HOW TO MASTER A SONG AT HOME

Step 1: Optimize Your Listening Space

Mastering is a subtle art. Extremely small moves can change how your entire mix sounds.

Because of this, you want to make sure your listening space is as accurate as possible.

mixing room

Let’s think of it this way. If you were to master your song PERFECTLY – with perfect balance, loudness, and excitement – but your room is poorly tuned, it doesn’t matter!

Your song might sound amazing in your space, but it will fall apart everywhere else.

If, for instance, your room has extra bass build up, then your low end will seem louder than it actually is. So if you get your low end to balance perfectly in your room, what’s it going to sound like everywhere else?

Thin. Lifeless.

Obviously, you don’t want that.

Now, there’s a few things you can do to fix this. First of all, you can properly treat your mixing room with acoustic panels. I cover how to do this in my ultimate guide to setting up a home studio.

If you don’t want to spend the time or money to treat your room, you can also just take the room out of the equation by using headphones.

I recommend the Sennheiser HD600’s.  It’s also worth using a headphone compensation software like Sonarworks Reference and Waves NX. These help to balance your headphones and make it sound like  you are in a real room, and less like you are in a vacuum.