Clear Perspective

It’s likely that by the time a mix is ready for mastering I’ve already spent 5-8 hours listening to it in great detail. By the end of that window my subjectivity is basically gone. It’s so important send it off to fresh ears!

Quality Control

If you work with a highly skilled mastering engineer they will sometimes catch things that you may have missed. It’s not uncommon for my mastering engineer to mention that they cleaned up some mouth pop/click or glitches in the audio.

Additional Studio Environment

Every listening environment has a different eq curve that imparts its sound on top of your listening experience. That’s why it so crucial to get your mix into one more dialed studio with skilled ears before it hits the real world. Also, gear can fail without you knowing. Like a dead tweeter or malfunctioning sub. You might not catch this if you weren’t working with an additional engineer. Think of it as mix insurance.

Sonic Improvement

When I was coming up I worked with a lot of mastering engineers and more often than not my experience wasn’t very positive. The mix almost always seemed to sound worse after the mastering process. I know now though that you have to find someone that truly knows what they are doing. There are tons of people calling themselves mastering engineers. 9 times out of 10 your mix should come back sounding a notch or two better.

Final Thoughts

One final piece of advice would be to find 1 or 2 mastering engineers that you send the vast majority of your work to and then reevaluate the collective work you’ve done with them over a year or two. If you keep changing ME’s from song to song you won’t really understand how they helped or hurt your mixes. Also it’s just so much more fun working with people you know & love!

Hope you found this helpful!

Cheers! -SVH