There are many ways to get your songs to final form. Lets assume, for this article, final form means a beautifully polished piece of music in 16 bit 44.1 khz digital audio (i.e., the "red book" cd audio standard) or a standard wave file. You need to start, of course, with a fully or almost finished song. This is the point where the writing ends and the TweakMeistering begins. I'm going to give you some hard earned tips on Mixing and Mastering.

Mixdown and Mastering, traditionally speaking, are two very separate processes. Mixdown is the art of leveling, equalizing and effecting all the various sources from many tracks down to a stereo Mix. Mastering is the process of taking the stereo mix and putting it in the final album-ready form. Recent software and hardware developments make these processes easier and less expensive than they ever have been in the history of making music. Given that much of the time we can stay in the digital domain we can add processing to our heart's content and maintain a high signal to noise ratio and achieve optimum dynamics for the piece at hand.

Other things to remember:

Make sure your trax are not constantly hitting the red. Once or twice is ok, but if you notice that your track is hitting the red more than 3 times, time level off and gain down the sound or the reinforced plug in you applied. Try not to crank your compressor plug ins too much. Gain your sound properly first, then use some compression, not a whole lot. USE YOUR EARS!!! After your have recorded your song, constantly listen to it. Test your work out in lots of different music players, like your i-pod, cd players, headphones, in your car, in a sterio boom box, in your computer, etc. DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT TEST YOUR MUSIC OUT IN OFF THE HOOK SPEAKERS LIKE IN A CAR WITH A HARD SOUNDSYSTEM WITH 12 OR 15 INCH SPEAKERS IN THE BACK. THE REASON FOR THIS IS BECAUSE IF YOUR WORK IS NOT MASTERED, THE LOWS IN YOUR SONG WILL DROWND OUT THE MIDS AND THE HIGHS. THIS MEANS YOUR VOCALS AND SOME OF YOUR INSTRUMENTS WONT BE HEARD RIGHT. ALL YOU WILL HEAR IS HARD, RATTLING, UNLEVELED BASS.