Summary
Mastering is the postproduction process you take your music through to enhance your song after it’s finished being mixed. Mastering polishes your song into a finished product. This includes ensuring song consistency, removing flaws, balancing frequency ranges, compressing dynamic range, stereo width enhancements, and limiting music. All of which can help to improve the overall reception of your song.
When mastering for the first time, its useful to try out your plugin’s existing mastering presets on your song. See whether they improve your song and investigate how the plugin affected the sound. Where did it EQ and compress? Exploring presets and comparing them can give you an idea of what’s possible. Then you can tailor the presets and adjust them to your own projects. Listen to songs that you like and think about how the song feels compared to your song. If you were to master your song to sound similar to your reference song, what steps would you...