Many pop artists aim for musical diversity within their albums by working with different producers.

Comparable tone, volume and overall dynamic range, in other words. If you make tracks aimed at the dance fraternity, mastering will involve making sure your track ‘fits the mold’ of other tracks in a similar genre.

However, the primary purpose concerns making creative, musical decisions to ensure that your final mixes meet the expectations of your listeners, which will vary depending on what kind of music you’re making. These may include tagging tracks with artist and track names, for example, preparing that data for digital services like Spotify and Apple Music. When mastering vinyl, engineers are trying to make sure that the tone of a record doesn’t cause skips or jumps, but as most music is now released digitally, mastering engineers have very different technical requirements. One is more creative, concerning the ‘final’ sound of a track, EP or album, the second is more administrative, ensuring that all tracks meet a required technical specification. That stage is mastering and for many reasons even the most experienced producers usually entrust that final step, the process to dedicated engineers. That said, the final stage of getting a piece of music ready for the outside world is still mostly seen as being reserved for a specialist professional. In the past, a session musician might never have dreamt of being part of the production or mixing/mastering process, but these days all of those tasks are often carried out by one person – you. Performing, engineering, editing, production, programming and mixing are all interconnected now. As computer-based creators of music, many of the tasks which form our daily workflow were once broken down into separate roles.

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