This article is a bit of crystal ball gazing into the future of music production.  I'm going to make the case that mastering will eventually go away as a separate process - that it will be merged with mixing as the final process for creating digital "masters" ready for distribution.

In the "old" days when music used to be recorded in big expensive recording facilities, the full process from pre-production through mixing would often occur in one place.  Then the final mix would be sent off to a mastering professional to ensure the physical product (vinyl record, CD, etc.) would sound the best it possibly could.  Mastering engineers had to have very specialized knowledge and skills, understanding the various medium they were "mastering" for.  They used specialized equipment that was very different than what you find in a recording studio.  Mastering equipment had to have the ability to recall all settings, which was rare in recording studios.  No one could master their own album even if they wanted to, and why would they?  It was a critical step to ensuring quality and the 2nd pair of ears was an essential part of the process. 

Today mastering is still a critical step in the process and not one to be taken lightly.  There are good mastering engineers and now days lots of not so good ones.  Tools like TC Electronics Finalizer, Waves L3 and others have many people thinking that mastering is as easy as strapping a plug across the master bus.  If you are serious about your release, find a mastering engineer you can trust to make the most of your music.

Now getting back to my point for this article.  Things have changed over the past 20 years or so.  Many bands and musicians are recording in non-traditional ways and varying locations.  If you can get a decent recording chain in a fairly tame room you can get very professional recordings done with close micing techniques.  When it comes time to mix, it is a very different story.  You need a great set of monitors (or multiple sets) in a great room.  If you have more than a few tracks you need a powerful equipment that can manage 4-8 plug-ins per track.  And most of all, you need tons of experience in making a bunch of tracks sound like a record.  So now days, like mastering, mixing is becoming a domain of specialization and expertise.

In the old days, no one would think of doing their own mastering.  Today, more and more professional releases will are mixed by a separate mix engineer in a specialized mixing studio.  This trend is already evident with mix specialists such as Chris Lord-Alge or Dave Pensado.  Mixing is becoming as separate of a process from recording as mastering used to be from mixing.  Mastering is blurring more and more into the mix realm where more and more mix engineers are mixing and mastering simultaneously.  These processes interact greatly and a lot of synergy can come out of mastering processes during the mix.  More mix engineers are relying on recallable mixes and insisting their systems support it, like mastering requires.

I foresee a day in the not to distant future where a separate mastering engineer will be reserved for a few major label artists.  For most productions, the mixing engineer and mastering engineer will be one and the same.  They will have specialized rooms that are a blend of today's mixing and mastering studios. 

If you look at many of the more modern studios, they are moving away from giant consoles to more modular systems with a few peices of exceptional analog gear, superb converters and excellent monitoring capability.  This is very similar to many mastering houses.  This is because the ability to listen and hear every minute detail is critical in both of these processes.  Large consoles require you to move out of the sweet spot alot and also create a reflective surface that distorts the image coming from your speakers.

Well, that's my prediction.  But I will leave you with a final warning.  As we move through this transition, be wary of studios offering mixing and mastering before they are capable.  At MagicMixStudio, we focus on Mixing, not Mastering.  We always recommend using a separate mastering engineer.  Many studios are only providing the plug-ins across the master bus mastering described above.  (We do this too, in order to provide a referrence of standard volume).  This is not mastering!