Toward the endeavor of a mastering tutorial, there are only a handful of people on NG with actual knowledge of Mastering, from either the university/learned aspect or the Experience aspect. And it's recognized as voodoo because so many engineers want it to remain this magical art. Imagine if there were no stage shows, only recorded music. Now, these musicians recording this great music only ever trained a select few individuals in the art of pick sweeps, running scales, finger picking, drumming, glissando, all of the alchemical music secrets which we take for granted in the world. In this world without stage shows and recorded evidence of how to pull off these feats, musicians sound on recordings more like magicians because most people can't learn complex musical techniques simply by ear alone.
This is the world that recording, mixing and mastering engineers live in. Professional studios are expensive to book time in, so most of us have never even stepped foot in one. If we have, none of these mysterious engineers has offered to teach us their secrets. And if they did, you'd be one of those select few cognoscenti who would, more often than not, perpetuate the mystery. It's rare enough to find a producer willing to give out fx, melody, arpeggio, or instrument choice secrets. Rarer still is finding an engineer willing to give out the magic of Mastering.
But, then there are people who do break the silence and teach that mastering is merely mixing all over again, though with far more precise tools usually. Just as mixing involves balancing instruments across tracks into a whole song, mastering involves balancing tracks across a cd into a whole product. The same techniques are employed to form a cohesive unit whole. The main difference is that all of the tracks of an album are not playing at the same time like all of the channels of a track are playing, so EQ is not so much used to keep tracks from conflicting in Mastering as it is used to make sure each track smoothly transitions into the next and the CD as a whole is well balanced. The same goes for volume balancing, which is made far easier if the individual tracks are from the same genre, the same producer, and have roughly the same mixdown methods, which most small label releases fit neatly into.
So, mastering in these cases is actually not as hard as doing so for a major label or mastering house, wherein you're dealing with mixes from different producers, mixing engineers, even different bands for compilation albums. That's when Mastering can turn into a major undertaking. But that is also where the triumvirate of Engineers becomes like the Editor of a movie, ie. another player lending their own character to the music and interpreting it into something grander than it came to them as.
Long story short, anyone asking for a tutorial of Mastering will get two results: an emphatic "no" or a wild goose chase/sage-like mantras from the people in the best position to give said tutorial, or information that will seem too simple to be true from those who may or may not truly know the answer. If you want the quick and dirty, get a good Parametric EQ, a good Multi-band compressor/limiter, learn to properly Mix first, then use ALOT of reference mixes from albums you think fit the genre(s) you're shooting for compiling and mastering. And for god's sake, if you don't have a good acoustical environment and good monitoring, don't torment yourself by trying to achieve the impossible.
