Cakewalk by Bandlab: Mastering for Beginners

in this video we'll be mastering in cakewalk by band lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will so we all know the feeling you've done the final mix of your song but when you play it up against other commercial songs in your playlist it just sounds kind of weak and lackluster and that may well be because you haven't mastered your song so in today's video I'll be guiding you through ten straightforward steps to master your song in cakewalk by band lab I'll be using a combination of the plugins which come with cakewalk and also a few free ones which really do help with the process so if that sounds like the kind of thing you're interested in I do encourage you to watch all the 10 steps of the video to really get the most benefit from it now if you do like this kind of content all about home recording da w's gear reviews plug-in reviews that kind of thing then do make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my future videos now let's get stuck into some mastering so what is mastering well mastering is the final step before you release your music to the world it differs from mixing in the you're making changes to the overall sound rather than individual parts of the music crucially it's also where you take care of the technical requirements for the different platforms you may be releasing to so platforms such as streaming services like Spotify or mp3 or CD or perhaps video even vinyl they all have different technical requirements now for some of you when you release music you may be expecting that it will be heard by millions or hundreds of thousands of people and if that's you and you've got the budget I highly recommend sending it your track off to a mastering engineer to get it mastered but for the rest of us mere mortals who don't have the budget all the time then I recommend having a go at mastering if you follow through the steps we're about to go through I think you'll at least find a marked improvement over your final mix one okay so I've prepared for mastering by creating a stereo wave file of my final mix down and I've exported that from my mix project now if you don't know how to export from a cakewalk project to a stereo wave file check out the video I've made about that and I'll put a link just up above here for that or down below in the description I'm going to go ahead up to file and I'm going to import audio and then select the wav file now there's various reasons why I'm using a WAV file and not doing my mastering in the actual project itself but I realize in a take I did before this that this video gets way way too long if I go into depth why I do that so ask me in the comments down below and I'll try and answer that if you're interested so I'm going to start off just by tidying up the interface a little bit I'm going to get rid of this side panel on the left here by collapsing it and I'll go over and collapse the right panel as well and I'll just expand so I can see what's going on a little bit more detail here so I'm gonna start off by trimming the beginning of this wav file so I can start at the beginning so I'll turn snap off and then I'm gonna gonna drag the edge of that across just to just before that I can see the music starts there okay of course you'd want to check this out by listening now the other thing you can do is actually zoom in a little bit closer here and if you go to the top left hand corner see this little triangle icon if you can create just a little fade there now that's helpful in it just make sure there's no pops and clicks at the beginning of your track there so I'll drag that back over so that it all starts at zero and then I'll scroll over to the end of my track where I'll just trim the actual end of the song now just zoom out a little bit so I can see what's happening now this song ends on a final piano chord here and it has a sort of a natural decay to it and there's a feeling of a natural time when it'll end and the next song will start so what I like to do is just start from that final chord where that piano has played and I'm gonna play it and kind of feel where I think it should end and go into the next song [Music] I'm gonna say about there is a good spot so I'll just trim the end of the track again just going to the right hand side dragging it across to that rough spot there now when there is a sort of a decay with a final chord on a song like this what I like to do is actually drag out a fade here again I'm going to the top right and I'm just going to drag out a faith and I go all the way back to where the final chord was played I generally find that works in terms of making it sound reasonably natural in terms of its decay of course you have to judge it by ear but let's have a listen and see how we've gone there okay that feels about natural to me so I'll go with that but of course you have to adjust it to the own your own taste for your own particular song okay so we have our track loaded up and I'll just squash that back down there and it's been trimmed now I'm going to create another audio track here I'll just right-clicked in the space here insert audio track and I'm going to go to file and import audio and I'm going to import a reference track now I've got one prepared here what is a reference track well a reference track is another song which you feel is quite similar to your one it's probably going to be a commercial song and and you'd want to feel that it's got similar sort of sonic properties a sort of a sound that you would like to go for and it's probably going to be a similar type of song so so my song for example is basically a piano ballad but it's got a section in the middle where some drums and orchestra comes in and my reference track is fairly similar to that as well now I'm not going to tell you what this track is and I'm not going to play it during this video because I'll get done for all kinds of copyright reasons so you'll just have to pretend that we play it once through I'll I'll tell you when I would use it as a reference but it's kind of at different points throughout the whole process of mastering now one thing that's sort of fairly important to me is to compare similar sections the at the end of this reference track you can see the very loudest set in here I want to be able to compare that to the loudest section of my song which is way back in the middle here so I'm just going to trim that reference track a little bit and then drag it across until its loudest section is lined up with my louder section that's just so when I'm a being between them later I don't have to keep adjusting the playhead and finding those different sections and that's probably the most important parts for me to compare the actual loudest part of the song so with that done I think we're ready to bring up the console so I'm just going to click on my console tab right at the bottom of the screen and if you don't have your console tab then gifts go up to view and click on console view there to bring up the console now I'm just going to squash down my tracks here a little bit I don't need them to be too big because I just want to use them for navigation and then I'm going to drag up Mike oops sorry wrong one I'm going to drag up my console view so that it goes all the way up to where my tracks are there the next thing I'm gonna do it just is a little bit of maintenance is get rid of this metronome track here which is there by default so I'll right-click on that click delete bus and the same for the preview bus there I'll right-click on there and click delete bus and then I can just drag that divider over there so that my master bus is all over there I'm not going to be creating lots of tracks here guys so this is nice to have this space here for plugins etc now on the channel where my actual song is which is the first channel here I'm just going to expand the proton or by clicking on the little arrow there next to where it says Pro Channel and that opens that up there I'll just drag that divider across and I'm going to get rid of a few of the modules from the pro channel which are there by default so I'll right-click on this compressor here remove that module and I'll go down remove this Tube module here same again and I'm also going to remove this console emulator because it's not quite the one I want so I'll remove the module there I'm just left with the EQ module there which is one of the first ones we'll be using I'm going to do the same over here on the master buss I'm going to just click on the little triangle next approach and I'll click on that that expands approach and all they're ready for me to use to so something really important to the process of mastering for me is metering so I'm going to insert a metering plug-in right at the end of the whole chain I'm going to put on the master buss and I'm going to make sure that it's right at the end so that anything affecting the sound is coming before it so I'll go to the pro channel on the master bus here are right click and I'm going to click on insert module and I'm going to go all the way down to where it says effects chain and that will insert a fix chain at the bottom there I'm gonna rename that there to analysis hopefully I can spell that right okay and that just lets me know that everything in there is for analysis now I'm only going to be putting one plug-in there today but sometimes I used two or three different ones I'll click on where it says effects and plus and I'm going to insert a plug-in which doesn't come with cakewalk but it's a free one called span it's by boxing go and course I'll put a link in the description so you guys can get hold of this there's really nothing similar to this in cakewalk by default so are very much recommend getting hold of this because we're going to be using it a lot through the process and I'm gonna start off by using it to level match our reference track with our actual track now why would I do that the reference track is bound to be louder and which is gonna make it automatically sort of sound better because things which allow to tend to just sound better to us so I don't want that I want it to be sort of matched in loudness to our track so that we can hear what we're doing and what effects it's having and how that compares to the reference track so I'm just going to quickly level match those two tracks but I'm actually going to start off with the reference track being muted here I'm gonna go to my original track and just check where the levels are with that to begin with so I'm just going to play it quickly in the loudest sort of part [Music] and I can see it's peaking around about minus 6 DB here which is just a little bit quiet for me I'd rather have it much nearer -3 maybe a little bit above that so I'm just going to use the gain control to adjust that [Music] okay so I've used the gain control on the actual channel to increase the volume there and it's going up to about minus three there now I'm actually going to play it again I'm going to just take a look at where the average sort of volume is so let's have a play [Music] so you can see it's averaging it around about minus nine so let's just remember that minus nine decimals is your average and I'm gonna try and match the reference track so that it's average is around about that level so I'm going to mute the original track I'm going to unmute the reference track now I'm actually going to mute the master buss here so you can't hear the reference track because as I say I don't get in trouble for copyright issues so we're going to do this visually but I would actually recommend you do it both visually and with your ears as well but we'll go ahead for demonstration purposes and do it visually now so I played the song in that loudest section again and you can see right away it's much much louder it's peaking at zero of course and it's averaging around about minus three so we will drag its going down until we get down to around about minus nine so that's going to be roughly the right kind of level and if you were to check this now I would take a guess that it's going to sound around about the same level of loudness so that now makes that track actually useful for us to compare it to three so quite often with our mixes we end up with a kind of low-end build up which we don't really want and sometimes we can't even hear so we're going to deal with that now but you might ask me well why are we getting rid of things that we can't hear Mike well although we can't hear some of these very low end frequencies the computer can and it uses that information and it will affect plugins which are further down the chain especially perhaps our compression plugins even saturation plugins may kick in before we really want them to so I like to get rid of them at the beginning here now so I'm going to go over to the first channel here and I'm going to double click on the graphic display err of the EQ that brings up this big display and I'm going to click on this HP button that stands for high pass now sometimes on other eq's they refer to this as a low cut it's exactly the same thing just different terminology now I'm going to change the slope on this so it's quite a lot more aggressive of dialer although up to the most aggressive setting there and I'm going to change the frequency to around about twenty to twenty-five we'll get the twenty there is fine now the relevance the relevance of that is that right at the bottom end of human hearing anything below that we really don't need it at all so we can just get rid of it and we can probably do without some of that which is right at the bottom of where we can hear as well now what I would normally do is kind of actually listen to the song and bypass that setting which I've dialed in there and see if it's making any difference at all if it's not making any difference that's a good thing we shouldn't really be able to hear a difference so if you've put the frequency up a little bit higher for example and then when you a B and you listen to the song you can hear an actual difference as you bypass it then you've got the frequency up too high I would tend to put it down to a point where you just on that borderline of where you really can't really hear a difference before so Kate cork has a really nice console emulators and what these can do is add some really nice sort of analog warmth to your mix now they're very very subtle and I would say you don't have to add them at all they're very very optional but if I was going to add one I would add it in at this point just after this initial high pass EQ so I'm going to go over here to the first channel I'm going to insert a module I'm going to go down to the console emulator buss not the console emulator channel but the console emulator bus I'll click that there now you've got three different types of console emulation here the S type the N type the a type they're all sort of based upon some famous consoles which were in famous recording studios in the past so I'm going to use the N type and I'm going to play my track and just sort of add the drive to taste so I have a listen to it far away from [Music] okay I like it around about there I don't overthink this at all now it's a very very subtle effect so if you're new to mixing and mastering and you're going like I can't hear any difference there at all that's fine it takes a while for your ears to get tuned into those kind of very real subtleties stick with it keep listening you'll begin to detect those tiny little things so that's where I would add the console emulation but as I say it's very very optional don't feel that you have to add it five so another very optional stage is to add some saturation now you don't have to add saturation but if you do I would add it in here so I'm going to go across to the track channel again to the pro channel and right click insert module and go down to the saturation knob I really love these very very simple controls this is a nice little module for the pro channel here I'm going to play my song and gradually push this saturation knob up to a point where I think it sounds okay and of course I want to avoid over distorting it as well which you can easily do with this plug-in so let's have a listen on a sort of a loudest part of the song or the loudest part of the song [Music] [Music] I'm just going to sort of play it and then bypass and play again see what difference it's making [Music] now I think it's fairly obviously adding a little bit of volume in there but there's also a nice little bit of sort of almost grittiness in there which I kind of like so I'll keep that one in there and that's where you would add it if you are going to add saturation six so next I'm going to add in a compressor but I'm not going to be using one of the compressors which comes with cakewalk instead I'm using a third-party one it's absolutely free it's by tokyo dawn records it's called katana Cove and I just think we can achieve our task a little bit better with this particular compressor so I'm going over to insert a module to my pro channel and I'm going to insert the effects chain one and next to where it says effects down the bottom I click on the plus button go to insert audio effects and then go to my Tokyo door labs folder and insert TDR kotelnyk off almost got it right now I love this compressor I could make a whole video about it but I'm not I'm going to start off when I'm doing this compression which I want to be very very subtle at looking at the actual ratio so the ratio starts at two to one here and that's the sort of kind of ballpark figure that I'd like to start off with maybe even a bit lower so I'll just drag it down just a little bit we want some really subtle compression here so the ratio can be very very low next I'm just going to adjust the threshold I'm gonna play the track and adjust the threshold so it's starting to do about sort of three decibels of reduction now that's not the amount I want finely but it just enables me to hear what's going on a little bit more with the compressor while I'm adjusting it so I'll play the track and adjust that so far away from okay and that's fine and because I want this to be subtle I'm just going to push up the knee the knee control a little bit so it's got a nice soft knee now next I want to be looking at the attack time now with master buss compression I think you've got to be careful with the attack time because if you make it too short you can really kill off the sort of transients with your drums and things and this song has some drums which come in in this section I particularly want the snare and the kick drum to be able to snap through nicely so I'm just going to adjust my attack so there isn't killing off those transients [Music] [Music] okay I could spend longer on that but I'll leave it there for now and next I'm going to adjust the release time now this particular plug-in has to release time it has the release peak time which relates to transients which sort of quickly go over the threshold are there for a moment it detects that and then it just allows you to adjust the release time for those kind of transients and then there is the release rms time this is when the signals gone over the threshold in a more sustained way and you want to adjust the release time for that now again this really depends on the sort of feel of the song and again how much of those transients you want to come through from the drums and really stand out so I'm just going to adjust those two now [Music] [Music] okay that feels about right for me at the moment so with those basic settings set I'm then going to adjust that threshold again so that I'm just doing around about one to two decibels of volume reduction so I'll just adjust that [Music] okay let's find it's very very subtle and if I switch it off and on you'll probably hardly hear much difference at all it's just allowing me just a little bit more Headroom and controlling those Peaks there in that louder section [Music] [Music] now one thing I will say about compression for mastering you don't want to be thinking about using it to control the differences between the the quiet and the loud sections of your song so say for example in a song like this where it starts off with just the piano the vocal lots of it's fairly quiet and then there's a much louder section in the middle I don't really feel that compressors are the tool of choice for that instead I would rather use my volume automation for that and we'll be tackling that a little bit later 7 so the next thing I'm going to do is a little bit of stereo widening now I've already got a plug-in loaded up here the ozone imager plug-in which I've already inserted into that effects chain which we created down there a moment ago this is a free plugin guys there'll be a link in the description down below and it's got some very simple controls I'm only going to be using this one here which is the width control if we have it all the way down to the bottom the song sounds pretty much mono neutral in the middle and then we can just add a little bit with as we go along so I'm going to play the song and add a little bit with until I'm happy with it [Music] [Music] okay I like it there it's as simple as that a no-brainer now there is a commercial version of this which I actually use mostly when I'm doing actual masters and that enables you to do widening based on frequency ranges because I tend to like to keep especially the base the lower end frequencies completely intact I like them to be centered so that's an option if you want to pay but if you just want a free plug-in to do some stereo widening I think this one's awesome eat so now I'm going to do my final EQ and I would be normally using my reference track quite a lot here to see how it compares to what I've got so far and what I want to add or take away from the different frequencies using the EQ plug-in I won't be doing that I'll just be demonstrating quickly here and I'm using this plug-in here which is from Tokyo John records called Nova it's a free EQ and there'll be a link in the description down below I just slightly prefer over the built-in EQ plugins that you do get with cakewalk now I'm first of all going to listen out for the bass end of things I'm going to go down to this bottom band here and I'm going to isolate that band I'm just going to adjust the Q a little bit like she looks okay and I'm just going to listen out for anything which is a little bit overwhelming in that bottom end now I must say on this point there's often useful to use something like a subwoofer if you're going to listen to this because even my eight-inch rocket speakers here don't always reveal some really unwanted frequencies down in the bottom end but you can hear those frequencies on some really common stereo equipment such as Bose equipment or even those beats headphones that everyone loves to use they're very base heavy and I've often found my mixers and the bass in aren't translating well to those so I try and pinpoint some overwhelming frequencies there so that they're not too much on that equipment so I'll have a listen to the song isolating that band and it's right there where I've got it they're round about the 50 Hertz it's a bit of a boom there now I'm doing this by eye and a little bit but my ear in my headphones normally as I say I'd use a subwoofer for this just to check out these low frequencies I probably would be bringing it down you know two or three decibels at the most with a fairly narrow cue actually so I'm not affecting those slightly higher frequencies up there now the other thing I'm often doing is adding a little bit of sparkle on the top end I usually use a high band up here and I'll set it to well it's set to here which is a sort of a shelf setting you can see if I move up and down and I would just sort of add a little bit of sparkle so I'm gonna listen to the whole song here just gradually add that in [Music] [Music] and again I'd be comparing that to my reference to see how it compares a word of caution on there if you're an older chap like me or an older lady like me hang on that's wrong well anyway your ears are not so good on the top end you lose a bit of top-end hearing as you get older so you can tend to overcompensate with this so just be a little bit careful with that 9 so the next thing I'd be looking at here is automation now if you don't know how to do automated in cakewalk and do check out my video about that I'll put a link in the description down below for that I'm not actually going to do any automation here at the moment I just have a quick chat about what I'd be thinking about automating now I did allude to it earlier I would think about automating the quieter and the louder sections of the song sometimes they can just be too much disparity and what happens is is you find that when you actually listen to the song away from the studio that you always want to kind of turn it up at the beginning but then the middle section kicks in it's too loud so sometimes you just want to it's good to have a dynamic range but sometimes you just want to close that gap a little bit so in that case what I would look at doing is just sort of lifting those quieter sections up a little bit with volume automation now it doesn't need to stop at volume automation and there's other things that we've done during this process namely I would suggest that the stereo widening is something you could automate so I would tend to think about automating making it much wider during the bigger sections of a song during the chorus or during the big section of this song where there's a big long instrumental and you know that's a really nice time to add it wider and then when you come back to your sort of verses it has a really nice effect of sort of closing backing and being more centered so that's another thing that you could automate as well even saturation could be something that you could automate in the same way so do use automation make sure of course if you use it for the volume automation that is subtleness not obvious that you've kind of just turned it up and down so as with everything in mastering subtle moves is the answer 10 so now we get to the part that everyone really cares about and that is how loud their track can be made so it competes with other tracks that it'll be played against now mostly in this day and age will be releasing to streaming services such as Spotify and they give some guidelines in terms of the kind of levels that you should be trying to achieve for their services it can be a bit different for things like CD mp3 that kind of thing and I'll discuss that a little bit later but mostly we're going to look at cases such as Spotify now Spotify give a guidance in terms of peak level and average level now a peak level is expressed in terms of true peak now true peak is a way of describing the peak level accounting for the fact that when we are converting for digital to audio there can be a bit of a margin of error so what can happen is although you set your song to be at a peak of zero dB in your da W when it gets converted out to analog there can be some area depending on the converters use and you can end up with sort of distortion which you don't want so true peak sort of tries to compensate for that and not only that but they actually give you a margin of error within Spotify itself to say a little bit lower so that they can adjust it themselves after you've uploaded it now the other thing is the actual average level this is normally expressed these days in laughs which is a way of looking at the average level of music kind of over time which is a little bit better than just looking at a snapshot here and there so what we're going to do here in cakewalk is look at our span analyzer here and I'm just going to change the metering here from dbfs to lufs ml medium-length laughs so we've got that all set up and ready to go and it's set to true peak for the peak metering now I'm using a plug-in to control the loudness and this plug-in is a well known one called loud max lots of people seem to prefer this one it's a free plugin and I'll put a link to it down in the description below not lots of controls here basically a control at the top here to control the actual loudness and another one at the bottom here to control the peak level so we're going to start off with the peak level and I'm just going to roll it down so it goes down to minus one DB which is that recommended peak level that Spotify suggests I'm also going to click this is P button here that makes it a little bit more accurate when it's doing it and the next thing I'm gonna do is actually start to play my song and I'm gonna be looking at the metering down here and it's going to show me the lost value there as I play it I'm going to try and adjust this threshold so it gets as close as I can to around about minus 14 [Music] I never really say what you see in me but you say the right words for the things you knew that's what we do [Music] so a couple of things on this you don't need to be ever so precise because it is going to be adjusted on the site after you upload it you could actually push it quite a lot harder than the suggested value all they're going to do is you're not going to be louder than other songs if you do that they're just going to push it back down but you may get a kind of a sound that you're like if you do that so you know you can be a little bit flexible with this you don't have to be too precise now when you're going for something like CD you can afford to really push it much much more bear in mind if you do this you can end up with some fairly awful kind of pumping sounds so you know don't try and just make it as loud as possible remember to keep dynamics in your music it's that sort of difference between loud and soft sometimes which really expresses some emotion that's my opinion on it in any case so it's really as simple as that in terms of getting your loudness to the kind of level you want it you will notice here as well that when I adjust this threshold here and make it louder there's nothing I can do to make it go over that true peak value it went to minus one there and it's just not going up above it there so you can really afford to push it around on that threshold so do try to remember you don't have to stick to these 10 steps rigidly I'm merely suggesting them as a starting point to get you going and then you can change them as you get more experience my process has changed a lot over the years and continues to evolve to this day now in a moment I'd like to tell you about a new cakewalk community that I've been taking part in but before we get to that if you did like this video make sure you hit the like button if you didn't like this video hit the dislike button twice if you've got any questions whatsoever ask in the comments down below I'll do my very best to answer them for you now if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you get notified about my future videos so guys I just want to quickly mention a new cakewalk chat group which I've joined I was put onto it by one of our viewers I hope I get his name right it's Riley right some so if I got that wrong but it's on a platform called it discord I didn't know anything about it until a couple of weeks ago so there's a new community there where they chat about cakewalk I found it really fun I try and get in there everyday it's a great place to get help or to help other people out so I encourage you to join it I'll put a link in the description you can go there in your browser you can also download an app for your phone and use it there as well so if you're go in there and you join up make sure you say might have sent you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 123,089

Keywords: Cakewalk by Bandlab: Mastering for Beginners, cakewalk mastering, How to master in Cakewalk by Bandlab, Cakewalk by Bandlab, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab mixing, mastering, mastering for beginners, Mastering 101, mixing & mastering, mastering tutorial, digital audio workstation, recording studio hardware, mastering music, mastering process, master my own music, mastering tips, mastering tips & tricks, the basics of mastering, what is mastering?

Id: qpz8rdjUmRM

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019