A quick note… A friend on a message board was asking if his music needed to be mastered before it was sent to itunes or any other cd selling service.
My quick answer… Yes.
The longer answer… People come from all different abilities when it comes to hearing music. Some people will never notice if instruments are out of tune, over compressed, recorded badly or distorted. But there are a lot of people who will hear that, and judge you on it. The thing about sound is you sometimes notice it when it’s great, consider it “normal” when it’s good, but always notice it when it’s bad. Never never never put out bad sounding music, people will judge you on it. It says amateur in so many ways.
Do you need to get it mastered though? If you can, I say yes. Make sure to look for someone proven. Ask them about their techniques. There’s a quick way of mastering, where you put a hard limiter on the master fader and “squash” it until it sounds as loud as other stuff you listen to. Then there are the masters who really get into your music, and enhance it with levels of EQ and compression so it sounds loud, but not compressed.
Depending on your recordings, they may not be able to make it great, but it wont be noticeably bad. It will at least sound as loud as other albums in the same genre. Unless you have serious cash though, you probably will have to settle for it sounding normal, which actually isn’t a bad thing at all. Make sense?
