of mastering to appreciate its integrity and importance in the music production process. Additional production advice can be found at music production tips for beginners.

In a nutshell, mastering your own music is possible, but it requires razor-sharp focus on the musician’s part. Whenever you opt to master your music, make sure to remain objective and steer away from the common mistakes addressed in this article.