Mastering for Pop Music: DIY, Online, or Professional Engineer?

To make a pop record, you have to go through a lot of stages. First, there’s writing. And this can take a long time. Ideas that have bubbled away for years can take even longer to bring out into the world. There might be multiple writers involved, or additional input from producers. Demoing and sketching out ideas, playing with arrangement, moving parts in and out – writing is a lot of work.

But it’s also deeply rewarding, and the part that most musicians love; getting their opportunity to express themselves through their art. It’s also probably the most important part of the pop music making process; no good song, no point.

After writing usually comes rehearsal – making sure you can actually sing the damned thing – and adjusting the key or tempo to suit. Once the performers are confident, it’s time to move to production.

Production is (or at least it used to be) long and costly. Depending on the song and vision, it might require a large studio space to capture a live orchestral arrangement, a live drummer,
a choir for backing vocals… Or it could all be made in a bedroom, on a laptop loaded with VST instruments.

Vocal production is especially important in pop music, and it’s not uncommon for singers to do dozens of takes before the next stage of the process; editing.

Editing is tedious and laborious, but essential in modern pop production. All performances are cut up, with all noise or unwanted artefacts removed, quantised into perfect time, and pitch-corrected to be perfectly in tune. Editing takes forever, and has a lot of naysayers – but it’s as old as music production itself, when engineers worked a similar way cutting tape. After editing comes mixing. And if the arrangement and engineering during production were done right, this should be a creative process, not a problem-solving one. It’ll add the final polish, studio effects, movement, width, bounce, balance and space – all the things that signal a professionally made record has arrived in your ears.

All of these components to making a record have some element of back and forth, revisions and redos.

But when it’s all done and dusted, there’s still one more step: mastering.

Mastering prepares a song for delivery – be it over radio and TV or film, streaming, CD, vinyl or mp3 download. It ensures a consistent and enjoyable listening experience beyond what the production and post-production engineers baked into the project. But it’s as much an art as any other part of the process.

Mastering is NOT just a final EQ and limiter to bring the volume up. It’s a whole lot more than that, and might well be the most important step in post-production. But can you (or an AI) do it instead of a mastering pro?

DIY Audio Mastering

If you can self-produce, you can certainly do audio mastering yourself – or at least a version of it. The problem with this is that mastering is a very different mindset and skill set. It requires above average hardware and a pristine listening environment.

If your production and mix already sound release-ready, then you might not need a lot of “mastering magic” beyond some saturation and a limiter or clipper. But at the level we’re talking about (fully self-produced), that’s not always likely.

The other issue is bias – the inability to separate yourself from the work objectively, and do what’s right rather than what feels right to you. You might not want to harm your mix or production elements, but a half-hearted master will do just that.

On the plus side, it’s free. If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a basic guide on how to approach DIY mastering to get you started.

But you need to go in knowing that it’s a ton of work. You’re not just setting a chain of plugins. You’re automating, actively listening, making creative decisions that heighten the track’s emotional impact – or at least you should be. And this is what a pro mastering engineer does all day, every day.

Professional Mastering Engineers

A pro will do all of the heavy lifting for you; the active listening, the automation, the frequency spectrum problem-solving, the clever processing, the mono from stereo checks, the gain staging and subtle saturation, the final limiting, the metering, the testing… But they’ll also serve your song.

Mastering isn’t a simple effects chain. It’s a series of decisions, guided by experience and knowledge, made using highly calibrated tools (and ears) that makes your music sound the best it can be, in as many listening scenarios as possible; from club systems to iPhone speakers. It’s not just about getting tracks to slam as loud as possible. It’s about making them feel as good as possible.

And this is why AI mastering might not be as good as what it’s being hyped to be.

AI Mastering

AI mastering services have come in thick and fast since AI tech went mainstream. LANDR, iZotope, and more, have been working on machine learning models that analyse everything from tempo and dynamics, to chord progressions and instrumentation profiles – in a bid to fully automate the mastering process based on similar sounding material.

They’re faster than a pro, cheaper than a pro – and trained on the work of pros. AI mastering is easier than DIY, and usually delivers better results than a newbie could ever get. But the problems with this are obvious; it reduces mastering to a paint by numbers affair.

An equation;
If tempo = X, limiter release time = Y.

That might stop the pumping artefacts. But a great mastering engineer might actually use that to their advantage, to make the track breathe and swell in time – heightening the
emotional impact of a song.

AI mastering is clever, and does solve a lot of real world problems, but it can’t replace a proper mastering engineer – and may never do so.

If you’re really serious about making pop music, and have put in the effort to make it as good as possible, then paying a pro is all but essential. It’s objective, guided, and done to make you sound great to as many people as possible. It’s not even that pricey when you put it into perspective, with even industry leaders charging highly competitive rates.

Effectively releasing and promoting your music means getting it all right. And when you’ve come this far, the next step should be promotion.

That’s where we come in…

Pop music PR – Join the Rebels

Urban Rebel does pop music PR for the most exciting emerging talent and established acts. Contact us: call +44 (0) 161 298 6650 or send your message to [email protected].