6. An Introduction to Music Mastering

I know that many of you have purchased WaveLab for mastering music, so I want to take you through some of the fundamentals and introduce you to some really important concepts of mastering. To make this chapter really interesting, load a stereo mixdown file of one of your music projects. That way, you’ll be able to hear what audio mastering can add to your music. In this chapter, you will learn about:

• My “Punchy, Shiny, and LOUD!” mastering technique

• The loudness wars

• How to analyze the average (RMS) volume level

• Proper Master Section signal flow

• How to audition mastering effects and store presets

• How to render uncompressed and compressed file types

• How to enter MP3 metadata

• How to save multiple revisions of mastered files