How to master a song in Reaper | Making a song on Reaper

hello i'm paul douglas in a previous video i took you through the mixing of a piano based instrumental full production in reaper um i shall put a link in the description below in this video i take you through the final track production stage which is mastering so i take the mixed down song from that mixing process and master that song now this should be much shorter than the mixing process and much simpler and hopefully you'll pick up a few tips and tricks for mastering your own songs you creeper please subscribe hit the bell like and share this video now what is mastering let's have a very brief explanation um simply these days mastering means getting the volume of your track up to comparable levels to other music so you know commercially released music that might get played on the radio or spotify or apple music or wherever uh and that's simply all it is these days is getting that volume level up to that up to that desired level similar to other tracks um you might do a little bit of eq uh maybe a few other things but the main gist of it is getting that volume level up so if your songs were played alongside other songs on the radio or spotify you would get them to be at a similar volume you wouldn't get a sudden drop in volume when your track plays now mastering used to be in fact it still is um getting your song ready to be transferred to vinyl or to cd and it still is that um but that is not what we're doing here that requires you know specialist knowledge and a a specialist highly trained mastering engineer to do those sorts of things okay so step one here um now you'll see in reaper i've actually created a new project that just has one track in it and this track is the output from uh the mix down process the mixed down stereo track that i produced in that previous video um why do i do that as opposed to just you know mastering it in the same project that i did the mixing in um i could do that but the reason i don't is that i'll get distracted and i may be tempted to go back and do some mixing moves you know change levels of tracks or mess around with compression or effects or eq and i've done the mixing i've said i've got it mixed that's it i don't want to do any more than that and i find that bringing in you know the mix down track into a separate new project just helps you know focus the mind okay the mixing's done i'm in a mastering mindset now an optional step as it was in the mixing is to bring in a reference track here so a commercially released track perhaps that you think your song should sound sonically similar to and you can compare the two i'm not going to do that in this process because of copyright issues okay so we've got to get to that point where we get our volume level up to the desired level and i'm going to use a limiter plug-in for that and the one that i'm going to use is called uh loud max by a guy called thomas muntz now this is actually a free mastering limiter plugin i shall put a link in the description below where you can get this and i like it because it's very very simple to use and the way you use this i'm just going to reset the settings is the first thing you do is you set your desired level and you may think that's zero db but i tend to just lower it a little bit and either put it to about you know zero minus zero point five db or minus one db i'm gonna minus 0.5 for this one so that's our desired output level and what that means is that the track volume will not go above minus 0.5 so as we play the track watch that number on the master track and it will not go above that minus 0.5 db level and what we then do is we play the track and i'm going to play in one of the loudest bits of this song so at the end here and as that's playing we move this uh threshold down and what we're looking for now you can hear the track getting louder as i do that and what we're looking for is for this bar to be moving down to between you know say two and four round about three [Music] okay and there we go now you can see as i said this volume has not gone above minus 0.5 db and you can hear that the track has got a lot louder and this should now be comparable to volume levels on other commercially released tracks that this might get played um played next to and that is it basically we've increased our volume level to the desired level and there we go one uh optional step that i i'd like to do i'm going to show you is to use a a vu meter plugin um now you can see here i've got this one which is called v-u-n-t from a company called clang helm this isn't free but it wasn't very expensive i think it was about 12 pounds 12 euros maybe it's that sort of order but um i do like this one um and if i play the track again you'll see the uh the meters uh now i like that because it gives you a visual representation of the volume in your track the way to do this is this calibration setting here i've got that set to -10 and and that is not the same as the uh the limit set here this is average level so and that's fairly typical and as you play this you're looking for the meters to not go above zero now they could just tip into the red occasionally but you're looking for them to mainly be around [Music] and that's looking good that is looking pretty good and that's it really um now as i said i'll put a link in the description below to that vu meter plugin but it's not free um there are plenty of free ones on market you just type vu meter uh plugin into google and you will find loads of them so that's it we've got a track up to the the right volume uh final thing to do is just render that track so we go to the render menu in reaper i've got this set to entire project we pick a folder to for it to go into and a file name for it standard settings 44.1 kilohertz stereo that's um cd quality although we've got 24-bit uh pcm here which is higher than cv quality cd is 16 bit um and we just render that file i'm just going to change the file name of this um so i don't overwrite the one i've already done render that and there we go it's done and you can see now that um the level of that track is consistent all the way through and it's pretty loud which is exactly what we want when it's compared to other tracks it may get played alongside and once you've mastered it of course what you ideally want to do is take that track and play it on as many different systems as you can so from you know your computer through headphones a hi-fi system uh car stereo stereo you got in the kitchen phone um and make sure that it sounds good on all those systems and what you might want to do is actually put it in a playlist alongside some other commercially released tracks and make sure that it sounds okay against them you know the volume level is similar to those songs okay thanks for watching please subscribe ring the bell like and share this video don't forget to check out the links in the description below keep making music and i'll see you again in the next video cheers you

Channel: Paul Douglas

Views: 49,033

Keywords: how to master a song in reaper, making a song on reaper, cockos reaper, reaper tutorial, reaper, music production, using reaper to make music, digital audio workstation, daw, songwriting, songwriting tips, how to write a song, record a song using reaper, mixing a song using reaper, how to mix a song using reaper, how to record guitar on reaper, how to record digital piano on reaper, ezdrummer reaper, Paul Douglas, Paul Douglas Musician, PaulDouglasMusician

Id: tlzpO0RujWw

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020