5 mastering MYTHS you've believed this whole time (music production MYTHBUSTERS)

he's got tons and tons of headroom there this is the master that he turned in are you here for the rising hey i'm max and today we're doing mastering mythbusters so we're going to talk about five common myths about the mixing and mastering processes specifically mastering and we're going to clear them up for you um these are things that i've heard a lot of people say over the years and hopefully i can provide some examples to show you exactly what i think and hopefully you can learn something no matter what level of engineer you might be so the first one that we're going to talk about is the myth that louder or softer is necessarily better like most myths there is a kernel of truth to this our brains interpret sound based on signals sent by the vibrations of tiny hairs inside our ears that are called cilia and the louder a sound is the more it excites our cilia which means that the sound is more exciting to our brains so you would think that that means that louder is always better right well maybe not because if you've ever met a mastering engineer you know that we love to ramble on about something called dynamic range so that's the difference between the highest peak and the lowest valley in the waveform a master that is dynamic will have a large amount of range between the lowest and highest and a master in that is not very dynamic will not have a lot of range a good master should be dynamic and it should also be loud and exciting which could be at odds but in practice mastering is about hitting the right balance between all of those and is dependent on a bunch of different factors foremost among them being genre in my humble opinion in different genres different loudness levels are appropriate so for example we're going to take a look at three different songs that are in different genres and compare how they're mastered in terms of loudness so the three songs i've chosen for this are the intro theme from variations on a melancholy theme which is brad meldaw and the ortho orpheus chamber orchestra's new record uh i chose a song called dammit by tor off his new album eel and um i chose fractions by nicki minaj as well so this is a classical piece a pop piece and a wrap piece and i'm going to pull up yulin loudness meter which is one of my favorite loudness meters so that we can see what the program loudness of each track is so first of all let's listen to the brad mildau which is extremely dynamic so we have a soft piano section and the other instruments begin to come in [Music] so for this piece it's not incredibly loud we have a loudness rating of about -22 luff's and that's appropriate for classical music because it's dynamics right if it's marked piano or mezzo piano or something then it should not be super loud and as a mastering engineer if i were to smash the limiter and bring it way way up and make it a lot louder as loud as the songs that we're about to listen to it would be inappropriate because you would lose the emotion and the artist's intent in having played it soft in the first place now with all that said let's take a listen to the pop record and i'm gonna um start it kind of at the verse here [Music] you can hear that and see that uh it's extremely loud uh we're at minus 4.5 lufs which is a really high loudness rating that makes it exciting and attention grabbing as a pop tune but however you could also see that there was some dynamic range there was some space for uh the song to get louder when the chorus part came in so compared to the chorus the verse is a little bit softer that makes a lot of sense and it's something that you'll find commonly on a lot of pop records now so finally let's take a listen to the nicki minaj track and see what that's like no action i'm about to get them attractions and a distraction then i'ma line them like fractions break i let them live look at all i'm eating but these [ __ ] don't be mad once i call this [Applause] okay so in this genre we see that it's pretty much conversant with the pop record that we listened to the loves numbers are pretty close and it sounds pretty much the same in terms of loudness although in the chorus the torsong is louder which again makes sense in this genre in rep you really want to emphasize the sub bass and you want to make sure that the vocal is as intelligible as possible so the way that they mastered this makes a whole lot of sense and frankly if they had used mastering techniques that were better for the other genres it wouldn't have sounded as good so louder is not necessarily better and softer is not necessarily better there are a few other things to think about here as well that many mastering engineers might not necessarily talk about for one a master that has too much dynamic range might not necessarily translate perfectly to consumer audio playback systems for example let's say i'm listening to a song on my airpods on the sub subway going into work and if the master is incredibly dynamic i might not be able to hear everything that's going on in the song over uh either the ambient noise or there might be frequency masking issues to contend with um and additionally you know with too much dynamic range just in the master there might be frequency masking that occurs in order to avoid that you compress and bring up all the elements uh and that's why you limit in the first place to make things loud enough otherwise you could just leave it super soft and nothing would matter but that's not what you actually do so as a mastering engineer it's your job to be conversant in the genre that you're working with and make sure that the mastery that you deliver is appropriate for that genre another common use case is is the track going to be played in clubs uh an incredibly dynamic master just might not hit the same on club systems or uh it might not fit in a dj set so you may you might be forcing your dj to who's playing the song to be constantly adjusting the gain knob in order to fit your track in with the others i know this is something that i experienced a lot when i started trying to play my masters in clubs i realized that they just weren't loud enough to compete with the rest of the stuff that was happening of course you can adjust the gain knob and of course you know dynamic range is still important but it's just another thing to think about when you're producing masters also loudness normalization by streaming platforms is another thing that we have to talk about when you listen on a streaming platform it will automatically adjust based on the program loudness uh whatever you're listening to so that it's at a similar loudness level to everything else that you're listening to this is usually a peak calculation so that means that if you have a master with a high dynamic range that you turn in it's going to sound better than a master that is crushed where the peaks are all pretty much the same uh those peaks will be reduced whereas the master with the higher dynamic range will be brought up that's how streaming platforms are attempting to combat the loudness were essentially it's a whole lot of stuff to think about and uh that's why mastering is something that people pay for um the bottom line is that there's no perfect loudness number there's no amount of luffs that you should have that's going to make your song sound right it all depends on what the track is what you want to do with the track what genre the track is in and a ton of other different things and a big part of the mastering engineer's job is to understand all of that and deliver a master that is appropriate for the artist's intent the next one that we're going to talk about this is a great myth uh it's the myth that xyz plug-in or piece of gear will make my tracks slap so it really uh there really is no magic bullet for this there's no plug-in that is going to make masters sound beautiful or perfect every engineer has plug-ins that they like and maybe pieces of gear that they like but in the end it's nothing more than just a bunch of tools actually you might be surprised by how few pieces of gear are typically employed by a lot of mastering engineers of course if you have a nice studio you might have everything that you want and a solid mastering house will have solid gear but even though everyone does it differently most mastering techniques don't really involve all that much different types of processing uh dynamics and eq alone can take you really really far uh of course you might want a super nice eq or a super nice dynamics processor this is uh really understandable it doesn't mean that engineers don't have favorite plugins it doesn't mean that some plugins aren't better than others uh or that certain pieces of software or hardware aren't commonly found in mastering studios they are but the thing to remember is this it's not the gear it's how you use it so all the plugins and all the analog gear in the world are useless if you don't know what you're doing with them um just for a quick demo i'm going to pull up a song that i mastered this is a song by my friend and brooklyn djisha and i will show you my plugin chain just to show you uh what it is that i did on this here's the original song i'll just loop a louder part of it so that you can hear so this was without any mastering processing applied and now i'll start uh turning these on one by one okay so we have a little bit of eq actually it's doing nothing i just had it on there in case i wanted to use it so we'll turn that back off a little bit of multi-band this is yeah doing a little bit of dynamics processing in a frequency banded way so controlling some of the bass controlling some of the mid-range i have an instance of ozone which is providing some eq some dynamic eq and some maximization i have a clipper plug-in k-clip i love this one so that's gonna be a soft clipper and then finally a limiter and i use pro-l a lot anyway so that's an example of how with a few plugins you can as long as you know what you're doing with them they can take you pretty far does that mean that these plugins are perfect absolutely not does that mean that these are the only ones that you can use certainly not it's just whatever you like and whatever you know what you can deliver with them so that's a little example of my in the box master chain just to show you that you can use a whole lot of different plugins but that there's no magic bullet myth 3 is the idea that we will fix it in the master so if there is a problem with a mix don't try to fix it in the master please just fix it in the mix it's going to be a lot easier it's going to make you more happy with the mastering engineers final delivery and it's actually going to be a lot more effective as well and more efficient so if there are issues with a mix like for example if the high hats are too loud or something like that fix that in the mix and then send it to be mastered a mastering engineer's job is to bring out whatever you have there it's not to mix it right with that said if you are uh unhappy with your mix or like maybe if you think the mastering engineer would like a little bit more control or if there's a few things that you want to change you could alternatively try something like a stem master so a stem master is when the artist provides the engineer with a stemmed out mix so that the engineer can make more precise mix adjustments and i have an example of this to show you this was a song by tamaguchi that i did a stem mix or a stem master on so i took yeah let's see three four stems no five because these are two different tracks and applied processing applied some mixed stuff and basically did a really small mix so tama did mix a lot of this and then i did a little bit of mixing and a little bit of mastering processing like i have my vocal group i have my beat group and then i have a master chain on all of this so just to give you a quick example i'll turn my mastering processing off and play what this sounds like [Music] because he provided the stems i was able to balance in terms of volume um exactly how i wanted it to be so that the mastering could be the most effective instead of trying to make mixed changes and then send it back to be bounced in the master and going back and forth really inefficient and kind of a waste of everyone's time um but this turned out really well i think uh here is with the mastering applied [Music] love that myth 4 is a really fun one and that is that ai is the answer uh ai is the only is only the answer when it comes to basketball uh go sixers um in audio world though it's not that simple as ai mastering services proliferate and gain popularity the entire business of mastering has begun to evolve and some have speculated that artificial intelligence will replace mastering engineers completely as they keep getting better and better while some others think that an algorithm is never going to be able to do as good a job as an actual engineer in terms of making music sound pleasing to humans in my opinion the truth is somewhere in the middle uh ai tools i don't think will ever completely replace mastering engineers but they do have some uses that traditional engineers simply can't provide so for one big example ai mastering is cheap according to lander which is one of the first ai mastering services if you sign up for one of their plans you can get your songs mastered for a few dollars per master engineers meanwhile have to keep the lights on in their studios they have to pay their employees they have to purchase and maintain gear they have to feed their own families and they simply can't work for a couple of dollars per master if you don't have the slightest clue how to master your music and you don't know any engineer friends who will do it for you for free probably ai mastering can be a really good option for you but it's not just person versus machine though i think that what savvy producers and engineers are doing today is that they don't just rail against technological advances they use them to their own advantage so mastering engineers don't necessarily need to work against ai instead they can use it to work faster one great example of this is the master assistant that is found in izotope's ozone mastering suite the mastering assistant you can use it to listen to your track um make adjustments and provide a suggestion based on the artificial intelligence algorithms in the software you can accept or reject those suggestions or adjust them however you see fit that makes mastering quicker and easier and really helps with things like for example programmatically detecting frequencies where you might want to make dynamic eq changes so my humble opinion is that the answer to the question ai or engineer is both it's a yes and kind of situation so just for a little demo here i have ozone pulled up and i have i have three versions of the same song so this is uh pre-master this is my master that i did with my plugins and processing and stuff and then this is um lander doing the same as i did uh it's their just default algorithm and we'll compare all three and see what we get out so first of all i'll demo this ozone here i'm gonna loop uh the loudest part of the song and pull up ozone okay and now i can set it playing and press the master assistant and it will uh generate a suggestion for me how i should master the track [Music] i'm [Music] okay so based on listening to my track that's what the ozone algorithm suggested in terms of processing it said okay here's how you should change the eq here's how you should process the dynamics looks like it controlled my bass a bit here's some dynamic eq issues that i found and then it uses the maximizer to bring it up to the target loudness so i could use this and i could start with all of this stuff and reject it as i want or not um when i was mastering this with my own plug-in chain i did use ozone although i didn't necessarily use exactly this this is really helpful in terms of making a first starting point when i'm doing my masters so let's compare it to how it came out to my own master and to lander here's ozone from the back to the front pulling out never tripping out like your mom's coaching you ain't getting on rep where you from make you want to blow the trumpet and i take your number one from the back to the front pulling [Music] okay so it sounds to me and i'm not sure how it sounds with uh youtube compression and all this but to me it sounds like the ozone suggestion is a little bit less cramped a little bit less like squashed a little bit more dynamic but i do want the song to be exciting so i decided to make it more clipped and more limited i think that mine sounds better than the lander one to be honest but i am obviously biased uh so the point is that uh you can use ai to your advantage instead of um just saying oh you know uh my masters are better than that and i would never pay for that or whatever you can also use it as a reference or like just an example of how a mastering engineer might do it the final myth that i want to talk about is that mastering engineers need 6 db or need 10 db of headroom this simply is not true and you can apply mastering techniques no matter how much headroom exists in the pre-master file so we can look at this i mean there's some headroom here you can see that the peaks aren't touching the absolute top there the only reason why mastering engineers request headroom is because they want to make absolutely sure that the mix isn't clipped if a professional mixing engineer worked on the track this is not a problem and so they probably aren't going to even bother asking for that but if the artist or producer is doing all the mixing work themselves they might not necessarily understand all the nuances of how to export the file um what plugins to leave on and off uh they might limit you know or a soft clip or something like that um and so in these cases mastering engineers might think that it's easier just to ask for a certain amount of headroom and for whatever reason it usually turns out to be they ask for 6 db or a 10 db i don't really know but the rule of thumb to follow i think is this make sure that your mix doesn't peak above zero db so you want to make sure it's not clipped you don't want to see the red things coming out here they didn't someone once told me they didn't start using red lights on the mixer because they ran out of green ones um yeah obviously they started using red lights because going into the red is bad when you're talking about mastering leaving a little bit of headroom also in the premaster file as my collaborator that sent me a song to master did here is perfectly reasonable and perfectly acceptable but if you're removing compression or processing from your master and it's killing the vibe of the song that's not really desirable either so if i'm a mastering engineer and i have a trade-off between getting a slightly more compressed mix and getting a boring mix that the artist isn't happy but that has enough headroom for me i definitely would choose the uh one that sounds better because it's going to make my job easier it means i have less to do also simply turning down the master fader to comply with a request like 6 db of headroom is not a good idea it's going to provide more head room but it's not going to do anything in terms of changing the dynamics of your mix so don't bother doing that what you should do is if you have a limiter on bypass it um so turn it off before you export your pre-master mix um and here i just have a key a few uh examples of what i'm talking about so this is a totally reasonable pre-master why don't you just date me that gives plenty enough headroom let me pull up the loudness meter so that we can see what we're talking about [Music] this is a file that i would not want to turn into a mastering engineer because it's already limited so that means that if we continue with the mastering process the mastering engineer is not going to have all of that much room to work with i've already as you can see kind of clipped the peaks off here maybe you can't see actually because it's pretty small but since the clips are peaked off here or peaks are clipped off here i would turn off the limiter before exporting this same with this track heavily limited you see there's not much dynamic range to work with this could be okay if it's preserving the vibe of the song but it's not necessary so if i was sending this off to get mastered i would turn off the limiter and finally i just want to provide one example of a premaster i had the same artist dj shifty mastered mixed and mastered this song for me so the premaster track i just wanted to play you and the master just to see what the difference actually was so here was the pre-master that he turned in and he's got tons and tons of headroom there uh this is the master that he turned in jump up on me okay so a super nice amount of headroom um meant that he was able to turn this particular pre-master into this master which i think sounds great um without having clipped it or anything a little different because he was doing the mixing and the mastering but you get the point uh so great so hopefully this uh clears up some of these commonly uh used mastering myths uh if you have other questions about these or if you have other myths that you'd like us to address let us know in the comments and i hope you enjoyed it and happy mastering

Channel: Splice

Views: 19,137

Keywords: izotope, spectral shaper, mixing, mastering, music production, producer, music producer, plugins, vsts, vst tutorial, vst tutorial for beginners, ableton, logic, protools, flstudio, edm, hiphop, electronic music, computer music, audio production, production tutorial, music tutorials, plugin tutorial, maximizer, maximizing, production techniques, music techniques, tips and tricks, music tips, production tips, izotope 9, vst 2021, plugin 2021, mastering tutorial, mastering myths, fabfilter

Id: f68o9LM3mjo

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021