HOW TO MASTER A SONG - 7 Steps to Loud!, FAT, & In Your Face

in the next few minutes I'm going to show you how to take your track from sounding like this to this hi I'm Rob the fact that you're watching this video means I'm going to assume that you have a similar problem to what I had a couple of years ago and that's that I would work on a track I'd spent hours of painstaking tweaking and trying to get the perfect sound and eventually I'd get it to a point where it go man this sounds fantastic until I put it up against one of my favorite records and I'm going to be totally honest with you it was a little embarrassing and so I want to give you a couple of key techniques principles and little tips and tricks that I've picked up along the way from trial and error and also from kind of learning from the Masters and so that you can put them into practice and get your track signing you know big fat full loud and just as good as all the other commercial stuff out there because isn't that really the point we all want our tracks to compete with the best and to sound the best so I'm going to do two things the first thing I'm going to do is I just want to give you a little overview of what the purpose of mastering is you know what actually is mastering what are we trying to achieve because as the old saying goes you can't win a game that you don't understand and most people just don't understand even what mastering is you know what are we actually even doing and then secondly I want to take you through the whole mastering process that I use step by step so that you can see exactly what I'm doing at each phase and that you can replicate that and put that into practice yourself so of course there are many different ways to master and I'm just going to show you the way that I figured out over the years and that's gotten me the most consistent results don't focus too much on the exact software or plugins I'm using this is just what I use at the moment but you can get great results with you know any program really and any good plugins and there are many good ones out there what I really want you to get is the principles and the techniques that I'm going to show you so you know don't worry so much about that it's the d-r-e stereo Widener you know just get the idea that you know using a stereo Widener and that you can use a similar one for your sound okay so why my string why do we master tracks and you know what is my string well mastering is the final process of kind of enhancements and tweaks that we make to a track before it gets released either on CD or mp3 if you're putting it on the iTunes Store whatever so that's why so much emphasis is put on it and that's why it's so important so I know a lot of guys think that the whole purpose of mastering is just to make your track as loud as possible and that really isn't the purpose at all that's one of the advantages but let me just break it down into five reasons why we want to master track the first reason is it's the final check it's the last chance you get to check through the track and make sure there's no noise make sure there's no kind of clicks or pups you know to listen to it on a lot of different systems and hear what that sounds like so that's the first reason the second one is consistency you want to check it out on a number of systems you want to try it in the car you want to try it you know on your iPod you want to try it on a laptop and your home stereo on a whole bunch of different systems to make sure that it sounds you know consistent and it's not to base you on one and it's not too harsh on another one so just to make sure that you know all the frequencies are kind of balanced on all these differences playback systems the third purpose is enhancement and this is just anything that makes the track sound better so you know it might be like EQ tweaks it might be some like exciters or like sort of bass boosts and in this stage as well if you think louder is better then it's better the fourth purpose of my string is album flow and obviously this is in the context of a whole album and this kind of regards to how the tracks flow from one to the next you know the spaces in between them is their gap or do they flow into each other and you know also things like you know you don't want this really loud rock song next to this really quiet song and the same level you know you want the soft song to sound relatively softer and that's just one of the other purposes of my string the fifth and final phase is the formatting and this just involves all the kind of the little admin things like naming the tracks putting in some kind of codes in case you want the names to come up and the album cover to come up in some media players and and also just the final format that you're saving this whole thing to you know is it going to CD is it going to mp3 and this would be done in this final formatting phase so the two areas that I'm going to focus on today are basically two and three which is the consistency and enhancement so the consistency getting it to sound good no matter what you play it on and Enhancement you know all the little tips and tricks to getting it sounding as good as possible and of course as loud as possible let's head on over now to Pro Tools and I'm going to show you the seven step process now in practice alright so here we are in Pro Tools this is the software that I use but like I mentioned there's a lot of different good software out there and there's a lot of great plugins out there so don't get too caught up on that I'm going to give you the basic category names of the plugins so you can use one that's similar that you may have so I've broken down the process of getting a master that's loud and fat and I've taken that and I've broken it down into seven steps into the seven step formula that you can follow to get these results for yourself now I'm trying to cram something that should take like an hour or two into the next ten minutes so I'm going to have to be like really brief but let's just get right to it and we'll see how we go so step one is the preparation what you're going to need is a stereo mix like I've got over here and what I also recommend you bring in are two or three reference tracks I've got just an old phrase song yeah and an old Daughtry song as well I just try and choose things that have a similar kind of composition and sound to what I'm going for they're not ideal but they'll do for this now what you may notice just right up front is that these quite different to this and if I make this the same size you'll notice right away that you can just see that this one is actually just from looking at at it you can see that it's a lot fatter and bigger and that's what we are trying to get to this is what a master track looks like and this one over here what we're going to do is we're going to try and chop off these Peaks over here and try and squash this whole thing down to get it to looking like that but more importantly sounding like that alright so get your reference tracks in get your stereo mix and one final thing I just want to mention is that you know trying to mix without studio monitors is kind of like trying to paint in the dark you know you're doing something but you don't quite know what it is it's really difficult so ideally you want some studio monitors or at least some speakers and don't mix on headphones it's just going to make your life really difficult step 2 I call fix it otherwise known as polishing the turd now polishing the turd is a very technical term for kind of trying to fix something that really shouldn't be fixed and if you're not familiar with that saying there's this kind of saying in the industry that goes you can't polish a turd which basically just means that no matter how much you try and fix a bad recording or bad mix it's still a bad recording it's still a bad mix it's still a turd so ideally you don't really want to you know you would want to go back to the mix phase or the recording phase even and try and fix it there but inevitably there might be things that you have to fix and at least you need a watch out for so just a couple of things to look out for obvious things like excess noise especially in the beginnings and the ends and stuff on the quiet parts things like harsh symbols or s's you know the sound that that's like jumping out at you and those you know also on that line different frequencies may be jumping out it may be like a certain bass note like jumping out of the mix and you just want to be aware of those things because if possible it's better to go back to the mix fix them then try and polish this thing alright with that said let's get right into it so let me just play you a little piece of the song and quickly compare it to you know the reference tracks that I have here so you can just see where we added the starting place and I know their commercial tracks I'm not really supposed to play them but you know it's all in the name of education and you don't tell I won't tell so let's get right to it so he has a little snippet of the track that we are bout to master now and this is of course with no plugins on right now it's completely clean let me just show you the levels of the master tracks that I'm comparing to then so of course we are miles out still but that's just fun because we haven't started yet so that takes me to step three which is enhancers now in this phase these are all the things that we're going to do to the track that are just going to make it sound better maybe clean it up a bit maybe just add a bit of something to it maybe fatten it up a bit add a bit of EQ on the top-end to bring it out so let me just get right into it now and show you some of the plugins I use in this phase the first one I put on is just a standard EQ that I'm going to put a high-pass fault on now all this is doing is just taking all the frequencies below a certain points and just basically taking them out and I'm setting it really low I mean it's at 40 Hertz and the slope isn't too much and this is just to clean up any potential low-end Rumble or there's just nothing down there that's that useful for a pop rock song now if you're doing something that's going to be played in the club or hip-hop song or something then you probably don't want to do this because you want all that learned and you want some you know it's going to be played in a place that's actually going to make use of that for this kind of track it's not that useful so I just kind of do it maybe I'm just superstitious but I just put it in there all right the next thing I'm going to add is some valve emulation now this is just a valve emulator by Dewey and I think you get different you know you get a couple of different companies that do some of the things and all this is going to do is sort of just fatten up the mix a little bit it adds some low-end sort of meat that I that I like it's very subtle once again all these processes and this is something to keep in mind like there isn't one sort of magic bullet that's going to bring this whole thing together and you're going to go wow that's incredible it's all these little these little emphasises and these little changes that are going to come together and culminate in the end to make the final master sound really great so I don't think you'll even hear it if I play it back I'll plays you something no quickly this is what it enough fat bypass it and on again so I'm not sure if you'll even pick that up especially if you're listening on smaller speakers or something like that but it does add something in the end it does thicken it up a little bit and I do hear something on that the next thing I'm going to add is a tape emulator and just to add in over here I don't use all of these in this exact same way for every single song you know there is no one perfect way to master this is just the way that I'm doing it for this song and it kind of gives you a lot of different ideas of what you can put in yourself so the tape also sort of adds some bottom and it adds like a little bit of meter add subtle saturation to the track and I like it kind of for more alternative rocky songs because it just gives it I don't know it's almost like what film does it's almost like film versus digital camera like they still shoot you know big-budget movies and film for that very reason it just adds a certain quality that you can't quite put your finger on so this is what the the tape on let me just bypass the cooking now I'm going to put it on so I don't know if you could hear that as well but it's also just thickening it up a little bit making it a little bit fatter next because the tape sort of takes off some of the top end and makes it a little bit dull I'm going to add a little bit of an EQ and it's nice to do this anyway just a little bit of Sheen on the top end very very subtle I'm literally adding one DB at like 16 K this is the waves q-clone and I just like this one because it's a very transparent EQ but you can use any shelf filter on any EQ if I go back to this one over here this is a maybe something more like that you have and you know you just go like that you select a shelf and you just stick it up like that so you can use any EQ for this but I'm just using this one and this just adds a little bit of Sheen let's see if you'll notice this one in here I'm just a back pass it at first and then I'll activate it okay once again very subtle you know it maybe just brings out those those Hyatts just very slightly but to my ears maybe I'm just imagining it but it does something alright next I'm going to add a plug-in called max base this is also by waves and what this is for is you can see this blue area over here this is symbolizing the base that's in the track at the moment I'm just going to use a preset of ear medium and what it's doing is it's actually emulating and adding frequencies that are higher in this higher sort of low mid range and what this is going to do is it's going to make the song sound fatter on smaller systems on like iPod headphones and things like that listen if you're doing stuff like hip-hop or things like that it is amazing this plugin because you know often we lose those the fatness of the track and it's not because those frequencies on there but they just so low that a lot of speakers aren't actually even reproducing them so let me just play you the before and after with this one on I'll just play it from you this is with it unarmed give me bad bosses on so there's definitely something there just to give you some perspective let me just bypass all the ones that I've got at the moment and let me just play it all right then I'm going to activate the ones that we got so far so you can hear that it's definitely sounding thicker there's definitely a thicker quality to it right next I'm going to add a little bit of compression like very just attach what I'm really doing here is just trying to glue the track together a little bit okay so as you can see that is why it's much going with arching I literally want like one or two DBS game reduction and before I forget I'm actually just going to drop my input at the beginning just a word of word of advice here when you are exporting your mix you kind of want to aim for around minus 6 dB this one might be slightly hot these Peaks are probably going to minus 3 minus 2 but you need some room to play with you so I'm just going to drop my first plugin here to say say minus 2 and a half just to leave me some more Headroom and obviously this is going to affect the inputs of all these plugins especially the compressor so just before I calibrate that okay so you can see it just touching it you just want to kiss the compressor just glue the track together a little bit more alright the next thing I want to add is a stereo whitener I use Dewey's wide I really like this one adds something to the track I find instead of just widening it seems to like push it past the edges of the speakers and I really like that and actually let me just put it on as I'm playing it and you'll hear it kick in so you can hear sort of like just spreads it apart of it and brings it all in your face this is with it all and I'm off and I'm so I really like that and you know if you've got a track that you just want to make sound a little bit larger than life that is fantastic for that alright so that pretty much covers the enhancements section all these things we use now were to enhance the track right step four is compress it now I know I used the compressor earlier but that was more just to glue the track together just slightly and more of an enhancement this is now going to be your main compressor or compressors I like to use a multiband compressor especially with something that's that's a bit bigger like this so let me just default this over here to zero and I'm just going to choose a preset just to get me going you know once again I'm going over this really quickly I'm really cramming this in and just getting this is like fast food mastering this and so I'm just going to put that on auto and now let me just show you what I do with this so what does multiband compressor basically is just for those you don't know is instead of like this one compressing the whole mix together the multiband compressor breaks it up into different frequencies so I can actually solo each frequency if you listen here right so you can actually hear that it's broken it up and I can compress each of these frequencies differently so why you would want to do that is that you may not want to compress the mid-range which is the most obvious part of the mix like where the vocals on stuff and you don't want to compress that as much because it'll sound obviously compressed but you want to compress the low bass so that it sounds really fat and even and then it's not disappearing so that's just kind of basically what you're doing with it and what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to find the loudest section of the song generally you want to play with this a little bit more but I'm just going to show you what I'm doing here so to reset these we just plan all right like I said you probably want to play with that a bit more you want to let it go for a while longer and I'm just giving myself some more Headroom you by dropping the input of that but what this is doing is that this is giving me the peaks of each of these frequency ranges and what I'm going to do now is and I'm I'm going to put these in as the thresholds so that's thirteen point three seven point six nine point nine and two twenty three point two now the reason why I'm doing that is that each of these bands has a different kind of peak so you don't want to leave it flat otherwise different ones are going to be over compressed and others under compressed so you want to get to sort of the level that they are peaking at now what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring that whole lock down just to start compressing it and you'll see it start to kick in there the more bring down the threshold the mortal compress you'll see that so I want to go to crazy and to something a little bit top-heavy so this is with it all and on so you can hear it really does sort of make it a lot clearer and and just brings it all together really nice for big songs big rock songs and stuff and let me just throw in your once again that every song is different and you know if you're doing something like mellow in the music or like classical music or something you're probably not going to go this crazy you know this is kind of a rock song at least pop rock so you know it's kind of a big song and we really want to bring it out you know it suits it so you've just got to do what works for the track right then Step five is clip it now what we're going to do here is if you see all these peaks over here we want to chop these off in order to get it to like that but we don't want to actually distort it you know by pushing it above because that doesn't sound good it kind of sounds like a like a click so we want to use something that Clips it and it sounds good and this is actually one of the secrets that the mastering engineer pros use and how they get these songs so loud is that they are actually driving them through these really expensive converters now I don't have really expensive converters and I'm going to assume by the fact that you're watching this video that you don't have either so I use this plugin from teawrex and I found it works quite well so what I'm going to do every year is I'm just going to put it on the right side which is this sharp slope over here which means that it's going to cut off these peaks as opposed to this sort of rounded one over here which will slowly saturate the track so we want to chop these off then I'm going to bring down the output just to leave me some room for my limiter on the next phase and then I'm just going to play the track and slowly push it push the game here as you can see look at not letting it go past minus three now you can see this in the the meters over you it's just chopping it off all right so let me just play it by part so you can hear what that sounds like and then on so we'll leave it at there for now that should be fun then step six is limited and this is the last plug-in that you use if you use nothing else none of these other ones are you know essential but you almost are always going to use a limiter even if it's just slightly and what this does is we're going to set the final out ceiling so I'm going to set it to minus 0.1 which means that it's not going to let it go past minus 0.1 all right so zero is clipping so we just going just below that then I'm just going to set the quantization to sixteen bits because you know CD audio is sixteen forty four point one and then as we drop this threshold it'll start to you know limit it more and more now just something to add is that this is actually a multiband limiter so similar to that compressor in except that it's actually limiting each band and you know there's nothing wrong with using a standard one in fact I sometimes do this is the waves all three the waves l2 is the one that isn't the multiband one and so you know those ones are just as good and there's a lot of great limiters out there that you can find I'm just going to use this one for today so let me play it and start to drop the threshold right it was it bypassed all right so as you can hear that you know these final plugins especially the multiband compressor the clipper and the limiter these are really where the leverage is that when it comes to you know getting the volume if that's what you're after and now I'm going to kind of assume that that's what people kind of like these days if that's what they like you got to give them what they want but let me just add it's not necessarily better like I've said now it's just sounding like maybe a little bit brittle a little bit thin let me just mess with out a bit just bringing up the low ends here all right so it's coming along look it's still need some work still need some tweaking it's not perfect but it will in time get a bit better let me just quickly compare to some of these other masters these are the reference references just to see where we are in terms of volume and sound caliber so I'm just going to play some of that back all right so you can hear we're getting pretty close there just something to to note if your track is sounding louder than a commercial record you're doing something wrong and it's just a little bit of a warning sign that you're probably not doing something right and usually it has to do with the low end because it's easy to get a song aloud and sort of like harsh signing but to get it loud and fats that is the challenge you know because the low frequencies or water is taking up you know most of the space so that's just kind of something to be aware of so basically that is mastering in a nutshell and just the final step is then to go reference it you know one of the advantages that the pros have is that they've got a whole bunch of different monitors in their studios that they can listen back on instantly what I like to do is I like to hook up like a small radio and I have my headphones and I listen on all the different references to get an idea and so you know if you don't have that just put the track on your on your iPod or put it on a CD and just go around and listen to it everywhere in the car on something with a subwoofer so that you can hear what that sounds like and don't make final decisions based on that but if you notice that say on like four different systems the bass is too high and the bass is then probably too high or there's sounding too thin on all the different systems then it probably is too thin and so that's just something to be aware of and also you know volume isn't everything rather get it sounding good and get great quality and don't worry that much about the volume and that's not the most important part and just one final tip your ears get tired so you can't listen for hours and hours and hours on end you know try and listen at a low volume you know I really don't last a lot at all but listen at a low volume especially when you're making the tweaks and then also make sure that you listen at really high volume and really soft as well because it sounds very different and the frequency range is sound different to our ears so I do that you're going to hear the whole spectrum and hopefully in the end you'll end up with a great signing master and that's mastering in a nutshell all right so thanks for joining me I really hope you've learned something and that you can put it into practice and really take your license to the next level if you've gotten your questions just post them below I'll answer as many as I can and I hope your masters are sounding great I'll talk to you soon you

Channel: Rob Williams

Views: 2,028,944

Keywords: how to master a song, waves mastering, loud mastering, How-to (Master a Song), album mastering, mastering a song, How, To, Master, Song, Pro, Studio

Id: k0FpX200S1s

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/birdnerd]

"Learn Mastering With My 7 Step Formula For Creating FAT, FULL & LOUD Masters"

NO

[u/MasterBettyFTW]

i threw up in my mouth a little

[u/sky04]

This is absolutely DISGUSTING. I want to punch this guy.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm curious as to why bands don't just make a separate master for radio singles/music videos. I could even buy iTunes MP3's being mastered loud, considering they are targeted at a group of buyers who are much more likely to use cheap ear buds, or generic computer speakers

The whole premise of squashing dynamic so that it sounds hot on the radio makes perfect sense. People do do the majority of radio listening on systems or environments where it's not as easy to realize dynamic, and in the end, radio is a "commercial" to market the band. But it makes no sense to ruin an entire album like this, when I would assume, it would be just as easy to do a different radio edit master.

It seems like it'll continue. Maybe I'm off, but aside from people who are making "loud" records out of ignorance, it seems like bigger companies want to keep CDs loud, in order to push anybody who cares about audio to desiring the vinyl mix. I would assume because digital Vinyl rips are harder to find for the average person, and less available. So if you want to hear your preferred mix, you have to pop down 25 bucks for the vinyl as opposed to "stealing" it, because there just isn't a rip of it out there.

It's disappointing when an album that is a sound track for a documentary about a great sounding recording console/magical studio, that is made on said equipment, ends up being loud.