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Originally Posted by Leon
My friend is doing a course in studio production and I'm going to record a track there hah.
Anyway, mastering starts with each seperate sound for me. Just watch out that they are not too loud, play it all together and listen to what bothers you the most. Then EQ, filter or whatever that.
I dunno, I'm not an expert either. I know no theories about music, I just do what feels and sounds best.
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actually that would be called mixing. Mastering is only done after you've recorded your final MIX to a stereo audio track. Mastering could then involve global eq changes, (multiband) compression, exciting, tape saturation and other mysterious processes.
Any mastering engineer will tell you that it is a completely different process from mixing (where you're trying to make all the different sounds sit well in the mix, versus mastering where you're simply trying to give the final mix a bit more "oomph" or sheen or whatever.)
I'm not a mastering engineer of course, so the only advice I can give is to make sure your mix is as good as possible. If your mix sounds good, but you want to add a bit more volume, use a bit of multiband compression. If you're tonal balance sounds off, try and compare with a professionaly mastered track in the same genre and adjust your master eq (there are several eq analyser plugins available that can help you match frequencies between tracks). Don't overdo it! And don't do it at all if your track is gonna be sent off to an actual mastering engineer later, because they won't like it if you've already squashed all the dynamics out of your mix with some multiband compressor preset. If it's not loud enough, turn up the volume on your stereo!
Myself I usually stick to a bit of compression with Digitalfishphones' Endorphin plugin, and then maybe a bit of eq and that's it.