this post is mainly aimed to talk to non-musicians and non-audio engineers, but if you’re one of those and also feel for this post, cool. but i want to put this into perspective for people who aren’t in music (recording and production in specific). i’m going to attempt to explain a very complicated concept as simply as i can fathom.
there’s a lot of stages to the creation of a song or album. there’s the writing, recording, production, mixing, and mastering (to simplify). what i’m going to be talking about has to do with “mastering”, the final stage a song goes through before it’s considered ‘final’ (in a sense).
mastering, in short, is the process of taking a fully recorded, produced, and mixed song; cleaning it up and preparing it for people to listen to it. a mastering engineer will often add some equalization adjustments to the overall song, adding some compression to bring things together and unify elements, and other stuff like that.
but the duty of establishing the “perceived loudness” is imparted on the mastering engineer.
