How To Get Loud Dance Masters (Tutorial)

you know if mixing gets difficult if you're struggling to get a loud Master then yeah I want you to watch this video and be inspired on uh yeah how to deal with that issue and how to get loudness hey what's up everyone so by far the number one subject that I get ask the most questions about is how to achieve loudness in mastering there's not a simple answer to the question but there's definitely a couple of very strategic and effective ways to achieve a louder master in the end now in this video I want to go over a couple of those techniques that yeah just work very very good and before we're going into this it's important to know that this project is a mix that I've done but the master is just for demonstration so I'm going to add a lot of processing going to let you hear a lot of techniques how they sound how they interact with each other and basically have a Sonic brainstorm of what you can do to achieve a loud Master let's quickly have a listen to the track that we're using for this demonstration [Applause] today hold me close feel the be of my heart hold me close super cool track it's Sam Collins together with take note pulls super cool upcoming track so keep an eye out on that so let's Dive Right In with the most important thing which is the balance if your track has a good balance and then I mean not only a tonal balance but as well a dynamic balance so if you have a controlled low end if you don't have very sudden Peaks especially in the low end that's already super important if your track sounds loud even when you play it at a really low volume because the tonal balance is present and yeah is clear then that's already a very very good starting point to begin with if you want a loud track if you have a track that's way to base heavy your limiters will start to distort way quicker as when you would have a mix that has a controlled low end and yeah it really already starts there so before we diving into techniques I wanted to have said that that balance is extremely crucial when it comes to achieving loudness then I'm adding to that that your RMS already needs to be at a good level ideally so your Crest Factor needs to be as high as possible and of course you don't want to over push it but if there's too much Dynamics in your track then it can still sound like a cool track but keep in mind that achieving a higher perceived loudness yeah it's very likely to be way more challenging that way what's really important as well to keep in mind that if you're pushing for loudness that you're really bringing out everything in the mix so if you have a gain staging structure meaning that you're going way too hard into plugins unintentionally clipping in a lot of places that's what you want to avoid why because all these artifacts and Distortion adds up so it's really important to keep a and intentional gain stage happening in your mixing and monstering session so starting with the first technique this is a preset in Pro MB it's called tighter lows you can select the zoom here if you're doing it at 3db you can see super in depth what you're doing I'm using this plugin at linear phase four times oversampled with look ahead on in this example I'm going to show you how One DB of compression sounds and what it does to the mix so that's what it's doing to the low end and if you do it in the mix it sounds like [Music] this what it's doing is it's tightening up the low end a little bit and it's also decreasing it a little bit in overall volume so if we're going to compress this with this limiter then I'm going to show you what's difference uh with base compression on and [Music] without [Music] close so in this example I wasn't really listening to what sounded best I was just showing you the correlation between gain reduction levels in your limiter and compression levels on your low end if I smash the low end all the way down you can you could see that the limiter almost had nothing to do and when there's a lot of Bas your limiter has a way more difficult job so control your base and one of the ways to do that is FB filter Pro and be of course you can use a dynamic EQ like proq3 as well or you can use Soo for this or you can use Gil for this or you can use lowend Focus for this there's multiple ways but just make sure that your base is is in control one way as well but I'm not the biggest fan of that if I'm doing it I'm uh loving the SSL highp pass filter but putting a full highp pass filter on your master yeah can provide a lot of head room as well if you do that I would advise putting a brue at linear vase and really only doing it when it's super needed because for example the low end is way too overwhelming next up is your limiter in this case I'm using ozone 11 maximizer and a couple of things are very important here if you want to go for maximum loudness don't use true Peak I am however using true Peak because it prevents the master from clipping especially on cheaper devices like an iPhone or any cheap speakers it will keep it clean Social Media stuff like that if TR peek is active your m Master will sound better there however if you're doing a master only for DJing then yeah feel confident without the true Peak activated then character in this case I'm going for extremely fast release time it's at 1 faster means clipping slower means very slow what you can do is even automate this so if you have a break you can go for a slow release time if you have a drop you can go for a faster release time the faster it is the more open your master will sound and the more aggressive the limiting will sound so if you yeah go for extreme fast settings be intentional and have a good listen how you can very easily listen with the ozone 11 maximizer is through the Delta mode let me bypass upwards compression so you can just simply only hear the rest that is doing when [Music] limiting [Music] hold close feel the my [Music] hard hold me close feel the my heart [Music] close yeah so how I set it up I was listening with Delta to The Limited signal so exactly you can hear what the plug-in is doing I was trying to get the right release time in this case one I already knew would be super effective upward compressing so we're pushing down a lot the peaks in limiting but with upwards compression you can bring up the quiet part so yeah it's just a big loss if you forget this function because why are we trying so hard to push down the loudest levels if we can simply bring up the quietest and that way increase our Crest factor and get us closer to uh loud Master that's a super clever function and I love how it sounds in 11 maximizer soft clip just quite aggressive saturation there in the soft clipping Circuit of this plugin and uh yeah in this case we're going for loud so 10% does the trick Trent emphasis basically emphas IES the trenance basically Tren shaper before the limiting process happens in Ozone 11 maximizing why did they add this feature because they want you to be able to emphasize the trenance so the trenance won't be killed in the limiting process then stereo Independence 50% in this case I love what it does to the stereo image because it's 50% independent what does it mean if it's at 100% the right and left channel of the limiter will react 100% separate the lesser the percentage the Lesser they are separated in the real world the sound difference is mainly that if you have a higher stereo Independence the stereo image feels a little bit more alive and if you have a lower stereo Independence the overall stereo image feels a little tighter and more focused so I like it at 50% for this track because those syns are really like wide and nice and I like to maintain a little bit of the movement there and yeah retain that width that this mix has then using saturation on your master let's by the way see where we're at with this mix hold me close Feel the beat my heart so it's at about minus 4 uh RMS we can easily push harder into the limiter but let's go and add saturation in parallel I'm using fet filter set 2 it's in a default preset at subtle Transformer 100% Drive 100% mix high quality and linear phas I'm going to shape the tone here and then I'll simply blend in the amount of wet signal that I want and that I think sounds good in this [Music] track my heart close hold me close the beat of my heart hold me close hold me close feel the be of my heart so what I'm trying to do here is shape a very different tone on the M there The 100 % wet signal is yeah super present super aggressive lacking a lot of low end and what I want is to blend a little bit of that into to my current signal that's way more base heavy and that way shape not only the tone but as well the Dynamics of the track because the Blended signal will have a lot of harmonics making the signal way more fat and way more easy to get loud so let me just blend in a little bit of this me close Feel the beat of my heart close the my heart really like what it does there it's makes the master sound a lot cleaner lot more present less muddy and closed down I really like it and Saturn 2 subtle Transformer just sounds incredible and I've only used about 25% in this case so as I said earlier this video is just a demonstration because I'm using a lot of processing on this master but yeah make sure to keep in mind that it's always very important to be intentional with whatever processing you add so this video is just to show you what's possible and yeah I hope that you can get some inspiration from this for your own uh tracks all right next up Oxford inflator this is extremely powerful however you need to activate band split when using it on your master let me show you the difference that this simple button makes it's simply splitting up the frequency bands making Oxford inflator react way better to complex material here I'm going to uh AB the band split before and after with you Feel the beat of my heart hold me close hold me close Feel the beat of my heart hold me close me close Feel the beat my heart close sounds so good this plugin is really Mighty it's uh super unique I don't really know any plugin that exactly sounds the same and especially on dance music it's just so powerful just make sure to activate band splits I showed you this super extreme example where I was pushing it way too hard and it starts completely destroying the signal if band split is off so um yeah it's it's super important to switch that on if you're using it in your master then parallel compression let me AB this for you with the actual analog West audio NG bus compressor which you can use a simple uh cic the glue or your builtin um yeah glue compressor or any SSL type compressor I'm going to set it up with a quite extreme ratio of four quite fast at attack 10 or slow it's how you uh see it but for mastering this is I think quite fast fastest release your compressor has most uh plugins I think are limited 2.1 the ngg bus the analog NG bus compressor so this is an analog um compressor or controlled via plug-in can actually go to 0.05 which is extremely fast but this is super important I'm going to only blend in a little bit and let me show you how that [Music] sounds Feel the beat of my heart close hold close Feel The Beat with my heart hold me [Music] close hold me close feel the be of my heart hold me close [Music] close so you can hear that this beefs up the signal even more in the beginning it was pushing a bit too hard uh into the rest of the mastering chain so I lowered the input eventually to minus one and keep in mind I'm using extreme settings just to demonstrate how to get loudness you know if mixing gets difficult if you're struggling to get a loud Master then yeah I want you to watch this video and be inspired on uh yeah how to deal with that issue and how to get loudness so I just wanted to show you a ton of ways to do that so the next way is with EQ and although I've showed you the pro andb trick where you just compress the base this is basically the same but then with EQ let me bypass the ma EQ here you can do it in a plugin as well I just really love this unit and the setting is as follows I did two clicks of the sub decrease one click up on the 2.5k it's at two on the 40K airband and yeah it's similar on the right side I'm using this in mid side so that's why I set it up on two sides let me AB this for you and you can hear the tone shift and how much easier the mix is to get loud with the ma EQ activated if it's on this master can be way louder lufs wise just keep in mind that's not always what you want but this video is about how to get that so let me show this to you right now hold close feel the be my heart me [Music] close hold me close Feel the beat of my heart [Music] hold my favorite uh way of using the ma is by the way with the subband and then especially only in the mids uh it it really brings out the low end but the problem is that the mix would be way harder to get loud but just let me play you an example of how that would sound [Music] insane that's such a powerful band which I think starts at 10 Hertz insane however last Bas is easier to get loud so yeah just decrease a little bit of the base increase a little bit of the upper mids make sure that it's not getting too harsh and too uh unpleasant for your ears because in the end I would advise that listening experience is way more important than a number on a meter then next up is one of my favorite plugins at the moment which is Ozone 11 Clarity I've set it up again quite extreme 30 I would normally go for like five or 15 but in this case we're going for 30 tilt brighter darker super easy and the standard attack and release works really really well you can use the midside as well but in this case I love how it sounds in Stereo let me show you what this does it's leaving the low end alone but it's really bringing out lots and lots of clarity that's why the name is Clarity what it's doing is Shifting your overall balance more TOS WI noise this tilt means that you can decrease the brightness it pushes toward so at minus three it's pink noise and I believe that at minus 6 it's called Brown noise just understand that less is darker and more is brighter let me show how it sounds on this [Music] track feel the be of my heart hold me close hold me close Feel the beat of my heart hold me close close Feel The Beat with my heart close hold me close feel the of my heart close of course it's way too pushed but just to show you how much difference all these processes make it's it's really powerful Clarity amazing sounding plugin it's super clever and yeah it's super easy to control I'm using G fall Master as well I'm using Bloom which I absolutely love but for this video I felt like Clarity is is is really cool to show why because it's super easy and it really helps into getting a tonal balance that's easier to get loud then for all the people that want to go really extreme I'm closing this video off with hard clipping let me show you what this does before the end limiter and let's try to yeah get a master that's uh that's loud what's it doing it's hard clipping the Peaks why because it feeds a more consistent signal that way into our final limiter which then has a way easier job and maintains a way cleaner sound so this is Extreme I would definitely switch this to 32 if you CPU can handle it and yeah we'll push into hard clipping and we'll see how much difference it makes to the game [Music] reduction Feel the beat my heart close by the way if you're using standard clip then what's super important is this meter so it shows you the difference between the input signal and the processing and it's really good to keep an eye on this so you can see what you're taking off or shaping off I should actually say because that's really what this plugin does so let's go extreme we are setting this at minus 8 and just see how much gain reduction the limiter is doing [Music] so there's almost no game rediction happening this would never be the setting in a real life scenario but just to show you how it works it's it's really powerful so let's set it up more towards a real life scenario Feel the beat of my heart hold me close me close Feel the beat of my heart hold me close close Feel The Beat with my heart me [Music] close so I ended up taking a little bit out of the 40 Hertz on the mar I'm not happy with how this monster sounds I would do it way cleaner and yeah a little bit more Dynamic to retain more of that punch but in this case yeah we're just throwing a bunch of plugins on the master to make it louder and for that I think this video is really cool because it's really giving you a couple of options how you can achieve louder Masters so that was the video about loudness I've written down some of the techniques that I wanted to show you and I've showed them to you this video wasn't as straightforward as some of the other videos I've published here but I just wanted to show you a couple of different super effective ways to achieve louder Masters yeah I'm super curious to hear if you like those kind of more freestyle type videos where I'm just covering a subject and where I'm going over a couple techniques how to do that we definitely could do more videos like that such as uh how to get way more Punchy drums or how to make sure that your FOC go is always understandable throughout the track and then just go over a couple of different techniques to do that for me it's really a lot of fun to make and yeah I've been pushing out tons of content on Tik Tok and shorts and reals where it's really super to the point because you need to be super fast because yeah otherwise it just won't really be watched um however on YouTube of course I can do way longer videos and go more in depth because there's not really a Time limitation so yeah that's super cool um let me know if you uh like those kind of videos as well I'm super curious to hear that if you want to see more of those videos just make sure to subscribe and then I'll catch you in the next ones yo yo

Channel: This Mix Is Sick

Views: 2,505

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Id: ji2w50z9Qp4

Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024