Mastering is a commonly misunderstood and complicated process that is surrounded by a lot of mystery and anxiety for those looking to produce their own music. 
 
Commonly confused with mixing, mastering is the process of taking a fully recorded and mixed song and preparing it for public distribution. As the final step in the music making process, mastering involves the fine tuning of your music to ensure it is optimized for release. Common tools used in the mastering process are compression, stereo enhancement, equalization, and limiters. 
 
Mastering can help to ensure that all the songs on your album keep a cohesive sound or work to polish and enhance a new single. A very common goal for mastering is to ensure that music sounds the best it can on streaming services such as Spotify and iTunes. In the new age of music and technology, streaming services have adopted loudness optimization in order to ensure that all the songs on their platform are cohesive. The mastering process looks to take advantage of that system in order to ensure that your song works with the streaming services altering of your music instead of against it. 
 
After your music is released it will be listened to in various spaces on many different devices. A good master allows for your music to sound the best it can in any given environment. 
 
At GDA, the mix you’ve fallen in love with will only get enhanced and polished with our mastering engineers ears and gear, making it ready for any platform you put it on.