Mastering


	Mastering your CD...
	This is where the rubber meets the road. Mastering is the art of making your CD able to compete in the commercial market, to give each song that commercial sound. Here you will finalize your files using a finalizing or multiband compressor, brick wall limiter, overall reverb if needed (remember sometimes less is more), normalization and volume balancing, and EQ'ing to all of the tracks making all the songs on your CD complement each other and transportable to many different listening devices, (Home Stereos, Boom Boxes, Car CD Players, etc...) You can also utilize fade in, fade out and cross fades to your tracks to add to your production dynamics. All of this and more is available in programs like Wavelab. Wavelab will create a Red Book CD which is the industry standard for reproducing commercial cd's. You can use other CD software but make sure it can make Red Book cd's. This is another tedious process where you are going to get your ears tired out, so make sure you take a break . You will also want to make sure that when you save your files after processing them to save them as new files together in a new directory. This will retain the original ones and keep the new files to be Burnt to CD in their own directory. When burning your CD, if you are going to be sending it to be commercially duplicated, ask the company what speed to burn the CD. When Commercially duplicating a CD the company will make a glass master to run the other CD's off. Burning at too high or low of a speed will cause the copies to come out sounding wavy, wobbly or some other non- desirable quality. If you will be duplicating them yourself you might be able to burn them at higher speeds. As always make a few test burns to see. [ Ready to Record ] [ Mixing your song ] [ Mastering ] © Copyright 2005 Christian Pro Audio