5 Magic Mastering Tips To POLISH Your Mix

we do tons of talking on this channel about recording and mixing but sometimes i feel like mastering just gets a backseat and a big reason for that is because i'm not what one would call a professional mastering engineer but guess what most mixers aren't and we still need to make sure that our music is loud and competes with whatever is peaking at number one peaking see what i did there but yeah many times we're working on a project that doesn't have a budget for ted jensen or mike kalashian and we're left on our own but that doesn't mean that we still can't get really amazing results with what we have at our disposal by the end of this episode you'll know some mastering tips to help you stay ahead of the curb since the regulations of mastering are changing every single year now so what's happening fam miami here with jst and i'm sure that you've had to master your stuff before whether it was because you wanted to make your own stuff louder or you were involved in some kind of test mix nothing can be worse than when you make an amazing mix but the band is comparing what you sent them to a fully mastered track when yours has nothing on the two bus if this has ever happened to you i'm sure it was a big wake-up call and if it hasn't happened yet hopefully this video prevents it from ever happening so let's get into all the bells and whistles of what to pay attention to in modern mastering on the subject of bells make sure you hit that notification bell subscribe button and give this a like if you're enjoying the content my transition game is still crazy number one the first thing i want to talk about is abandoning rms at this point for a judge of loudness l ufs or lufs is the way to go it's for a pretty simple reason rms was the king during the cd era and represented the actual loudness of a track while luff's perceived loudness and is the measurement by which streaming platforms will go so if you don't know what these are they're the units of measure for how we determine the volume of our tracks the reason this is important when mastering is that if you don't master to the levels the platform's suggesting your music is going to be limited anyways and not in a pleasing way the average number of loves recommended by most platforms is negative 14. this is youtube spotify and let me just show you a chart all right so it looks like amazon music is a little bit more friendly for this but the old measurements are basically dead and we need to adjust with the times and the damage [Music] what's crazy is that at any given moment this whole standard can change and so will our workflow the most annoying thing is metal and rock music typically sound better being pushed harder ac dc back in black was like negative 9 love spotify would knock that down about 5 loves without a question make sure with whatever mastering software you're using you have true peaking enabled to not have to deal with any inter-sample peaking and that brings us to our next point and since we're on the subject of peaks let's take a peek at a comparable song to see where that lands number two referencing now if you watch my recent episode five reference tips to improve your mix you probably understand how important it is already but i have to bring this up again to expand on a very important point a little while ago i said there's a standard amount of loves for us to follow but what happens when we follow those guidelines but we don't get the results that we want what if the song isn't aggressive enough sounding well this is the time when we want to compare to another song right because if another song is going past the amount of lust that is standard but has the sound we're looking for maybe that's what we need to do right my thought process here is if someone else i admire is breaking this rule then maybe i can break it too and if their mix is getting squash 5 db on spotify and i still like it maybe it doesn't matter as much as we think it might seem like i'm on both sides of the fence here but i just want you to know the rules as well as know when and how to break them [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] on to our next point number three setting your attack and release based on genre and tempo i want to stress how important this can be for the set it and forget it crowd sure you can set a compressor to 10 or 30 second attack and auto release but that doesn't always vibe with the song the right way not to mock another youtuber but there's something about the way the compression moves and ebbs and flows you know when i'm dealing with fast music in the metal domain i typically like to go with the fastest release not auto when i'm dealing with hip hop or trap music i find myself going for a more automatic release with a 30 millisecond attack and in other rock music i like to do a 3 millisecond attack and a 0.3 release that settings not extremely common but i find that it works great on pop punk projects that have an upbeat vibe but not extremely fast drums you'll find as you experiment with the settings on your bus compressor certain styles of songs require a similar type of compression the set it and forget it mindset probably works for big producers that work on the same type of material and bands day in and day out but it's most likely not going to be the same scenario for us [Music] is [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] point number four don't mix into your master bus unless you're a seasoned mixer i had a bit of pushback a while ago when i did a video referring to people that do top-down mixing and the justification people had was that nollie was doing this some amazing stuff with it but the thing they also need to realize is they aren't nollie most of us aren't and it's not something he started out doing from day one he found it along the way and some of my favorite mixers ever mix into their master bus of course cla and one of the greatest mixers ever dan korneth because they understand everything their master bus is doing and they're okay with the fact things might get a little wonky if they turned it off but they probably never turn it off if it's been working for you this long why change it right but my reason against top down mixing will always be that an entire mix can fall apart once you take off that master bust or you might be making weird moves because of that master bust thought i was alone in this but it was cool seeing andrew wade agreed with this sentiment a while ago so unless you're 100 confident in what you're doing pumping out consistent albums don't even risk this one as a permanent thing it's not for beginners and can even cause issues for the pros number five using a limiter at the end of your chain after you've finalized your track it is pretty common for people to put a limiter at the end of the chain the only reason you should be doing this is to shave off peaks that are getting through the idea is to not use the limiter to actually compress your song all that much i know it sounds counterintuitive but everything else at this point on your bus should be doing the heavy lifting the reason people used to push these so much is because there was this hardware version of the l2 from waves and people would really slam this thing so people figured okay i can just abuse the limiter in plug-in form to get the results but there's also a reason that we don't see these hardware limiters anymore right plugins work just fine to handle this when not used super aggressively and there are a few really cool limiters to use um l1 is a classic for sure l2 i'm not huge on of course finality by jst extremely feature rich just grab something throw it on the end of your chain and don't make it work too hard [Music] so let's go over all of these one more time abandoning rms for lufts referencing set your attack and release based on genre and tempo don't mix into your master bus unless you're a seasoned mixer using a limiter at the end of your chain these are some tips to ensure that you're paying attention to the song and treating it appropriately we're in a very different time of audio in which the standards for things can change at any second so we need to be aware of how it can change and what the changes might mean for us as engineers at the end of the day we either adapt with the new direction of streaming or we're gonna get left behind now you have the knowledge of the rules and can decide if and when you want to break them if you're an engineer on the come up give this video a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe you only have to do it one time and tap that for notifications so when a video drops you know the location until next time i am out of here mic drop except as engineers we know i'd never really dropped this thing because that get really expensive even if it is a piece of shirt later

Channel: Joey Sturgis Tones

Views: 4,982

Keywords: home recording, audio production, mixing tutorials, how to master audio mixes, Joey Sturgis Tones, JST, what is mastering?, audio mastering walkthrough, audio engineers, optimizing tracks, the best listening environment for mixing and mastering, using reference tracks, compression and EQ, how to master your own mixes, mastering, LUFS vs RMS

Id: kIkd14Js5jc

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021