HOW TO PROPERLY REVIEW YOUR MASTERED TRACKS

Now that you've got your mastered tracks back you'll want to listen to them to make sure you're 100% happy with the outcome. Here are a few tips to make sure you do this properly. Listening under the wrong conditions can cause skew the results, potentially leading to revisions that make the masters actually sound worse. 

Listen where you're most comfortable, within reason. 

In general, a nice set of speakers or high quality headphones are the best way to listen back to you mastered tracks, but any system that you listen on regularly should be ok. Just keep in mind that iPhone speakers, laptop speakers, and earbuds don't even come close to producing the full frequency range of your music, and should be totally avoided for critical listening. 

COMPARING YOUR MASTERS TO YOUR FAVORITE REFERENCE TRACKS.

I totally encourage this, it's a great way to see how your master "stacks up" commercially. But you MUST play your mastered tracks reference tracks from the same application. Playing one from spotify and the other from iTunes, or one from youtube and the other from windows media player will TOTALLY skew the volume and overall tone of the files. 

THE BEST WAY TO DO THIS IS TO USE ITUNES, IT'S FREE AND EASY TO SET UP. IF YOU HAVE A MAC YOU ALREADY HAVE IT. IF YOU DON'T HAVE ITUNES YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE. 

Before you start listening you'll want to make sure the following settings are as follows:

You can access these settings by navigating to your iTunes preferences.

- Crossfade Songs, Sound Enhancer, and Sound Check should all be Disabled.

- The equalizer is set to OFF, and the Preamp is set to 0 DB.

Once you're sure iTunes is set up properly, simply create a new playlist for your mastered tracks. It's easiest to drop the reference tracks right in to the same playlist so you can easily toggle back and forth while previewing both sets of music at the same volume from the exact same source.