How to ACTUALLY use Logic's Mastering Assistant (In-Depth Tutorial)

welcome back to the band guide I'm your band guy Colin and today we're taking a look at logic's new mastering assistant this is basically AI mastering built into Logic for free so you don't have to pay for Lander or one of those other mastering services to send your song off to and it's built right into logic so I can just click a button and it's going to do a quick AI Master for me in seconds what a powerful cool tool that I can't believe that logic just gave us this is awesome but it's not perfect and in today's video what I want to do is show you how to use it how to tweak it if you want to you don't have to you can and that's pretty cool H what I like and what I don't like about it and I think some of those are the most important things to understand and finally why and how I'm going to use it for every master I do from here on out and why you should too and I definitely want you to stick around for that because I think that's the most important part of the video but we got to get there to get there so let's go and get into it but before we do I want to give you something the truth is no matter how good your master is if you don't have a great mix it's never going to sound great the best mix in the world can't make a bad mix sound good so if if you're struggling to get a mix that you're proud of be sure to grab my six-step checklist to a pro mix it's completely free from Link in the description below and it just goes through the six steps that all professional mixes have and how to do them specifically inside logic it's free so why not grab it it's really going to help you out but let's go and jump into logic and take a look at the mastering assistant now here we have a mastering session and if you're not familiar with a mastering session the way I like to set these up is that I have the track that I'm mastering and then above it I have an unmastered version of the same track so I can always check back and forth between these quickly and make sure that my master is going in the direction want it to and then below it I put all my references in this case I just have one song but I'll often have two or three songs what I love about this is I can have these other tracks muted and I can just solo them and quickly check them against my master to make sure that I'm happy with the the results that I'm getting now this is also particularly great because if I'm working on an album or an EP I could have all the tracks from that album or EP back to back and I could do all my processing on the individual tracks there and all the processing happens at a track level so I could it could be catered to each individual track and I can put them a multimeter on my stereo output and see one meter that shows me each individual track and the reference track if I want to see what that looks like on a meter or the EQ curve or the reference track I can have one meter that shows me all that information for all my tracks so I love a mastering session if you can't tell now we're going to go ahead and bypass all my plugins here on this track we're going to go to our stereo output here to see this if you just hit I you'll see your stereo output as long as you have a track selected or you can bring up uh your little mixer window here and you'll see your stereo output and here you can just click mastering and will bring up the mastering assistant and what's awesome is this happens in seconds it pulls up the plug-in does a little bit of analyzing and then it builds us a mastering chain and we go from unmastered to mastering in that amount of time it's kind of crazy right and this isn't even a brand new laptop now to be fair this isn't a full song If you have a full song it might take a little bit longer so with this plug-in uh the first thing that you need to know is that it's happening on my stereo output so now immediately I can't just quickly reference back and forth to my reference track here because this is actually going to go through that mastering plugin and this is unfortunately my number one gripe and maybe my only real gripe with this plugin is that I can't move it to the track level meaning that I also couldn't process a bunch of different songs differently with this mastering plugin in one session hopefully logic will fix that in the future and make it a plugin that I could drag to individual tracks I do get why they don't want to do that because they you don't want to have that all over a mix it's not really meant for that but it would be helpful to create a proper mastering session to be able to have it on multiple tracks at the same time and still have my stereo output without anything on it so I could listen to reference tracks without this mastering processing on it anyway that said here is our track uh it's amazing how fast it is to set it up and with this plug-in what we get is three components we have our tone shaping our Dynamic shaping our loudness and then our stereo spread now I consider tone and Dynamics loudness to be the only two things that you have to do in mastering that is m mastering to me and then spread or stereo width stereo widening it's kind of a bonus nice if you want it but I definitely don't do it in every mix kind of thing so let's break go through these and look at how it set it and how I might tweak it to be a little bit more what I want in my master so let's go ahead and start by looking at the tone here and the main area of the tone is this EQ curve so it sets us up automatically and it's doing a lot and really precise movements here in some cases let's exaggerate it with this slider over here to listen to what it's doing and then bring it all the way down listen to it without any of that EQ on let's go and do [Music] that kiss my neck fall the again light me up and now we start again interesting so obviously it's a little bit exaggerated a little hyped when we're looking at it at the full uh setting all the way up here I would probably never really use this in a setting but it allows me hear what it's doing a little bit better and I'm noticing some stuff that it's smoothing out up here in the upper mid-range that I hadn't really necessarily caught on before but hearing this do it for me it's kind of teaching me something so let's go and scale this back I think realistically maybe you in some cases might exaggerate up a little bit but a lot of times around here is probably the most you want to do or actually even scaling it back so let's scale it back just a little bites so much but it's never enough kiss my neck follow so somewhere around there seems good to me as a starting point now you do get three EQ points that you can also adjust in here you get a low shelf that you can boost or cut you get a mid frequency band that you can boost or cut and you get a high shelf that you can boost or cut uh and the cool thing too is you could set this at a frequency that you like and then you could turn it off and on down here with the custom EQ just to make sure that you like it I always encourage people to do that and I would actually say that this is the first thing I hear while I think it's addressing some harsh frequencies up in the mid-range upper mid-range that I hadn't caught uh I think there's a little bit around like 3K that I'm now starting to lose as you can see it's doing a fair amount of a cut right there I think the harshness is probably more up here let's first identify if that was right around the harshness and then if so let's do a little bit of a boost around 3 it's that kind of stuff so it's cutting that but I think around here I think I just want a little bit more of that back so I'm just going to boost this up just a little bit here so you can see I'm pulling their curve back up a little bit if I turn this off it goes back to how it was put it back on and it kind of pulls their curve to be closer to how I like it so let's make sure we like that I definitely like what that's doing okay now the next thing I would play around with is the character unfortunately I don't have apple silicon so I can't uh one day I'll get an Apple silicone computer but in the meantime I'd love to hear from you if you tried this what is your favorite apple silic or what character in this plugin not Apple silicon or what computer do you have that you love but which is your favorite of the characters uh I'm really excited to try these out okay and then the last area of the tone is this a little Exciter button here and if you aren't familiar with excitement it's basically saturation targeted at specific frequencies typically kind of the upper mid-range uh let's go and he what this [Music] is deserv so much but it's never enough kiss my neck fall the again light me up and now okay I like it I think it's doing something kind of neat uh I have played around with this a little bit and I have noticed that it can start to distort ese especially if you start to dial up your loudness here so be careful with that and always turn it off and back on and listen a few times and make sure that you don't just just like that it's you know brightening up because we tend to like things that are brighter uh but make sure that it actually is sounding better to you and it's not adding anything you don't like okay so that's the tonal options let's look at the loudness options so it's already done loudness processing even though this knob is at center it's already done a bunch of stuff behind the scenes if we turn it off you'll notice it's a lot quieter then I engage it it's definitely turning it up right so we can see the ls over here this is our main loudness reading and the ls we have momentary short-term and integrated momentary and short-term basically just being what's happening right around that time shortterm is a a few milliseconds right around it and momentary is just in the moment integrated would be for the entire song and to get our integrated score or I score right here we would go to the very beginning of our song so just go back to the beginning of your song and then you would hit the start and you would let it play throughout the entire song and it would measure your integrated score over the whole song We're going to reset that since we didn't do the whole song We'll go back focusing on okay so the love score that we're getting here I think is around 13 let's SL up so much but it's never enough kiss my neck fall the part again like me up and now we start to get home kiss my neck I fall aart again lock me up and now we started so it's actually around 12 I think it was probably 13 before I did the EQ boost and the Exciter keep that in mind that those things will impact the actual volume and and perceived volume that you're seeing with the lefts here go and reset that again so to me that's great it's a good starting point I typically actually will go a little bit higher with a genre like this -109 8 somewhere in that range I think the master I did on this was around negative 9 and 1/28 some or 9 and a half n somewhere in that range uh so I would probably try pushing this a little bit harder and seeing if it could take it let play with that kiss my neck I fall the part again light me up and now we start again home oh yeah okay so immediately to me as I started to bring this up it started to feel shrill up in the upper in I think it's this Exciter here up so much but it's never enough kiss my NE fall the me up and yeah there's something about the loudness and the Exciter in in conjunction using them both together that I think isn't really working and as I said i' I've noticed that before I wasn't sure if I was going to run into that here and I definitely do feel like it's happening and I don't love it so be careful using this Exciter especially if you're going to dial up the loudness okay let's see where we are with our lefts and maybe turn up a little bit more maybe turn down def so much but it's never kiss my neck I fall theart again light me up and now we start again home oh kiss my neck I fall aart again lock me up and now as I start to get around here I start to feel like I'm noticing the limiting and it gets a bit of a pumping effect if I exaggerate this let's see if you really no so much but it's never enough kiss my neck I fall the part again might be up and now we start it just feels like it's pulsing a little bit too much so you definitely can't drive it too hard uh I feel like around here was still okay NE so I think I'm getting about -10 on my lefts I don't know what my integrated score is obviously but somewhere around there still feels fairly safe to me so I definitely think you get a loud enough Master but if you really want a really loud Master you might have to play around with adding a Clipper before this or maybe you know playing with the tones a little bit more maybe a little bit more lowend will help you bring that volume up a little bit uh but I think in general that's probably about as loud as we can get it with this the last thing I'll say in the loudness section is I wish it had an RMS meter uh that's just a different way of looking at loudness that I often like to check while I'm mastering you could use the multimeter put it after this plugin and check it so like I could drag the plugin before the multimeter I have here this will take just a second and then I can pull up my multimeter and look at the RMS value on and typically on an RMS I'm usually looking at -12 so that's another indicator that I might actually want to see if I can get the volume up just a little bit more2 kind of on the low end for my my master so something else I wish that they'd include here so I would always check an RMS meter in addition to this so keep that in mind that's another thing you might want to just pull up uh that meter or you could just pull up they make a smaller one if you are under metering you could just go to uh your level meter and you can just pop the level meter up over here you can make it vertical and we could have it right here next to this plugin and you could set this to be your RMS meter right here and you could even do true Peak and [Music] RMS so you can definitely compensate for but I would like for them to build it in hopefully they'll do that one day okay so let's finish with the stereo spread here now with the stereo spread as I turn this knob what I want you to pay attention to is on the correlation meter you'll see that it goes from Green and starts to pull down towards the middle this is our basically phase coherency this is making sure that there's no major phasing issues in our mix you want this to be in the green if it starts to pull towards the the middle here the yellow or the red that means that it's going to be a little weird you'll hear with your ears too though so listen for that and also pay attention to this [Music] correlation gets pretty weird right it starts to sound like kind of disjointed so we'll put that back to the center but I do think you could do a little bit with it I think around 20% me up and down we start to get home I will say the number one thing that I wish this had uh in terms of the spread is a way for me to just flip this off and on and just see if I like it really quickly like that because they don't have that I'm not even sure if I like this better so I'm going to actually put it back on zero because I'm not positive if I feel like it's really adding anything okay now the last thing to know is this labus compensation down here uh you always want to make sure if you're uh comparing your master to the unmastered version that you're listening to it at the same volume and uh the lus comp compensation should turn this plugin down so that when I bypass the plugin with this button right here it's the same volume off and on to the unmastered track so ideally that would work my experience so far is that it works occasionally and doesn't work most of the time for some reason it actually makes this quieter than the unmastered version let's see if it worked today it did not so for some reason the unmastered version is now louder than this so I can't easily just flip back and forth between those but that would be helpful if it was now if you're using the master assistant you're noticing that your Masters are really quiet maybe you turn this on and forgot to turn it off be sure to turn this off because that is going to bring the volume of it down to try to compensate for the loudness from this plugin okay so that's the way I would tweak this I know I pointed out a few things I don't like about it but overall the fact that I could do that so quickly and I could do it much faster if I wasn't talking through it uh is amazing we just generated a master and tweaked it to be a little bit more what we like in just a few you know minutes right so now what I want to do is compare this master to the master that i' done and we can see here the master that I'd done has a lot of processing on it it's several layers of processing but I break it down basically into tone and then making it loud and so I have a linear EQ this is just doing some basic tonal shaping I have the stock logic compressor in dual mono mode just doing a little bit of gain reduction uh a tube EQ just doing a little bit of what I consider like a high fidelity EQ and then uh fresh air from Slate this is just giv me a small bump in the upper mid-range and we have linear EQ here doing a little bit more just on the sides this is kind of uh adding a little bit of weight to the guitars and also a little bit of presence to the guitars out in the sides and then uh I'm using a little bit of clipping to just chop off the biggest Peaks and then I'm using two stages of limiting with Fab filter Pro L2 to uh do just gentle limiting in two stages and by doing you know clipping and two stages of limiting I can get it really loud while it not being you know too pumpy uh with the dynamic so let's listen to my master now I need to be sure to turn off their master and then I'll flip mine off and turn theirs back on and we can just flip back and forth between the [Music] two NE all the again light me up and now we start again home and then I'll flip mine off turn theirs [Music] on kiss my neck Fall Again lock me up and now we start again there's off turn mine on neck Fall theart Again light me up and now we start again home turn mine off and turn theirs back [Music] on and we'll go back to mine one more [Music] time so one of the first things I notic is that mine is Def a little bit louder uh mine does have a little bit more compression to it that is something I was actually going for with this master I didn't feel like I could get that same amount of compression with just the loudest knob but maybe if I did put a compressor before it I added clipping before it or maybe one limiter before the mastering plugin I might be able to get the amount of loudness and compression that I was looking for in my master uh so that's one distinct difference there is a little more volume so don't be tricked by that but I also think there's just a little bit more uh energy and excitement that I get from doing the several layers years of processing that I think it the more simple processing that they're doing here isn't quite giving me that same level of subtlety spread out over multiple layers of processing now that said I do think that there's something up in this upper mid-range somewhere around here that their's is addressing a little bit better than I might have I did have uh a little bit of a cut right around uh 4500 here but you can see they had one more around like maybe 5500 here and I think that that uh processing is something that I could learn from this and take and apply to mine and that's the last point that I want to make and that's why I am always going to put this on every master that I ever do from here on out because I want to learn from it even if I don't end up using this for any master that I ever release there is something that I might be able to pull out of what it does that I didn't think to do or that my brain just didn't even think about that I could apply to my master and I would end up with a better master and if I can only take one thing from it but it makes my master better then it was worth the 30 seconds or 2 minutes that I spent doing this I'm not going to take and upload it to you know Lander and do all that and pay a monthly subscription but I will do it instantaneously here in logic and learn from it and get that benefit so I think that is the coolest thing and I think that everybody that's using this should always Master it and if there's ever a day when I'm comparing my master to their master that their Master beats mine I will happily release a master done with the mastering assistant I have no shame in that at the end of the day no one knows if logic's mastering did it or if I did it or if the a world-class mastering engineer did it so at the end of the day it's just what comes out of the speakers and if you are beat by this that's totally fine now try to dig into it and see if you can learn from it to improve your master so if you're just starting out and you feel overwhelmed by mastering I encourage you to try mastering every song you ever do from here on out don't just put on master and assistant because you're not going to learn just from putting on mastering assistant but try a master and then do Master and assistant and compare back and forth and if yours beats theirs great that's awesome but if theirs beats yours that's also fine because now now you can look at theirs and say well what did they do that looks different than what I did is there anything that I can learn from that Master and over time eventually you'll likely start beating it and you'll get a better master so this is like teaching yourself mastering uh teaching yourself how to improve mastering very specifically with your music it's like hiring a second mastering engineer to master your song and show you what they did it's awesome I can't believe that you get this built into logic now that we all get this built into logic now it's such a powerful and cool tool even if you never actually release a song that was mastered with this plugin so I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below do you agree with me do you disagree with me I'd love to hear your thoughts on that in the comments below before you go be sure to grab the six step checklist to a prom miix from Link in the description below it's really going to help you out if this video was helpful be sure to like comment subscribe and I'll see you next week with another video only one thing time I'm the gold briak champion

Channel: The Band Guide

Views: 22,947

Keywords: logic's mastering assistant, mastering assistant, logic mastering meter, logic mastering, mastering in logic, mastering on Logic Pro x, music production, audio engineering, the band guide, thebandguide, Logic Pro x tutorial, mixing in logic pro x, mixing on Logic Pro x, Logic Pro x, logic pro, logic, 5 minute logic expert, logic settings, logic preferences, advanced logic settings, advanced logic tutorial, how to use logic mastering assistant

Id: a5RpmNiVkmg

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023