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The art of mixing and mastering your music

Mixing and mastering can be complex, yet it is essential in arriving at a quality music sound

With a section of music lovers praising his songwriting skills and creativity while a minority stay unimpressed.

So as I lay to experience the wizardry that Oso captures, surfing through the 11 tracker album, and revelling in the depth of his artistic brilliance at a time when songwriting and the purposeful music was becoming a collector’s item.

Some songs take you to the highest heights while others, though good, didn’t quite envelope an exciting surge.

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One thing, however, remained constant over the 30 minutes plus journey and that was the production in its entirety.

‘Oso’ is a listener’s delight.

There was clarity of sound, balanced to fit the mood of the artiste, the intention to bring every instrument on the different songs to life was evident, never at a point did any song sound out of place or become too gritty, work and professionalism had been put into the album process and the sound engineers had duly earned their fee.

In very contrasting style, rapper Olamide had released his seventh studio album late last year titled ‘Lagos Nawa’ and upon its release, fans had expressed their disgust (yet again) as the rapper seemingly never pays attention to details.

Social media was filled with complaints of how the YBNL boss had again neglected the ‘Basics 101’ of music making, even when he was fast becoming a veteran in the business and had the funds to get the best sound engineers to work with.

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The songs on the album mostly sounded shrill, distorted and ear-splitting, they were usually too loud, unbalanced and unfriendly to the ears such that even though the music itself was a let-down, the production made it worse.

There have been excellently written songs ruined in mastering, and average songs saved by the dynamics of a good mixing and mastering, how come artistes then neglect to take this part seriously?

How does mastering even work and what are the processes involved?

Singer, Songwriter and Producer, Daramola who also mixes and masters his songs is of the opinion that ''Mastering makes the entirety of your work sound bigger, some people just rather mix and give their track enough clarity and crispness where it doesn’t need to be mastered but I do think that mastering is important''.

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Mastering is likened to book editing, it is the fine tuning process, the process where every detail counts and the music is stripped down to being correct, clear, soothing and providing the ideal listening experience.

It also takes different forms across genres, depending on the mood or intention of the artist, a song could be mastered to enhance the vocals of the singer while another could be to make the beat more alive on the dancefloor but in its entirety, a well-mastered project should fulfil the purpose of improved sound quality and succinct audio to provide a pleasant listening experience.

For young producer and engineer, Michael Excel, “when it comes to mastering, I use a combination of software like Fabfilter’s mastering suite, Slate digital limiter, TRackS 3, Waves plugins and A1 stereo plugin.

I usually use some or all of these and the occasional ‘outsider’, but I must stress that the most important tool in mastering is experience and your ears.

A good mastering engineer can make magic happen with a very limited toolset”.

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Another top producer who would rather not be named says, ''Mastering is important especially when a song is part of a project of other songs. Mastering is a songs’ final presentation.

On his experience with artists he has worked with, ‘Most Nigerian musicians want only one style of mastering, there is a certain master designed for clubs and dance music and every song these days is mastered loud and driven, like the low end must knock''.

''When you mix a song, you are looking at a broad spectrum of parts and tweaking them to come together well but when you are mastering, you are listening to a song either by itself or part of a group of songs and figuring the best way for it to be heard, whether big and loud, wide, soft, bottom heavy, vocal focus or crisp and muddy, presence, clarity, it all depends on the major element you want to emphasize in the songs experience.''

''An example is Daft Punks ’Random Access Memory’ Album which won the Best Engineered Album (Non- Classical) at the 2014 Grammys, that project isn’t low end driven and loud, it is very dynamic, dynamic here means sounds getting mound and soft at will and moving from speaker to speak at will and is rhythm driven.

So mixing and recording is like cooking in the kitchen while mastering is the art of presenting it for consumption''.

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The producer continues ‘Most pop songs are mastered to play alright on laptop speakers and terrible earplugs because that is how most people now consume music, so the sings are not dynamic and centered, but some artists still mix for high fidelity systems and car systems, it depends on what you want unless you are just slamming one template that fits all mastering like we doing presently in the industry.

On the mastering software he uses, “It depends on what I want sometimes I master in whatever daw I mix, other times I use T-racks, Wavelab or Adobe audition but I am open to new things as they come along”.

It is easy to think that the sound of a song is not that relevant to its acceptance, as long as the songwriting and vocals are good but the finest details and adjustment in sound at times is the difference between a good record and a great record.

The devil they say is in the details, loudness alone should never be the measure of acceptance and in a country where quality sound engineers come in short supply and some artists have even had to go abroad in their desire to attain that quality sound, the likes of Foster Zeeno who has been around forever, Indomix, Suka Sounds and Sheyman all have their names tagged on the songs of your favourite artists for their skill and fine-tuning to put into making the record a masterpiece.

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