How To: Master Your Music with AI
So, you've poured your heart and soul into your song or album, painstakingly recorded your tracks, and even have mixed everything down. Now it's time to create the final, polished versions that the world will hear. It’s time to talk about mastering.
Preparing for a song to be successful means it needs to sound amazing, or at least consistent, on everything from a club sound system to a smartphone speaker. That means taking the time to address things like EQ, limiting, compression, etc.
It can be an intimidating process, especially for a first-timer, and specialised equipment like monitor speakers and audio interfaces can be expensive. You could outsource the job to a mastering engineer, but their time doesn’t come cheap either.
Let’s find out how you can use AI to master your music.
What is a Master?
Your master is the final, release-ready version of your song that’s ready for distribution. It’s a crucial final step in music production, ensuring your audio sounds balanced and polished across all playback systems, from speakers to headphones.
But it’s worth pointing out that mastering is more about fine-tuning than it is fixing major issues; that should be taken care of when you’re mixing tracks. Changes made during mastering are important, but they’re often incremental and precise.
Create Different Versions of your Master Track
Counterintuitively, despite what its name suggests, there are situations in which you might want several master tracks of the same song. Some of these include:
- Instrumental – a vocal-free version of your track that can be used for sync licensing opportunities (TV, film, ads, etc.)
- Radio Edit – a shorter version of your song, optimized for the airwaves. It might have a shorter intro or a verse removed to keep its length down
- Acapella – a version of your track that contains only the vocals, which can be useful for DJs, remixers, and making mashups
- TV Edit – Similar to an instrumental, but with backing vocals and non-lyrical vocal sounds (think “hey!”s and “ooh”s) included
- Stems – Individual tracks for each instrument and vocal, used in remixes
The main issue here is that creating such an extensive range of master tracks, especially if you have a lot of songs on your album, can get very expensive. But there are now AI tools for mastering tracks that can cut that cost down to size.
Master Music Using AI with Masterchannel
Our partner Masterchannel is an AI mastering platform to help you make your tracks release-ready and optimised for all streaming platforms. It’s already being used by tens of thousands of artists, including GRAMMY award-winning producers.
By working with thousands of human engineers to achieve “benchmark results”, its algorithm automates the process to achieve results comparable with those of a human mastering engineer at a fraction of the price. You won’t believe your ears…
Check out Masterchannel here. (Pro members get 20% off via Partner Perks!)
Ready to learn more about mastering and releasing your music?
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