FREE: Ambient Guitar Mastering Tutorial

hey everybody I'm Bill wencel this is chords of Orion it's all about ambient guitar here I recently posted a walkthrough of how I mixed my tracks for my up and coming album layers it will be releasing in April of this year 2023. on this video I'd like to walk you through my mastering process so let's get to work all right as you can see I've got logic pro fired up and that's Point number one logic pro is the first tool that I use when I master my mixes so let's see what I have going on you'll see I've got a track set up for each of the songs that will be on the album you can see the song titles here on the left hand side and in each track what I've done is imported my mixed stereo file for the track in other words I've got a logic project in which I do a full mix down for each piece and then I pull it into a mastering project in Logic Pro we're going to look at the last piece on the album It's called The Hard Road and again I did a breakdown of the mix for the Hard Road I'll link that at the end of this video let's take a quick listen to the piece just a little bit of it [Music] all right yeah that sounds good I like that piece a lot what I do is basically again I pull each of the stereo mixes into this logic project and I've got a couple of goals to that I'm looking to accomplish in this mastering project number one I want to get all of the pieces all of the songs up to the correct level for Distributing to iTunes Spotify Apple music Amazon all that good stuff I want to get I want to get my levels right and I want to get them balanced between each track so that that if you listen if you were listening to the entire album you could move from track to track without having to turn your volume control up and down the second purpose is that I want to achieve a tonal balance that is pleasing as you move from track to track I don't want one track to be overly bright I don't want another track to be overly dull I want them all to have a similar tonal balance so it sounds like you know if you're listening to it sounds like you're listening to an album So to that end what I have done on each of the tracks in the project I have added a single plug-in that I love I've been using for many many years that's izotope ozone and in this case I'm using ozone 10. so let me pull up ozone for the Hard Road for this particular piece if you think about mastering it's really mastering a track it's really divided into a couple of different areas that you're going to want to address one is EQ so you'll be making likely little EQ tweaks another one is dynamic range you may add a little compression or maybe not depending on the piece a third one would potentially be Imaging in other words the stereo image you may adjust the stereo image so that all of the songs on your album have a similar kind of feel and then as I mentioned prior the last piece that I usually address that I normally address is the issue of loudness to make sure that all the pieces are of a similar loudness so let's walk through this just a little bit first I'm going to turn off ozone and play a little bit of the track and then I'll turn it back on [Music] okay let me get to the spot where the drums are there we go now I'm going to turn ozone on [Music] it's not a crazy difference but it is a good bit louder again because I want to bring it up to the correct level I'll talk about that in a minute so first up let's talk about EQ ozone has a an interesting capability where you can match the EQ of a particular song to a reference track or a reference an EQ reference in this case actually across the board for my album I'm using the reference that ozone provides called cinematic and you can see here a kind of a visual of what the basic EQ curve looks like so if I play the track and check this out so you can see I'm kind of in you know I'm kind of relatively close it kind of follows the arc and I don't want to try to force it in too much because it's not going to sound good but I use that kind of as a reference for determining how to EQ so I'm scooping out a little bit in the say 60 to 300 range that's where a lot of mud lies I'm bringing up a little bit in the high mids so that would be 600 to about 3K and then I've got a little lift as we get into the high end the high frequencies of the song and again it sounds pretty good to me let me turn that off you can hear it's pretty subtle now ozone ozone 10 this is the newest version has a couple of other cool features that are somewhat related to eq'ing one of them is called stabilizer and this is a lot like the soothe 2 or dynamic eqs that seek to reduce resonant frequencies so I've been using this quite a bit on my masters for the last you know several months or so so if you watch what's going on here [Music] you'll see that stabilizer is dynamically reacting to the music and seeking to drop frequency ranges that might be a little more prominent and bring up frequency ranges that might be lagging a little bit so you can see here we're dropping a little bit in that same range that 100 to 300 range where that mud lives and giving a little bit of lift in the high mids next up I want to talk about compression I don't have a full on compressor on this track but I'm using a microdynamics compressor that ozone provides called impact and let's see what is happening here [Music] again this is very subtle but if you look at the if you look at the line there in the middle you'll see where it's compressing and expanding a little bit of the dynamic range foreign it helps it just really helps to smooth out the dynamic range the next topic is Imaging so this is the stereo image and I do use the imager in Ozone 10 quite a bit to adjust my stereo image and you can adjust the image by frequency range so let me just play you a an example here let's get the kind of the mids here now if I bring down this slider you'll hear it you'll hear a collapse to Mono and I can bring it way up it's too much just about right just about right so you can control each frequency band you can adjust the bands however you wish and then you can kind of customize that stereo image so always good though to check against mono to make sure that everything sounds like it makes sense so ozone has a little mono button right here that allows you to do so [Music] yeah works great next up is dynamic EQ this is another form of compression but it allows you to specify a a frequency range that you would like to compress and it will then dynamically compress those frequency ranges [Music] and as you can see I'm not going for large amounts of of compression I'm looking for a very subtle compression in different frequency ranges again to smooth out the tonal characteristic of the track and then finally let's talk about loudness so I'm using the maximizer and that's the limiter the the brick wall limiter that comes with izotope almost every Daw has a brick wall limiter logic does I know Studio One does Reaper does Pro Tools does they all do right so this is izotopes brick wall limiter [Music] foreign limit here what I'm looking to do is get this track up to a particular volume or loudness so I can feed it into the stereo bus so before I go there for a minute let's just take a look at again what I have going on each of these 10 tracks has its own instance of ozu ozone 10 and I've customized it to each track and I've tried to get each track up to a particular level and they all feed into the master bus so that when I render each of the tracks out they're going to go through the hard road is going to go through its own instance of ozone 10 and then it will feed into the master bus and go through three other effects that I have lined up let's take a look at those the first effect on the master bus is the fabfilter pro R Reverb and I've got just a very mellow Reverb setup and it's the same Reverb that all eight tracks are going to run through the reason why I'm using a Reverb like this is to give each track a similar feel in other words each track has a feel like it's sitting in the same space so I don't this might be this might be too subtle to hear on YouTube but let me um let me play this track and I'm going to stop it and see if you can hear this Reverb Decay kind of ringing out did you hear that little bit of a room sound let me play it again [Music] okay every track um has that Dynamic so for example if we go to the first track that's called layers it's the title track of the album ah again you can hear that Pro R kind of room sound so each track I'm going to bounce each track individually to create the mastered file but each track individually is going to go through that Pro R Reverb and get the same Reverb sound printed into the track again to give each track a familiar feel the second thing I've got going on in the master bus that each track will run through after the Reverb is a tape simulator and I'm using the soft tube tape plug-in which I really really really like so if you check this out here real quick [Music] and I'm not going to go over all of these settings it would take too long but just let it be known I've got a kind of a a tape setup where the the level coming into the this plug-in bumps up against that zero mark on the meters so the zero mark on the Vu meter so it's not going to be distorting a lot it's going to be a mellow kind of tape sound I'm using the cleanest tape type which is a on in this case and I'm boosting the highs just a little bit to give it a little bit of Shimmer tape Shimmer and I think it sounds really good so each of the eight tracks is going to run again through this master bus we're going to run through the pro R Reverb and then run through the soft tube tape plugin and then finally I've got a plug-in Alliance BX limiter true Peak limiter setup and this is basically going to catch any of the Peaks that are coming into it and limit it down to negative one dbfs so negative One DB full scale and it's going to be the true Peak so if we we check this out you can see what's going on here foreign [Music] setup I'm adjusting each track separately with ozone 10 and then I'm running each track through a set of three plugins that are all the same settings for each track so in in a way I'm I'm not really mixing but I'm mastering into those three plugins and in terms of loudness what I'm shooting for is about negative 11 lufs so lufs is a loudness standard that's commonly in use now in particular for broadcast and for every streaming service all right as you can see in the middle of the screen I've got finder pulled up and there are eight wav files there those are the eight tracks that I bounced out of logic pro after setting up the mastering plugins that I just reviewed with you once that's done I pull those files into another piece of software this piece of software is called hofa cdburn.ddp dot master and I've been using this product for a long long time I really like it it's totally optional so don't feel like you need to go out and buy it or anything like that but I like to use it because I do occasionally create mastering projects that are distributed on CDs and this can easily create a CD distribution package according to the what what is called the Red Book standard for CDs so it's really convenient but it's also really good for streaming distribution because it's it makes it very easy to sequence and time and space out the tracks so as you can see here I've got all eight of my tracks lined up in in the hofa product select here is that first piece again here's the second piece oh yeah and number five I'm giving you a little bit of a sneak peek into some of these sounds number six number seven ah there we go and Number Eight the Hard Road which we've been talking about [Music] so again what I can do is just easily drag in each of these files and kind of sequence and sequence them out on the timeline and in hofa it it kind of tracks what's going on in the upper area here and I can easily add in the titles my isrc numbers and all the other information that I might want on the files in addition I want to talk about this for just a minute you will see a little uh space called a pre-gap so up in here you'll see it's a pre-gap and it's in this case it's one second and 747 747 of a second so 1.747 seconds and what this is it's a little gap between the two tracks so for example if I finish out layers here let me go ahead and play that and listen to How it spaces with the next track which is called the water is wide [Music] [Music] yeah so if you think about a CD or a vinyl LP what normally sits in between two of the tracks it's a little space right and typically it's going to be in that two second kind of range it could be a little bit shorter it could be a little bit longer and what that space does is it provides your brain just a little bit of a rest between each track so you can do a little reset and your brain is ready to hear the next piece of music one of the nice things that hofa does automatically is when you set up your album layout and you create the pre-gap areas when you render them out for streaming what hofa does is it adds the pre-gap to the previous track so for example this is track one layers and then I've got track two the water is wide that 1.7 second Gap would actually get added to as silence to the end of the first track layers and that way even though you're still you know in a streaming environment or maybe on bandcamp when you play the album through you still get that little gap between both of your songs and you can still kind of retain that feel that that space that drama that kind of brain reset to make sure that your listeners are ready to hear the next track after you've got everything laid out you can simply render out into its final form whether it's 16-bit or 24-bit your finalized Masters that will be delivered to either distrokid or CD Baby or wherever whoever you're using for distribution all right there you have it that's my current process for mastering my albums so again if you don't have the same set of software no worries you can accomplish the same goals with what actually with whatever recording software you use almost every piece of recording software can be utilized to master music and to prepare it for final distribution just remember a few things that I've mentioned along the way one is achieving a similar tonal balance across all of your tracks so when people listen to your album if they feel like it's a real album number two would be to ensure that the volume or the loudness levels of each of your tracks is similar again to create a seamless listening experience and number three is to again on the loudness side to get the loudness and the other specifications of the files up to whatever the standard is for your digital distributor once all that's done the only thing left to do is is to upload your music to your distributor do you have any mastering tips for us if you do I'd love it if you would drop a comment and let's get some conversation going around all of our best mastering tips so we can all benefit together I've got a playlist here of other ambient guitar recording techniques and I'll see all of you over on those videos

Channel: Chords Of Orion

Views: 2,039

Keywords: mastering in logic pro x, ambient guitar, mastering audio, mastering audio in logic pro x, mastering audio final cut pro x, izotope ozone, izotope ozone 10, izotope ozone 10 advanced

Id: WMAQOObOqjM

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023