How To Master Mastering

mastering doesn't have to be advanced doesn't have to take many hours and it surely doesn't have to be expensive when I first started out producing I didn't know anything about mastering and it took me years to fully understand and now I'm mastering my own songs and also the songs of a few bigger artists so I thought I make a video on this what is mastering why do you need to match your songs and how by the way I'll do a video next week answering questions you guys have so drop your questions below with whatever you want to know and I'll also pick out three comments that I'll give a free mastering two now mastering can often seem like it's just about making the songs loud at least that's what I thought for a few years but it can be a lot more than that mastering won't make a bad mix sound good but it can make a great mix sound amazing by balancing it to sound good on all sound systems applying techniques like compression limiting EQ in serial widening or something to make it shine and give it some overall quality boost especially compressing and limiting can make a track sound more as a whole and it also gives it like this desirable fat brick world sound that has become more and more popular and prevalent in recent years especially in dance music there's a lot of arguing of how the so-called loudness war has ruined dynamics and music and so forth but at least in dance music it's become sort of an important part of the sound and the energy that it portrays there is some confusion about mastering and at least I thought it was like one of the most difficult things to get right in the beginning I was lucky enough to having been having been taught mastering by a few very skilled people so I hope to be able to share some of that information with you guys so without further ado let's get into it so I'm going to explain how I go about mastering but I think the general guidelines and things to do is pretty similar to how most people would do it before mastering there are a few things that need to be done which I think is one of the most difficult things to understand at least it was for me there is a lot to talk about here but I want to try and keep it as simple as possible you may have heard of Headroom before which can be explained in this scenario as like the space in between the loudest peak of a sound and the zero decibel threshold hitting that zero decibel threshold peak will induce clipping and undesired artifact and using a limiter of any sort will then induce limiting which is also undesirable for mastering you want the loudest Peaks to hit below zero decibels now a lot of people will tell you to aim for the loudest peaks to hit around minus 6 dB while that is a good reference point to work from it's largely a myth that anything above this is more difficult to work with 1 mastering it was back in the days but with digital audio interfaces and digital signal it's not a very prevalent problem so don't go back into the project file and mix everything over like just a bit lower just because it's peaking at minus 4 dB it's not that dangerous as long as you have some space to work with it's all good what I like to do when I start up a new project I actually have this in like the template project file I have something that includes increases the volume like 10 DB on the masters so that I then automatically makes everything lower as a result just to be sure what I also like to do when mixing is at a brick wall limiter sometimes to test with similar to the one I'll have in the end of the mastering process which gives that hard limited mastering field this is because when mastering the transients aka like the sharp attacks dynamics of the sounds will often get too squashed especially like kicks and snares and sharp transients like that this helps me get the mix right so I know how to mix and compression like it will change in the end so that I for instance don't come over compress sounds before mastering and keep the kicks louder for instance so now that you have your track with a little bit of headroom I actually have a lot in this one you've checked how it's going to sound with the limiter what I do is I render it out and put it into a new project like this the first thing I do is find the reference tracks by that I mean having songs that are mixed and mastered the way you like in that your aspired to have the same quality in your tracks s I think in this case I uses on the link track to reference with to get the mastering right but I advise using several different tracks instead of one the first thing I do when I start a mastering process is I put a brick wall limiter on what I mean by this is a limiter that does not allow allow any signal to go through the threshold aka like the set desired decibel you set it to I think most limiters will do the job but after trying pretty much every single one I could get my hands on my favorite by far is the invisible limiter by a OM I'll link all the plugins in the description and now I'm not sponsored by any of them I wish but I've used this plugins for years after trying out a lot of plugins so I can recommend them wholeheartedly but as I said I really like this invisible imager and I can also recommend the fabfilter pro-q limiter but for this project strangers do I used the invisible imager so I put one on the Sun and then I set thresholds so that at the highest peaks which is in the drop and maybe some of the loudest parts of the break depending on the track I set it so that at the loudest peaks its it gets cut with the limiter just not a lot just a couple of decibels and just in the absolute loudest moments in this plug-in it looks like this this is before and this is after [Music] so you can't hear much of a difference but what this does is prepare the track for the next step which I do is which is a plug-in called the glue a compressor why I use the limiter first is so that the absolute loudest Peaks won't mess with the compressor and make it act like stronger than it should so it's just a little bit more controlled going into the compressor I'll do a video on compression later but basically what this does is super slight compression and reducing the dynamic range and making it more compressed again very difficult to hear this is with because it's very soft and overdoing the compression in the mastering stage can sound ugly very fast and then I'll also have a final limiter again in the end so all of this compression and limiting adds up fast so be very careful with that I'll just use a preset named mastering - and then I tweak it a bit to fit the track but as long as you set the threshold to the right amount let's say well around around here so it doesn't compress too heavily it's all good again a link to plug-in down in the description I love this compressor and I use it a lot the next step is spicing up the sound which I use isotope ozone for it's just so easy to use and it sounds great but feel free to use anything you like I think most plugins will do the job as long yeah what I like to do first is I put and stereo Widener to make everything now this is actually a steer stereo reduction it makes the everything below 150 130 Hertz mono and then I make the heist a bit wider again use this very carefully this was actually quite a lot you can easily make things sound very bad then I'll use the exciter which is a saturation tool sort of works like an EQ but adds harmonics and slight distortion and works in like sort of a and more natural way in lack of a better word I'll go through the different modules here and I'll listen to what sounds best for the trek and I just boost usually just the heist to add some spark to it after that the next step is subscribing to this channel and liking the video then I'll add the vintage EQ in Ozone I like how it boosts and usually my songs lack a bit of bass when they're mixed so I usually boost the like around 100 Hertz just a decibel or two and it just makes the bass a bit more present and let's say headphones or lighter speakers something like that but again depends on the track of course next thing I do also depends on the track but it's just an EQ where I usually cut out around 500 Hertz where I tend to have a lot of mud and unnecessary information in my mix but in this track I actually ended up boosting it just a little bit which is very rare but again it everything here depends on the track and you have to listen carefully with your reference race the most important thing about mastering is having those correct reference tracks that are a bit similar especially when doing stuff like cuts and boosts so you kind of need to figure out how much highs you want and compared the base to the other tracks and so on which brings me to my next point which is checking the master on different systems listening to your song on your phone in a car small and big speakers alongside the reference tracks it's just so valuable and I know it's a hassle and boring but it really really helps and then the final thing I did here actually that was after I had checked it in my car I think or on my phone I heard that it lacked just a little bit of spark in the high end so I added this to spice up the highs with the sound toys CQ plugin I use this a lot I just love how it sounds especially when boosting the high end by the way all I do this all on like this pre master Channel that feeds into the master channel just so I have more control and the possibility of automating the volume easier thus I can choose like how hard the final limiter is pushing the track at different places I'll often reduce the amount of limiting aka the volume of the premaster in the build up so that when the drop hits it feels like it hits a little bit harder even though it technically isn't louder but it's just more compressed and brick world which gives like the illusion of a louder sound so the finish of the mastering I'll again use the limiter and again it's the invisible limiter this time I'll increase the gain pretty much until it's starting to sound clipped and then I'll tune it bit back a bit until it doesn't sound bad again using reference tracks is essential to making sure it sounds the right amount of squashed so what I do is just I'll just play around with the gain [Music] so there it clips a bit too much and then I'd just drag it down a bit until it sounds just about right so it's all about trying to get it as loud as possible without too many side effects rather be more like I are on the careful side rather than overdoing it then again you have to check it on different sound systems reference with other tracks but then you should have a pretty good sounding master in my opinion at least but of course no matter how good the mastering it just cannot fix a bad mix so that's like 90% of the battle but it is a good idea to have some understanding of mastering nonetheless and I hope I was able to make it a bit more understandable understandable to you I've had some questions about like instant mastering services like Lander and I personally wouldn't recommend it if you follow these guidelines I've run through you should be able to achieve a more tailored master to your song by doing all that what I do recommend though is some time trying out a proper mastering studio such as wired masters I tried them out for a son they're amazing I'll link them in the description but as I said I didn't have any understanding of any of it when I started so I hope it was helpful and that you got something out of it remember to comment your questions to win the free master feel free to ask well whatever you want really and anything that I spoke up and I'll spoke about today and I'll answer you guys ASAP thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next week [Music]

Channel: Jonas Aden

Views: 352,629

Rating: 4.9399862 out of 5

Keywords: Jonas Aden, Mastering, Compression, Limiting, Plugins, Future House, House, in the studio, Tips & tricks, Tutorial, invisible limiter

Id: FeuGS7_b4F0

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019