Mic The Snare
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What Even IS Audio Mastering? (Early Access)
🕑 Added 2025-05-29 22:00:09 +0000 UTCHope y'all are having a good week! Here's my latest video all about mastering. This one has a very special guest — Adam Ayan, a Grammy-winning mastering engineer who's worked on albums by Lana Del Rey, Father John Misty, Paul McCartney, Shakira, and sooooo many more artists. Sitting down with him was a blast, and I think you'll get a lot out of our conversation.
The video is out now here and on Nebula, and it'll be out tomorrow on YouTube. In tandem, I'll be releasing a follow-up video next week on here + Nebula featuring the questions some of you asked last week.
Comments
Adam Stutsman
So I’ve been a DIY musician for over a decade, handling every aspect of the recording process from writing the songs and playing every instrument through recording, mixing, and mastering it, and mastering has always been the weirdest most confusing part of it all. I use the same YouTube video to “re-learn” how to do it every time I get to that point. lol I’m so grateful mastering engineers exist. It’s an art that I do not understand and I’m so glad other people do, and when I finally make something I feel is worth getting professionally mastered, I can’t wait to hear what they’ll do to it. This is a really great video and I can’t wait to see you do more like it in the future!
Daniel Jones
Hey Mic! You ended your Pitbull DDD saying the best album to start with is his greatest hits compilation! Are there other “greatest hits” artists/bands you would be interested in doing dives for? Bob Marley and the Wailers, Journey, Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc? Would you consider Queen to fit this idea of a “greatest hits” band?
Mic The Snare
Oh for sure I definitely plan to make more like this!
Matt Evans
This was very cool and interesting! I hope we can get more videos like it in the future!
Claire Ewers
Oooooh you're making me interested in music creation again, thank you! What a cool video--I completely agree that AI will never replace human judgement and I think that can go for just about any industry. Even at the most basic level, we need humans to fact-check AI, so I don't think it'll ever be fully self-sufficient. Also learning all these little details is making me want to go back to some of my favorite songs and figure out what makes them great. Is it the buttery soft feel of the song as a whole or a certain guitar effect or a particular vocal choice? I fear this is a rabbit hole I may never climb out of but I'm excited to see where it leads!
