Most of the projects I receive these days for mastering are recorded anywhere from a bona fide bricks and mortar recording studio to a guy or gal recording in his bedroom. A typical mastering session may only take a couple hours but within that time a lot is happening to transform your music into its final state. Mastering, in today's sense, is merely the last step that lies between final mixes of a song and delivery of those mixes to a replication plant or onto whatever medium you intend to release your material. This problem and the educational path the search for a solution sent me on transformed my understanding of audio forever. However, in those early days I was hounded by one reoccurring problem my mixes didn't sound as big or loud or sweet (or whatever adjective you care to insert here) as a track I or one of my clients heard on the radio or jukebox. (gear acquisition syndrome) that afflicts pretty much all musicians on both sides of the glass. It was a great opportunity for both learning and supplementing the inevitable G.A.S. Very soon after building the studio I suffered from a severe case of mission drift and I quickly found myself running sessions for other musicians.

Couple this phenomenon with the emergence of newer and cheaper recording technology and we had the dawn of what all of us enjoy today- the ability to put together a respectable recording rig in our own home. At that time, the recording industry was already struggling under the weight of decreasing budgets for label-based projects and many mid-sized facilities were failing not only because they weren't big enough to attract big money sessions but also because they were financially invested heavily enough that their rates were out of reach of the average broke musician (yes, that part hasn't changed much). When I started out as a humble project studio sixteen years ago it was for one expressed purpose, which was as a personal space for me and my close musician friends to work and create without the constant looming face of a ticking clock hampering the creative process. Instead, I'm going to try to bridge the understanding of this process simply by defining what it is and why it is essential that you budget both time and money towards this often overlooked part of the audio production chain. The first topic I wish to address is audio mastering- a topic obscured in a mist of mysticism and widely debated approaches- of which this article will thankfully be brief enough to avoid. Welcome to the first installment of many of what I hope will be informative articles on a wide variety of topics related to music production from the perspective of art, technique and business.

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