How To Make Your Music Sound Professional | Mastering for Beginners

hi everyone and welcome to this new wavelab video series my name is dom and i'm a music producer mixing and mastering engineer based here in london and on this video i'm going to talk about five easy steps on how to make your music sound professional and get it to sound it's best for releasing it into the world so let's take an master song as an example and let's see what we can do to give it some depth punch width and loudness using the powerful tools that we have in wavelab step number one analyzing and checking your files and that's extremely important before you even start mastering your track make sure that there are no problems with your file to begin with and wavelab has some extremely useful tools to help you do that let me show you a few of them on the analyze tab we have the global analysis tool and that's extremely useful because you just click analyze and then it analyzes your file and shows you what are your peaks your digital peaks your true peaks very important if you're planning to release your music online your loudness so basically your lufs loudness we'll talk about this in another video your dc offsets and any possible errors that you might have so this can give you a very quick overview of what's going on on your file next of course we have the waveform view and this can come in quite a few different forms the first is the typical waveform view the second one is a spectrogram that can show you the entire frequency spectrum in a very analytical way and you can identify any problems and we also have the loudness view that allows you to see the loudness distribution for your entire track the next thing of course is metering and we have some really really powerful tools in wavelab when it comes to metering the first meter is the level meter and that shows you in real time the peak and average loudness of your track as well as the relationship between the left and right channels the next one and that's a very very cool one is a spectrometer and of course i can resize all of them very very easily and that's a very detailed very powerful fft analyzer so let me give you an example when i play back this track i can clearly see the kick drum dancing over here as well as a snare right there so it's very very powerful very fast very responsive now if you want to see the entire frequency analysis of your track you can just select it and then go to your analysis and select audio selection and now all the meters will update and will show you a full analysis of the entire length of your song extremely cool and you can do this in seconds the next meter i want to talk about is the loudness meter and this is an audio meter for monitoring loudness according to the ebu r128 standard which is extremely important if you're planning to upload your tracks on services like itunes spotify youtube and so on and so forth another very very cool meter is the wave scope and this basically allows you to preview your waveform after you've done some processing to it for example if you had a limiter if you had an eq you can immediately see this updating in real time so you can actually visualize what's happening to your audio file when you add processing to it this is a very very invaluable tool and the next thing you want to make sure before you start mastering is to perform your fading and fade out for example in this specific file when i zoom in you can see in the beginning it looks clean but when i zoom in a little bit more you see there's a little bit of dirt right there that i can get rid of so i can very easily go and select this region clean this up and also perform a fading right here so i can go to the process tab perform a fade in so that my track starts smoothly and i'm going to do the same towards the end i'm going to perform a fade out right there and now we're good to go step number two add corrective and creative eq and it's very important that you add your corrective queue at the very beginning so if there are any issues with your audio if you find any offending frequencies any tonal elements that you don't like it's a good idea to address them at the very very beginning because when you start adding compression or character eq all these things then all you will do is basically amplify those problems so you don't want to do that so in this case i'm going to use maserik which is a mastering suite plugin in wavelab that has all the processors that you need to master your tracks and i'm going to add an eq right there so let's play back the track [Music] so in general i'm very happy with the sound i don't find any offending frequencies right there but what i can see on my analyzer is that there's quite a little bit of rumble right there up to 34 hertz that i don't need and this will compromise my headroom in the end so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to add a very nice filter on the eq on wavelab and i'm going to cut up to let's say 40 38 hertz something like this this is also a 96 db per octave filter so it's very very surgical and detail it really cuts everything below that point so let's see what it does so now you can see that this low end rumble is completely cleaned up so the next step is to add some creative eq and when i'm saying creative i mean this is completely subjective right but what you want to do is basically enhance the important elements of your song so i'm going to add another module so that i keep things contained and now i'm going to make some decisions you know i think that the low end is pretty okay i mean if i want to enhance the kick drum a little bit i can go right here and maybe find my kick drum right there [Music] and maybe add a little bit of boost i don't need too much because it's already there and then what i want to do is i want to go to another band and enhance a little bit of the mids you know the vocals those nice synths right there the guitars so let's try and do that [Applause] [Music] so in general you want to do broad strokes wide cues you know i don't want to do sharp cues right there i want to make it nice and broad [Music] [Applause] and again not too much a few dbs if you find that you need to boost more than three dbs and you can go back to the mixing stage go back to the mixing stage if you can't more than three dbs is fine don't worry about it so the next thing i'm going to do and that's something very very cool that i want to show you right now is i want to enhance a little bit of the side signal and that's where all the stereo information is and this way you can make your track sound wider so i'm going to use band 4 and i'm going to turn it to a mid side band so that means i can treat the mid signal and the side signal separately so i'm going to go to the side signal and i'm going to enhance those stereo sounds like the sims the reverbs the guitars all those things using this band let's check it out [Music] [Applause] so i want to get this nice low mids from all those different elements the last thing i want to do is i'm going to add a nice high shelf and give the song a little bit of sparkle [Music] again just a little bit of it [Music] now another very cool module we have in master rig is the dynamic eq and the difference between the dynamic eq and the normal eq is that the dynamic is not a static eq it engages itself when your frequencies pass a certain threshold so let me show you a quick example let's say i wanted to enhance this snare over here and i can clearly see that the snare leaves around here on 140 hertz so what i'm going to do is i'm going to type this frequency right here and now i'm going to exaggerate a little bit so i can show you what it does i'm going to add quite a bit of gain let's make it a little bit more narrow and now i'm going to set my threshold so that when the snare hits then the eq adds a boost so this will enhance my snare let's check it out [Music] let's bring down the threshold [Music] so without it so it really adds a lot of punch to the snare of course i don't need this right now but in case you cannot go back to the mixing stage this can really help you get some elements out in the mix step number three add compression and punch and of course compressors come in many different flavors you know you have single band compressors you have multiband compressors you have fvt compressors optical compressors so many different things and the secret right here is to figure out what you want to do with your music do you want it to sound compressed do you want to fix some things do you want to make it more even let me show you what i'm going to do here i'm going to add a module and i'm going to add the compressor module in master rig so as you can see we have four bands this can be up to four bands and it's a mid side compressor as well but if you feel you don't need all four bands in this case i don't think that i need all four bands i can just reduce the number of bands right there and now i can basically define the frequency crossover point like this i want to make sure that the kick and snare are on different frequency ranges right there and then i can decide what kind of compressor i'm going to use for each frequency range so for example i can select my low end to have a standard compressor which means a very clean a very transparent compressor tube is more of an optical style compressor vintage is an fet compressor very fast and of course we have the maximizer as well so in this case i'm going to leave it on standard and i'm going to bring up the threshold open the attack because i don't want to squash the low end too much i just want to make it a little bit more even to make it a little bit more coherent and i'm going to have a low ratio change the release a little bit so that it bounces with a song and let's listen to it right now [Music] so it basically catches those peaks when the kick drum and the bass play together so that the low end becomes a little bit more homogeneous okay let's try the same thing with the mid and high frequencies [Music] again i'm opening the attack because i don't want those snare transits to be eaten away [Applause] [Music] and as you can see i'm adding just a little bit of compression i'm only touching the needle i don't go and compress this really really heavily now if you want to add punch to your master there's one secret plugin that we have in wavelab that can really help you out if you cannot go back to the mixing stage and that's the multiband envelope shaper this allows you to basically enhance your transients depending on the frequency range that you want to choose for example let's say i want to have the transience of my low end [Music] my mid-range [Music] [Applause] so it's a very very powerful plugin it can add this little extra layer of punchiness to your masters step number four add excitedness wideness and depth with saturation and of course when we talk about saturation there are so many things that you can consider but when it comes to mastering some people are really scared of saturation but remember you're the artist you take these decisions and if you want to add a little bit of richness to your sound that's great let me show you what i'm going to do here i'm going to add another module and i'm going to add the saturated module right there so in this case we have two algorithms we have tape saturation tube saturation and all these bands as you can see we have four bands but i can also change the number of bands again can be mid side so in this case i'm going to go to my low end and not a little bit of tape saturation right there let's see how it sounds [Music] a little bit not too much i don't want to introduce distortion to the sound of course now let's go to the mid-range and i'm going to turn it into mid-side and now i'm going to add some tube saturation to the sides [Music] and maybe some tape saturation to the highs bring out this nice silky top end [Music] so this not only allows me to add extra harmonics to the sound but also make it wider so let's see what we've done up to this point [Music] so i've made this song wider i've made it more open the vocals shine now we have a little bit of richness in the low and the top end the mids are up front so just by using the mastering you can do so many different things step number five add loudness obviously everyone wants to make their songs loud and that's one of the aspects of mastering so in this case my suggestion is try and use layers of different limiters and maximizers in this case i'm going to add another module right here on master rig and i'm going to add the limiter right there so this has quite a few elements but in this case i'm going to use the maximizer element right there i'm going to set the type to modern and i'm going to start adding a little bit of loudness [Music] [Applause] [Music] so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to add a second layer of limiting and i'm gonna do this with the vice mastering maximizer from softube because of course wavelab is an audio editor and it can load third-party plugins you have lots of options right there so in this case i'm going to use this mastering maximizer to add a little bit more loudness and let's see what we can do [Music] [Applause] [Music] and as you can see i don't need to over compress i don't need to over limit because i'm adding all those things in stages in layers every stage of the process adds a little bit of something like cooking ingredients to a great dish so let's see what we've done up to this point [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so these are five steps that you can use to make your music sound professional and ready for release hope you found this video useful let us know in the comments down below what you'd like to see next and we'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: WaveLab

Views: 87,941

Keywords: How to make music sound professional, what is mastering, mastering for beginners, mastering engineer, mastering engineering, steps for mastering, Mastering software, best audio mastering software, best mastering software, best mastering software for mac and PC, mastering software for professional use, professional mastering software, audio editing, mastering workstation, WaveLab

Id: vCp8LD2dxo8

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019