Are You Listening? Ep. 1 | Audio Mastering Basics

Hi there, my name is Jonathan Wyner. I'm here at iZotope in our critical listening room at the Cambridge campus. Welcome to Episode 1 of our masterclass we're calling Are You Listening? and this first week we're gonna be talking about audio mastering basics. I'm gonna spend a little time kind of laying out a little bit about what mastering is what the discipline is and hopefully we'll provide a little context for what we'll be talking about in subsequent episodes. I invite you to look at our website take a look at all of our blogs, other educational materials I expect everybody's here because they want to understand either how to make their stuff sound better or how to get it out into the world in good shape which is maybe a lead into what mastering is in the first place so I hope you find it interesting let's dive right into audio mastering basics Before I start spinning out lots and lots of words about mastering let's do a little listening. We've got some examples for you to listen to. When you're engaged in mastering ultimately you're trying to make decisions about whether to change something whether it needs to sound different in one way or another so listen to these examples and see what you notice So what did you just hear? if you listened to the first version of the song and the second version of the song they sound different. In what way? Obviously one's louder than the other but which one is set to the right level? and is the louder one better? and in what way are they different? these are some of the things that we always need to be thinking about in mastering The third version you heard was the mastered version. I'd like you to go back and compare the unmastered to the mastered version and see what you notice that's different about it Ultimately your goal I assume is to get better at doing this, or at least understanding what mastering does for a track, so that we can really get into the subtle nuances and make a song sing if you will you know make it sound as good as possible and communicate whatever it is that you or the artist is trying to communicate. However you've got to start somewhere so listen to these next two examples and I bet that every person who's listening no matter what platform you're listening on will hear that something needs to change One of those tracks had way too much low end or at least it didn't have any top end and the other track was way too bright and everybody out there can recognize it so this is one of the most basic things that we think about when we're adjusting in mastering I assume that everybody out there has some experience mixing and you know how hard it is dealing with balance and the color of the snare drum and the collision between the snare drum and the vocal and all of that's mixing. that's what mixing is. It's really hard to focus on that and at the same time be thinking about the tone the shape the tonal balance if you will. that's what we think about as mastering. So while you're listening to that track that we just heard you can immediately tell that's got too much bass or that's got too much treble. it's really much harder to do that when you're mixing. so this leads us to separate a little bit the mindset between the mixing engineer and the mastering engineer and why we need to approach mastering in some ways as a separate discipline just so that you're zoomed out and looking at the forest instead of the individual trees. What ismastering? In some ways it's a very familiar activity. It uses a lot of the same tools that you use in mixing. We EQ, we compress we use limiters we change the level of things, but that really doesn't capture the entire activity. To me, order to do a good job mastering we really need to define what mastering is the classic definition that you've probably heard is that it is the last chance to change anything about the sound of a track but that's really only half of the activity the second half is getting it ready to go out into the world and that's the part of mastering that involves making sure that the level is set right making sure there's nothing wrong with the audio making sure that it's not too bright or too dark compared to every other recording that's been made out there and keeping in in mind the different contexts where people might be listening to the tracks that you're going to be creating you know it's not just about the creativity it's not just about the sexier part of the gig which is the EQ and compression and maybe you're adding a little flavor or color to a track that second half about getting it ready so that your listener is going to be able to get the experience you want them to have that's an essential and important part of mastering so when we start talking about mastering I think you'll hear both sides of that show up in how I talk about the the work that we're going to do. When we talk about mastering it's tempting to confuse the tools for the activity. it's entirely possible to make use of mastering technology iZotope makes Ozone, a fantastic suite of mastering tools. You can put them on your 2 mix when you're mixing and you can certainly adjust level and overall tone while you're in the activity in the mindset of mixing That is mixing When you're mastering you are thinking about all of the mix decisions that you've already made and the way that they're contributing to the song. you're now thinking about the finished product and 'is there one more thing I need to do?' is there something I need to do to change the overall result that I've gotten to get it out into the world in good shape so that's a way of kind of differentiating between the mixing part of the process and the mastering part of the process and I think the mindset that you inhabit when you're doing each so while it's possible to try to master your own mixes it's really really hard to do them both at once. I often use the analogy that it's very difficult to produce your own vocals you know, imagine being the vocalist and also having that presence of mind to understand what it is that you actually just did and could I do it better and is it in tune and is it the way I want it to sound? so I think it's it's very much the same to try to master and mix simultaneously all right so level let's talk about level and loudness When we talk about level it is how high is the peak or the average that you see on a meter in your DAW. loudness happens here, entirely happens in your ears and in your brain. It does not happen in your DAW Now of course a lot of people are concerned about 'is my track going to be loud enough?' and we'll spend some time talking about that, but it's not just about what happens in the DAW It's about making sure that it's at the right level for the distribution format. so we might set level differently for streaming services or for just playback from your hard disk it's really important to keep those two ideas separate if you do it will keep you away from this idea that I just have to make something loud or louder for loudness sake Not every genre obviously needs to be loud and the way that we think about loud. When we think about loud tracks what immediately comes to mind is something that's got a lot of distortion and edge and a lot of density in the arrangement whether it's EDM or punk rock or something that's got some aggression. Other genres, acoustic music of any sort, but especially classical, acoustic jazz singer songwriter, music that stripped-down doesn't need to be as loud comparatively speaking as other tracks and other genres need to be. So we think about genre in helping us establish a context for level and ultimately how something's going to translate out into the world compared to other genres and other tracks but let me take it one step further every recording in my way of thinking has a what I call loudness potential to it what is loudness potential? if you make a recording that's got a very very strong mono component to it compared to stereo thinking about mid versus side correlated versus uncorrelated that will change the loudness potential of your track a mono recording by definition will sound louder than than a very diffuse recording that's largely out of phase or has uncorrelated information if you make a recording that has a lot of a very very strong mid-range component like a recording of a solo piccolo and compare that to a recording of something that's got a lot of low-end like a tuba recording or solo bass solo tuba I'm sure that that's the record that you're all aspiring to make but anyway the piccolo recording is by definition all levels being equal by definition is going to sound louder because of the nature of our perception and how we hear so we need to understand something about the tone of what we're working with the mono versus stereo width in order to understand the loudness potential. at some point in your work you've probably run into a scenario where you feel like a track doesn't have as much loudness as what you would like it to have. Some of that has to do with your arranging, some of it has to do with your mixing, and then once you get it as good as you can going through that entire process mastering can try to get you across the finish line to get it as loud as a track can be without destroying it but I guess what I'm trying to do is encourage you to start to understand the limitations or the loudness potential of the audio that you're producing and know when you've crossed the line you don't want to go over what some people like to call the sonic cliff and push something so far that it just sounds distorted and crushed and no longer good and loud. One of the things we all hunger for is rules like always do this and never do that and there are certain rules in mastering down the road so to speak we'll get into things like dithering you probably all understand that you don't want to go over 0 dbfs without some kind of modifier or something like that to stay away from Distortion. there are some physical realities also that we have to respect like there is such a thing as making a recording with too much bass that won't translate well to lots of speaker systems or too much top-end but there's a lot of room for creativity as well so long as you're staying within bounds and observing good hygiene there's a lot that we do to think about is there a little bit more color to add is there something that we can do to sweeten the recording can we make a chord chorus jump out a little bit more compared to the verse so that's where the creative decisions lay in mastering mastering really is a game of inches and sort of gentle nudges in a mixing context you might find yourself taking 10 DB out in the low end in an instrument to get it to fit into the mix mastering moves if you look at a mastering session you'll notice that most of the moves were a half a DB a DB maybe 2 DB at a time 2 DB is a lot in mastering it's a little hard to sort of get used to that. but here's a thought maybe to help you understand why that is. imagine taking an EQ and making half a DB move on a single track in your mix doesn't sound like very much right but in mastering if we take an EQ and put it on the stereo out and make a half a DB move it's like taking an EQ and putting it on every single channel in your mix and making that same half a DB move and so you're in essence applying that same change across everything in your mix so it has a lot more weight and carries a lot more meaning if you will in the difference that you're making in your mix. In order to get better and learn how to get better at mastering I would encourage you to you know go ahead and experiment try making a 10 DB change and listen to what happens. But at the end of the day eventually you come to the point where you begin to understand what the scale of your changes should be in mastering and most of the time if you've got a good mix a little bit goes a long way. Thanks for watching 'Are You Listening?' If you want to be notified about other episodes when they come out subscribe to the YouTube channel and then you use the little bell icon. feel free to go to the iZotope.com website there are lots of educational materials there free product manuals there's the ISO sessions where you can download sound samples and experiment within yourself and I look forward to seeing you next. I hope you find this useful

Channel: iZotope, Inc.

Views: 372,673

Keywords: how to master, mastering music, mastering, isotope, izotope, mastering tips, what is mastering, mastering basics, audio mastering, mastering vs mixing, how to master a song

Id: E-6Lnp8RB00

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/nojuan-cares]

*cough cough

[u/Roberto_001]

Thanks, very interesting

[u/boywithpowers]

Brilliant and simply spoken. Where can I access the rest of this series or are other episodes even out yet?

[u/[deleted]]

I recommend watching this!