Free Online Mastering – What You Need To Know About Free Mastering
If you’re a musician, artist or performer you’ll already be aware of the importance of music mastering. Now we’re here to make mastering more widely available with our free online mastering tool!
If you want to compete in the saturated market that is the music industry, you need to ensure your material is up to scratch and of the highest quality. We can’t stress enough how essential it is to get your music mastered, but unfortunately, music mastering can be a costly and time-consuming task.
In this piece, we’ll be providing you with essential tips and tricks to help get your tracks mastered in a cost-effective and timely manner and why music mastering is essential to an artist.
What Is Online Mastering & Why Is It Important?
Music Mastering is most commonly referred to as the process of taking audio and preparing for distribution.
In a nutshell, mastering is the final polish on a song, it’s adjusting the levels of the whole song rather than individual tracks.
This is to battle some imbalances from the mix and to enhance certain characteristics fitting for the song. There are a few considerations we need to keep in mind with this process;
- Unifying the sound of the record
- Maintaining consistency across the album
- Preparing for distribution
These are the main pillars of strong music quality, but unfortunately, adhering to these steps can be quite difficult. Not to mention time-consuming and sometimes expensive.
While challenging, it is worth it in the long run. Especially when pitching to tastemakers. Having a consistent sound across your album adds to your professionalism as an artist.
The Technicalities: How Does It Really Work?
We can’t give away all our secrets unfortunately, but our free online mastering tool uses AI. The AI takes your track and masters it in the same style as a reference track of your choice.
Advantages of Free Online Music Mastering
Firstly, it will sound good!
It’s important to work on your own mixing and mastering within the studio, fine tune that dynamic range for the best high-quality results. There are many benefits to mastering your work. We have compiled a list to help show the importance of music mastering.
Music Quality Changes Depending On Playback Situations
We have many different ways to listen to music in this era. Car radios, home sound systems, mobile phones, televisions.
There’s no doubt that your music will sound different on these platforms, however, good mastering helps you sound your best everywhere and in all situations.
You Can Lose Perspective
You can become accustomed to the sound/music listening. Similar to how an artist takes a step back to view work or an author asks someone to proofread their book.
Mastering will allow you to step away and look at the whole picture – allowing you to fix any issues you might have missed.
It Could Just Sound Different
You might not be hearing the music the same way the audience does.
This could be due to the quality of your reference monitors, your mixing skills and poor acoustics in your room. Mastering will be able to fix all of this.
AI vs Humans
Music Mastering can be quite a complicated field to navigate so if you’re unsure, you can hire sound engineers and mastering services like Abbey Road Studios who have state of the art audio mastering facilities.
Audio processing WAV files, sample rates and frequency range is a lot harder than when you upload a track and let us pick up the legwork, processing CD quality versions of your music.
Thankfully, people who trained specifically to master tracks and albums exist. Mastering engineers specialise in adding those final touches to albums, which can include various mastering options.
In essence, music mastering requires critical listening. But, keep in mind, results depend on a huge variety of factors such as; the intent of the engineer, the skills/experience of the engineer and accuracy of your monitors/speakers.
These are only a few of the core components that can impact the final result of a mastery attempt.
Luckily, free software tools exist to facilitate the process. Some tools allow you to pretty much master your track instantly. They use AI and machine learning to replicate the processes human engineers make when processing a track.
While in theory, this sounds great, there can be negative connotations to having your music mastered by AI as opposed to a mastery engineer.
While an AI will determine a consistency for your music based on algorithms and programming, an engineer can listen to your music and think about what it needs to sound just right. A real person will be able to ensure your music/album conveys the correct emotion across the board.
Music Mastery: Final Thoughts
Regardless, music mastery done by software is still a great alternative if you’re looking to save some time and money.
It could free you up to create more music or promote what you already have. Perhaps software mastery could be a good idea if you’re just starting out in the industry and still establishing your brand.
It could be good to save up and invest in a mastery engineer down the road once you’ve grounded yourself as an artist.
Wherever you are within your musical career, music mastery is a must. Whether you decide to do it via software/AI or paid professionals, it will only boost the quality of your music tenfold. While also maintaining your professionalism as an artist.
We highly recommend taking the time to learn about music mastering and deciding how best to execute it.
Who Can Help Me With Free Online Music Mastering?
Right here!
Music Gateway offers a huge range of services including music distribution, music promotion, sync licensing, and as of now, free online mastering.
Music Mastering is included within our amazing free music distribution service. We help get your music onto all major platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
What’s more, you keep 100% of your sales and we don’t get a penny from you.
If you’re a music artist looking to get help with any aspect of the music pipeline we’d love to hear from you. From creating your first track to promoting an album, we’re here to help.
If you like our free mastering tool, make sure to check out all our other free music tools.
Now scroll up and master your track for free!