Mastering is a magical unknown step for some.
In the old days Mastering used to mean that a Mastering engineer would take a super-critical listen to tapes coming right out of the mixdown session, then deciding that one song is too loud, or th next song had too much high end, or there wasn’t enough overall compression on another track, etc. Then these decisions were combined with the compromises that had to take place in order to ‘cut the lacquer’ which would be turned into the mother stamper from which the actual vinyl records would be made.
The mastering engineer had to know how hot he could cut the lacquer, against how much time he could fit on one side of an LP. There were a lot of physical considerations involved. Nowdays a mastering engineer is likely more concerned with the actual purity and clarity of the sound across a variety of digital formats. The uniformity or the overall balance of power across the tunes is taken into consideration along with the target audience of listeners.
We’ll go over the steps involved in digitially mastering todays music, and just what kind of considerations are involved in the process.