How To Master A Song | Mastering Basics For Beginners

[Music] foreign Music Tech and in this tutorial we're going to be covering the basics of mastering for all you beginners out there want to start taking a crack and mastering your own tracks which I believe is actually a great idea if you're currently making a lot of music or if you're planning on making a lot of music in the future but regardless still good to know about mastering whatever your plans are with your music so let's get into the video but first before we get into the tutorial if you need a professional mixer master and want me to mix your music go to jobmixdowns.com or click the link in the description and follow the fast and easy three-step process and remember all of my mixing and mastering Services have a 100 money back guarantee to make sure you're completely satisfied with the final result so for beginners it's really important that they know exactly what mastering really is and not what they think it is which in my experience is very common for people to have the misconception of what master and Canon should do for your music so let's first start with a quick definition so mastering is the final stage of the music production process when you take a mix and enhance the Sonic characteristics of that mix by using audio effects such as EQ compression and limiting to create a clean and Polished sound that's optimized for all distribution and streaming platforms and most importantly making it sound great on all playback systems so there's basically two types of mastering and that's the mastering of eps albums and basically any type of project that has multiple tracks to be evenly leveled or Blended together cohesively and then of course there's a mastering of individual songs and projects which I'm sure is the reason most of you guys are here so the specific tutorial is about mastering individual songs so next we're going to look at the difference between mixing and mastering now if you're watching this tutorial it's likely that you already know what mixing is and you're already mixing to some degree yourself so I won't dive deep into what mixing is but more about what mastering is and what its purpose is in the music production process so with someone who does both mixing and mastering it's so important for me to clearly explain the difference between mixing and mastering because in my experience everybody that's new to music production and I mean everybody has a complete misconception of what can be accomplished in the mix in the mastering stage so I really want to talk about the difference between the two processes and set the record straight on what's possible during the mastering stage and luckily it's actually very simple to explain so the most important distinction to understand between the two is that mastering is not designed to fix mixing problems but it's designed to fix entire mixed problems many of their problems in the overall mix that need to be addressed such unbalanced eq'ing and this is what mastering is used for so for example if an entire mix sounds thin and some low end needs to be added to thicken it up or conversely it sounds too harsh on the top end it needs to be toned down with an EQ this is all part of the mastering process and things that mastering needs to address but let's say the chorus is too loud or the outro guitars are too low and getting drowned out in the mix then you have to readdress these types of things during the mixing processes that are actually mixing issues and not mastering issues so when it comes to affecting any type of singular aspect to a mix like a specific instrument a specific vocals or adjusting levels mastering is not designed to fix these types of problems all major problems in a mix need to be addressed at the mixing stage and this is so important for beginners to understand so always remember that mastering should not be considered a tool to fix problems in a mix even though it can to some degree but it should also be used as a tool to enhance the mix and make sure it sounds great and all play playback systems and you wouldn't believe how many clients over the years asked me if I can fix a problem or fix problems in a mix by mastering it and the answer is almost always going to be a big fat no because you always have to remember that a master can only be as good as the mix itself it's so important that you understand that mastering can't make a bad mix sound good just like mixing can't make a bad recording sound good so never leave a bad mix in the hands of the mastering engineer in hopes that it will fix everything this is a classic garbage in garbage out scenario to always keep in the back your mind so make sure your mix is always as tight as possible and use mastering for what it's intended for and that's to enhance the mix make it loud and make it sound great in all playback systems [Music] so there's four reasons why you actually need to have your music mastered if you're serious about releasing your music so number one people listen to music everywhere and mastering is how we make sure that our music is going to sound great everywhere in all playback systems number two streaming platforms have standards so playlisters are looking to make sure the music they play sounds professional and any professional in the music industry knows if a song isn't mixed and mastered well so mastering is kind of like a measure of quality control you can always exercise on your music to make sure it sounds professional in the hands of other professionals and number three almost all modern music needs to be at a certain loudness level and mastering is how we accomplish getting our songs as loud as possible without distorting the signal and number four mastering can fix small mix issues so like we discussed earlier there is a repairing aspect to mastering but it's very acute and should not be dependent on to fix major mixed problems okay so before you get started with mastering there's three essential requirements that you need to know about in order to get the most effective mastering results so number one is that you must make sure your space is acoustically treated to at least a basic level and what I mean by basic level some form of acoustic absorption on the walls like foam or acoustic panels and you should always have bass traps in all the corners of your room as well it's the only way to get the accuracy needed to effectively master your music now I'm not completely against mastering in headphones if that's all you have to work with but I strongly advise against using headphones if you actually have a choice and of course this is always a huge debate when it comes to mixing but for mastering speakers will almost always get you better results and that's why all professional mastering Engineers master and speakers they have a wider frequency response a wider stereo image a more accurate frequency response and generally depending on how your room is set up you'll get better Sonic active interesting mastering in a room rather than having headphones directly on your ears but that's a topic all on its own so for now if you can try and master in speakers in an acoustically treated space and if that's not possible then make sure you have a solid set of reference grade Studio headphones to master with and number two always make sure your ears are fresh and I love this tip because it's so important when it comes to effective mastering ear fatigue really comes into play here and I preach about ear fatigue all the time and it's just such a huge topic to be covered and educated on so make sure you check out my blog post it's called the importance of ear training at attentionmusictech.com and get more up to speed with ear training but because mastering involves so many acute adjustments it's imperative that you have fresh ears to give yourself the best chance at making the correct adjustments needed and fresh ears actually make all the difference in the world in all areas of recording and music production but it's especially true when it comes to mastering so make sure your ears are always fresh before you do any mastering because fatigue deers just won't be able to make the acute Sonic adjustments required for Effective mastering and trust me I really learned this one the hard way and I've had to redo way more Masters than I care to admit with you guys so number three is always use at least one reference track and this is another thing I talk about a lot and it comes up again here simply because it's the easiest and best tool you have at your disposal to make sure your songs are sonically competing with your favorite songs but more importantly it gives you a guideline to follow that takes out so much of the guesswork to know if you're even heading in the right direction to get the result that you want especially when you're new to mixing and mastering and still aren't experienced enough to know how polish Master should sound and I'm sure if you've done any research on this you'll know that even the most experienced Engineers always use reference tracks for mixing and mastering so whatever you do don't neglect this one because it's so easy to implement and so effective so now that you have a better understand of what mastering is and what you need to know before you get started let's jump into the session and see what tools are used in mastering and how to apply them okay so the name of the song that we're working on in this tutorial is called remedy and the artist name is nanya spark super dope super talented artist and this track is out right now and you can get it on all streaming platforms so if you like the song make sure you go check out the rest of her music on all streaming platforms so before we get into the tutorial I just want to remind you guys that this is a tutorial for uh mastering for beginners so I'm not going to be touching on any complex mastering techniques in this particular tutorial but I will be making more in-depth tutorials on more advanced mastering techniques for those of you who really want to learn more about mastering so the first thing that we're going to look at is the six effects processors used in mastering and these are the main processes used in mastering you can definitely use more but for the sake of this tutorial we're just going to cover the main six and number one is an EQ number two is a compressor number three is harmonics and harmonic saturation uh number four is using stereo imagery number five are using limiters and number six are using uh metering software and metering plugins so those are the six that we're going to cover in this tutorial so before we get started I'm just going to pull up a master fader in my session because by default Pro Tools doesn't do that and I gotta do that here so there's our Master fader so the first thing I want to talk about is Headroom and this is very important to mastering and for a couple of reasons mainly because it allows you to add your effects to your mastering without it distorting too quickly and general rule of thumb is to have about negative 3 DB to work with before it hits uh zero DB and starts clipping so I'm going to show you what I mean here I'm just gonna play the song and then we're gonna watch our output meter and make sure that we have it at a good level before we start mastering [Music] devil is a liar he wanna use you to use me while you don't confuse me [Music] so I have went around negative four right there um for me that's okay to get started for sure and then there's sections of the song that will be a little bit louder but this is something that you always have to watch while you're mastering is your head room so again a common rule of thumb number is to try and get it to around negative three DB so if you do get a master and it is too loud and it's already clipping don't even bother mastering it you're not going to be able to do it properly and everything you do is just going to distort the signal so Headroom is very important one of the most most important aspects to mastering before you get started and if you are too loud if the signal isn't already limited you can just turn the volume down and get it to where you want like I said around negative three DB so just pull the volume down if it is too loud and then start your mastering from there so before we get into the effects used in mastering I'm going to bring in a reference track and this is so important and I want to bring it in at this stage just to show you guys how valuable it is as to have as a tool when you're mastering so I use a plugin called that a b metric here from adapt adapter audio it's actually a plug-in Alliance plugin but it's an incredible mastering tool and you definitely don't need this plugin to do this but this is what I use and I'm going to show the demonstration with this plugin so the song I'm going to use is actually another Naga spark song and it's called Undress and I love this song but I know it's done really really well and it has a similar Vibe and feel to the song that we're going to be working on today so it's a great uh reference track to use for this particular song and that's another thing with reference tracks is to make sure that it you have to know that the song has been done well otherwise you're just shooting yourself in the foot referencing a song that hasn't been mixed or mastered well so you want to make sure that the song was done well and it was professionally done so that you know that you're referencing something of quality so I'm gonna bring in the song and we're gonna use this song throughout the course of this tutorial I'm going to bring it in and drag and drop and now we have it there so the first thing that I do with the reference tracks because they're already limited and they're a lot louder than the track uh that we're working on at the moment because we don't have any limiting on it when we're referencing it we want to have it at the same level so we get a better idea of what we're referencing so first thing I'm going to do is just match the levels here oh yeah devil is a liar oh yeah [Music] okay so that's pretty close so now the the levels are matched so when we're whenever when I'm doing any eq'ing or compressing or adding harmonics whatever we're doing it's gonna be more accurate when we're referencing it so that's the reference track now we can get into the processing so the first thing that we're going to look at is using an EQ and it's important to understand signal chain when you're mastering as well so when for example if you're mixing vocals I personally like to bring in a EQ first when I'm doing subtractive EQ so I'm taking out frequencies that aren't going to affect the rest of the effects such as the compressor and so on and it's the same thing with mastering if you're going to be taking out frequencies it's best to have those at the beginning of the signal so you don't have unwanted frequencies hitting your compressor or your limiter um so for this specific tutorial I'm not really going to do much subtractive EQ because this is for beginners we're going to focus on more additive EQ and then I'm going to show you examples of subtractive EQ but I'm not going to get too deep into it but I'm still going to keep the EQ at the beginning of the signal chain so the first thing that we want to do with EQ is look to see if the first things that usually poke out of the mix is usually the top end or the low end and generally we want to add a bit of low end we want to take out a bit of low end and then we also want to add top end or we also want to take out some top end so things that mastering can do for example is if I'm just going to play this song here so we get an example or so we can hear what we have to work with oh sorry I still have the there we go [Music] you don't confuse me [Music] [Music] medicine [Music] so it's actually a good a good starting place like whenever you're doing any mixing to mix the part of the song that has the most going on and it you know when you think about it it makes sense to do that because if you're eq'ing or you're compressing whatever you're doing you want to make sure that you get an idea of how that's affecting the signal when you have the most instrumentation maybe the most vocals going on all at the same time so I can actually skip ahead to the chorus here because we have the Baseline and we have the um sampled vocals and there's just more going on during the course and this is a good section to do a lot of the mastering in so let's play this and then I'm gonna play around just for example say we wanted to boost the kick in this master I'm going to show you with that an example of what that would look like [Music] so I'm exaggerating it now so you can hear what it's doing whenever you're doing any type of mastering you don't want to boost or cut very much at all a lot of Max mastering Engineers don't like boosting anything more than one DB um you know so that shows you how serious it is the most that people stretch to or will that you'll hear is 3 DB and that's really pushing it because it's just so easy to distort the signal and just throw the balance of the mix off so the mastering is always very acute but again you can still do sweeps find the signal what you want to boost and then bring it back to taste and that's what we're going to do here [Music] foreign [Music] 55 and that's bringing the base and the kick out a little bit more and I'm gonna pull that down so we can hear how it sounds I am [Music] a Demar remedy [Music] so that sounds pretty good we got the the kick popping out we got the bass a little bit deeper and it's just made the whole mix a little bit Fuller and a lot of times that's what we're after when we're mastering is trying to mix it to to make everything a little bit Fuller because a lot of times when you're mixing you just don't have the ability to give it that fullness and this is where it's really important at the mastering stage so that's an example of boosting a frequency and trying to bring out certain instrumentation in the mix and then also conversely we can if the say the kick was too loud this is where we would pull it down so for example [Music] so that's also what could be done with mastering and uh for me personally I think this song needs to be thickened up so I'm just going to pull this back up and leave it remedy [Music] okay so that sounds pretty good so now let's focus on uh the top end so when you're new to mastering I think it's safer to when you're using EQ to use a shelf when you first start out mastering and uh it will just save you from getting in a lot of trouble unless your ears are already trained and you have quite a bit of experience um mixing already and are familiar with using EQ a lot then you can go in and do more intricate Cuts uh within the mastering process but when you're first starting out generally a lot of mixes to be able to compete they're gonna need a little bit of top and sometimes of course you're gonna actually need to take away some top end but a good place to start is adding a shelf and a lot of times I'll bring it down to around 2500 Hertz because that is the fundamental frequency of a lot of vocals and especially female vocals so let's boost the top end here and just get this mix a little bit brighter remedy [Music] so I'm going to a b it so you can see how big of a difference this makes we've only boosted it uh 1.65 dvdb but in mastering that's a big big adjustment [Music] messy [Music] so that's a big difference so now what we can do is go to our reference track and see how our EQ sounds in comparison to a song that's already mastered well [Music] when I see you [Music] so this is what I'm talking about reference tracks are so important because as you can see I boosted it quite a bit with the EQ but it's still not as bright as this master so I'm going to want to add a little bit more EQ and a lot of times what I'll do is actually use multiple eqs because when you push one EQ too hard it can just be a little bit harsh I'm going to try and push this one a little bit more I'm not going to get into those more Advanced Techniques in this video so I'm just going to boost this up just a little bit more remedy [Music] okay so that sounds good so that's just an example of using EQ and of course these are just basic adjustments for as far as mastering is concerned it gets a lot more cute and again this evolves more ear training so a good safe place to start is with the low end and the top end and then in the mid-range if you're comfortable in the mid range you can look to boost and cut in the mid-range as well but the key is to not do any extreme boosts or Cuts it's very subtle to get the best results with using an EQ in mastering okay so next we are going to look at using a compressor for mastering and I have this one bypassed uh I'm using the pro C the reason I had it bypass is because by default it actually starts out with a lot of heavy compression so I had to have it bypassed so it wasn't affecting anything we're doing with the EQ so the most important important uh compressive settings for mastering of course are the threshold um they're all important but we want to make sure um that the ratio isn't too high so for me when I'm mastering I try and keep it between 2.1 and 4.1 tops but usually you know a two to one ratio is good we don't want it too heavy because we get a lot of that when we do the limiting later on in the mastering phase and then the attack release in knee are very important settings when it comes to compression with mastering so whenever we're using compression with mastering we're looking at there's there's two terms that we use and one is punch we generally want something Punchy depending on the track or we want it more glued together and these are the terms that are used a lot in audio and essentially what glue is is a thicker fuller sound that's a little bit smoother and then Punchy is just exactly how it sounds and usually that is more involved with the kick and the snare and getting the drums popping out of the mix the best we can and the way we go about doing that is by adjusting our attack release and knee settings but first the most important thing is adjusting the threshold so when we're compressing and mastering we want to make sure that we don't have a lot of gain reduction for me personally I don't like going past 2 DB of cane reduction with compression otherwise it's just going to flatten and squash the mix unless that's what what you're after and a lot of times uh tracks call for that and that's what people want and that's fine but generally for me I like to actually keep the gain reduction around 1 DB so that's the the first thing that I'm going to do here I'm just going to back up on the attack and release and then we're gonna set the threshold and try and just get one DB or so of gain reduction [Music] messy [Music] so as you can see like just on the graph here we're just tickling with that compression because we want to keep those transients intact and still have some sort of transient response that's the key when we're using compression if that's what you're after but good master and compression is keeping the transient response there but still having a nice glued together mix so now that we have our gain reduction set there I'm going to talk about how gluing the mix or the mix works and then out getting a Punchy mix works so the settings for gluing a mixed together is actually more we want more of a faster attack and then we want a slower release so when those transients are hitting the compressor it's hitting right away and then it's a slower release and it gives just more of a smoothing sound to the master and we have to be careful with our attack and release it we we you generally don't want any thing slower than 50 milliseconds otherwise it's going to start distorting the signal and it's the same thing with the release we don't want too slow of a release otherwise it will distort the signal as well so that's something important to keep in mind when using compression and limiting when mastering we don't want anything too fast so let's play this and let's dial in more of a glued uh setting for for this track [Music] so I'm going to a b it uh hopefully you guys can hear it because a lot of this stuff is very subtle but it just thickened it out and smoothed it out a little bit more so I'm going to play it one more time [Music] so that sounds good to me we still have it's still Punchy I still want it Punchy but I want more of a smooth sounding Master for this particular song and if we wanted punch what we would do is have a fat a slower attack time so that the transient can pop through the mix and then we also want to keep the release somewhat slow but more mid-range for a Punchy mix because we don't want it to stick too long if it when we want when we're after a certain kind of a Punchy effect we want to have more of a mid-range uh release time so just so you hear how it sounds I'll just give you a sample [Music] I oh [Music] messy [Music] so it's very subtle but those transients are popping through and um the kick and the percussion are popping out of the mix a little bit more but I'm going to go back to the setting that I had it on before because I want a little more glue together now the last thing we're going to look at is the knee and this is very important so with a soft knee and this would be considered as softening as you can see it just kind of straightens out this is what we're after for more of a glued together mix and I'm going to show you how it sounds and how much of a difference it can make to have to adjust the knee settings so I'm going to put it back to zero and then I'm going to adjust it in the mix [Music] foreign [Music] so as you can see it's starting to squash the mix a little bit more when we have that softer knee and then if you want more of an aggressive compression sound then you want more of a hard knee and I'm going to show you what that sounds as well so it sounds like as well [Music] messy [Music] so as you can see there's a big difference between a hard knee and a soft knee and that's why the setting is so important to understand with mastering so for this song in particular I don't like how it sounds too soft that's too squash for me I'm gonna go for more of a hard effective [Music] so now I'm going to a b it well I'm going to AP the compressor [Music] foreign so for me this just sounds like a good mix it's glued together in a good way but then it also has some punch and aggression because of how I've adjusted the knee so for me it's just a good blend of both and these are the basics that you have to understand when it comes to using compression with mastering so next thing we're going to look at is using harmonics on the master track and harmonics are really unusual effect to use because they can do so much not just for mastering just in all aspects of of audio and one thing I do want to point out when you do add harmonic Distortion to a signal it actually does add some soft knee compression to the signal as well so depending on what plugins you're using it can actually glue it has a way of gluing to mix together just by adding harmonics and sometimes you might not even need to use a compressor if you're depending on the plug-in and the type of saturation and harmonics that you're using so I just wanted to quickly point that out so in a lot of ways I actually prefer to use harmonics and harmonic exciters over using an EQ when it comes to boosting the signal so if I'm adding top end or low end a lot of times I'll go to a harmonic Exciter to accomplish this and for a lot of reasons for one just by Nature harmonic exciters make the fundamental frequencies easier to hear they're also louder it makes the fundamental frequencies louder and then it also gives it effect to be what it gives it an effect to be perceived as being wider to the ear and then it also just gives a fuller sound and you'll see what I mean here so this is a plug-in that I like using it's called the oven it's actually one of the most incredible plugins I'll keep saying this and all my tutorials uh if to anybody out there this is just this is my go-to plug-in right now um great for mastering grade on vocals great for everything um but you definitely don't need to use this plug-in any harmonic Exciter will work so what I'm going to do is uh just dial in some setting settings here just so you can see the power of uh what harmonics can do in mastering remedy [Music] remedy [Music] okay so I've just dialed in some quick settings here but I get an A B it so you can see how powerful this is [Music] so as you can see it's just a really powerful tool when it comes to mastering the whole song is just bigger and I've added depth to it with the low end here and I've brightened it up with the top end Sizzle and it's just given that effect where everything is bigger it's wider and that's what harmonics do and this is why it's such an important tool when it comes to mastering and harmonics that's a whole topic on its own to discuss but I just wanted to show you guys why this is such a utilized tool in mastering so the fourth effect processor that we're going to look at is using a stereo imager and I just want to point out uh that when you are mastering or if you are planning on getting into mastering if you can get plugins that have multi-band capabilities it makes a huge huge difference when you're mastering so for example this is a stereo width imager from ozone and what it does it allows me to adjust different frequency spectrums within the mix but I'm not going to do that in this tutorial again that's for uh more Advanced Techniques but I just wanted to put that out there so there's multi-band compressors multi-band harmonics multi-bend images multiband everything because it's just more effective and you get you can get more detailed when it comes to mastering but for this specific tutorial we're just going to stick with uh uh my I actually really like this plug-in it's a free plug-in and I use it quite a bit and um it works well for any type of mastering or mixing so basically what we're trying to do here with stereo Imaging is just get a a wider mix but you have to be careful when using these plugins on mastering because if you widen it too much it will actually flatten the sound so you need to find a balance something that works or it's not too much and but it's still giving you that bigger sound but you just you definitely don't want to overdo it so I'm just gonna play around with this I'm going to exaggerate it and then um you can hear what it's doing to the signal and I'm going to AP it [Music] foreign [Music] foreign so depending on what playback system you're listening to this in uh it just makes a huge difference when you spread out the stereo feel like that in mastering so now what I'm going to do is just pull it back to taste and just give it a little bit of width to make the song sound a little bit bigger [Music] and this is also a great time to use the reference track as well so I'm going to pull up this reference track while I'm dialing in the stereo width [Music] remedy so even though I've done only four percent here you can actually hear how big of a difference it makes on the track [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] Fuller than the interest track um it sounds like we did I didn't do any uh stereo width on the unrest mix and I definitely didn't have this oven plug-in but when we reference it we can see that we're on track to it sounded good so I'm going to play this one more time and AP it baby and now because we've added all this stuff the level on the original track that the mastering has gone up so we're going to match the level with our reference track that's very important [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign really good and I hope you can see the power of using these reference tracks because we just have something to see we we have a template to go by instead of just doing the guesswork and hoping that everything sounds good so now we can see that we're on track and it sounds uh really good so far so I'm gonna actually just um bypass everything that we've done up to this point so you can see how everything is sounding so far um so let's try this out [Music] let me try that again [Music] okay so it's starting to sound really really good and these are just four processes that's all we've done so far and you can see how powerful it already is so that's using stereo imagery we don't want to overdo stereo imagery and a lot of times to be honest I don't use it on all of my masters it just kind of depends if the if I if I feel the track needs it or not but it can make a really big difference in the overall master so next we're gonna look at using a limiter and a limiter is one of the most important elements to mastering because it's a tool we use to help us get the most level out of our track without the signal distorting now the difference between a compressor and a limiter is that a compressor compresses the transients in the Peaks and the limiter Cuts them right off and because it cuts them off this is how we're able to get more level out of our track one thing that's important to note when you are mastering and using limiters limiters should always be the last effect in your signal chain so as you can see I have these other effects here but I have the I have the maximum last I have this other limiter here that I want to show you guys something a little bit later on but I'm going to bypass it for now um but the limiter always has to be the last effect in the signal chain for this to work properly because you're dealing with the last output stage and if you add anything after it it's most likely going to distort the signal very quickly so I'm gonna start out by using this Maxim limiter this is the stock Pro Tools limiter and um these are just basic settings that are on most limiters so we have the threshold we have the ceiling and we have a release a lot of limiters don't have an attack setting uh but though most of them will all have a release setting and then we have our attenuation here which is essentially a gain reduction and these other settings here because of the scope of this tutorial I'm not going to get in to dither and noise shaping we're just going to focus on the threshold ceiling release and gain reduction so we have our threshold and then we have our ceiling and the ceiling is very important and what we want to do is take this off of zero and just have it at either negative 0.1 or negative 0.2 so our transients can't go past zero DB and I'm going to show you why this is important so first thing we're going to do is pull the threshold down and start getting the level back out of our mix [Music] and while I'm doing this we're listening for Distortion and we're watching our gain reduction because the more gain reduction we have the more we're going to flatten our sound and this of course is something that we have to be very careful of when we are doing limiting so um a lot of it is ears making sure we're not distorting and then a lot of it too is still watching our gain reduction and make sure we're not pushing the threshold too hard [Music] so whenever I'm doing any mastering I try and stay away from doing any type of gain reduction or attenuation past 6 DB so we're going to try and stay in that range and hopefully we can still get the level we want out of our track [Music] so I'm going to a b this so you can see how much louder it's got from me pulling this threshold down [Music] be my eye remedy [Music] so that sounds great so now we're gonna look at the release time so release time is important because the longer the release the more flattened the sound is going to be because the limiter is holding longer so a quicker release is going to have more of a Punchy sound and then a longer release it's going to have more of a gluing and a heavily compressed sound so if you want to maintain your transients if you like the way that your mix is sounding at the present points then you want to keep your release time uh somewhat um neutral I would say between 50 and 100 milliseconds [Music] foreign [Music] foreign and one thing I want to quickly mention about using a limiter on the Masters the release time generally if you have a release time that's too fast say 50 milliseconds or faster there's a very good chance that it's going to distort the signal it's the kind of the same thing it's using a compressor so stay away from release times anything faster than 50 milliseconds it's very important that you understand that tip because it's just a way that you can be compressing the signal and not realizing what's doing it okay so now this is where using the reference tracks comes in and also an lufs meter and that's why I wanted to actually just quickly bring in this limiter here to show you that it can become it can be really handy to use a limiter that has a built-in lufs meter and a lot of new especially mastering limiters but just any limiters will have an lufs meter and this is the number that we're going for or to judge our levels so um for streaming we want our levels to be somewhere around uh between eight and nine luffs to be competitive as far as getting your songs is loud uh as the competition and of course this varies from genre to genre but if you're doing any type of music associated in the pop genre you want to get your stuff as loud as possible and what we're aiming for somewhere between eight and nine lufs and um I'm just gonna play this here quickly just so you can see what I'm talking about this is [Music] so I have that at negative 8.4 so I know generally that's going to be a very competitive level when it comes to mastering and we're going to look more at the lufs metering in uh when we start looking at all of the metering involved in mastering but uh for now I'm going to bypass this and this essentially is what limiting is all about when you first start mastering you want to make sure your ceiling is set to negative 0.1 so none of the transients can pop through that level and then also we have our threshold and this is how we bring up our level and then we have our release time which is going to judge how Punchy the mastering is and then our attenuation is our gain reduction so we're watching how much of the signal that we're limiting so these are the basics of limiting when it comes to mastering okay so now we're gonna get to the final stage of the mastering process and we're going to be using metering plugins now and also we're going to be using reference tracks this is really where the reference track comes in to be the most valuable at this stage of the process to make sure that we're on track without doing the guesswork so I like this plug-in from adapter uh audio this a b metric uh it's actually a plug-in Alliance plug-in but you can literally do everything you can a b your track and then it has all of the metering here um and it's just a very good plug-in to use for mastering but of course a lot of you aren't going to have this plug-in and there is a free plugin out there that I just quickly want to mention and it's this plug-in from Uline and it's the loudness meter and this is a free version and this is going to give you access to basic metering uh for for mastering because a lot of you that are just starting out you're not going to have metering plugins and this is a great one and if you want to upgrade to the full version which is going to give you a lot of similar functionality as the adapter uh audio plugin it even has an A B function here it's only I believe 41 dollars Canadian so it's very affordable if you want or need to use a metering plug-in so I'm going to go back to adapter audio and the first thing we're going to do is start referencing this mix to make sure that the loudness and just everything the the the EQ make sure it's well balanced all the things we want to look for to make sure it's going to sound good on all playback systems and that's why having the reference track that we already know sounds good on all playback systems is so important to have here so let's play it and let's uh a b it with the reference this is [Music] so earlier I had turned the level down on the reference track so we can match levels and now that I have the limiter on there um the levels are up so we have to bring this reference track back to zero where it should be and we're going to try and level match with um with it at zero DB [Music] [Music] they said [Music] so that actually sounds very close to me a lot of this we're just using our ears and then of course you can go to the metering and um make sure that your lufs levels are right I am ready [Music] well here again these are lufs levels and what we're looking for is an integrated lufs and this works by playing the whole song and if the whole song is at a certain level then we know that we're competitive and of course I don't have time to do that in this tutorial but that's what you're after with integrated lufs this is the most important one that you need to look at in order to make sure that your sound is going to be competitive and if your sound is matching the reference track without it being distorted then you know that you're in the right direction and it should sound good and I'll play back systems so that's why referencing is so important next um so this particular plugin has all the metering it has a spectrum it has a spectrum analyzer so you can see how balanced your mix is looking uh from a frequency standpoint [Music] it also has a correlation meter and this is uh of course more advanced um but this is to check to make sure that your mix is in phase and then it has a stereo image meter to make sure that your imagery is balanced as well [Music] and then here is this is um going to show you your dynamic range and this essentially is going to show you uh if your mix is or sorry your master is too squashed or not or too flat and we want to this is how we kind of Judge to see if we're maintaining some sort of reasonable Dynamics in our master [Music] in my eye or remedy my remedy and then of course we have our loudness meters here and again for the scope of this video I'm not going to go deep into this stuff I'm going to be putting on other videos on mastering where I'll go over more of this stuff in detail but these are the basic meters that are involved with mastering and then as you start getting more involved with mastering you start understanding how to do this stuff more but this is how you make sure that your stuff is going to sound good on all playback systems and that you're meeting the standards of the streaming platforms and if you are Distributing you know on CD or final whatever it might be all of the stuff you need to make sure that everything is on point is through plugins like this so before I wrap up here I just want to a b uh what we've done on the master so you can see how powerful mastering is so I'm going to get rid of this plugin because we're not using it and also this plugin and I'm going to a b it for you guys [Music] foreign [Music] so it's not level matched but you can see because it's louder we're going to perceive it to sound better and there are ways to do level matching with the metering plugins but again what we're after here is enhancing the Sonic characteristics of the mix as you can see I didn't do anything too drastic with mastering they were just all little incremental things that added up to the full master and that's so important to understand when you're mastering is incremental small incremental changes are going to get you the best results in mastering so these are the basics when it comes to mastering using these six effects processors I hope that you guys we're able to just get some sort of rough idea on where to start when it comes to mastering and again I'm going to start rolling out more mastering videos for those of you that want to start getting more involved with mastering because it does go a lot deeper than this but with these fundamentals it's definitely a good start with mastering hey so if you're enjoying this content and you're really serious about learning how to mix and you're really looking to take your mixing game to the next level make sure you check out my brand new recording Academy and attentionmusictech.com because for a limited time I'm offering free access to my first two courses they're part of my new mix and Clinic series of mini courses that are a real comprehensive dive into mixing lead vocals and mixing beats so when you sign up to the academy you'll get access to both the pro lead vocal mixing clinic and the Savage beats mixing clinic and these two courses are packed with some of my favorite mixing tips and techniques that I use on all my tracks and work for any genre of music and I know I guaranteed to help you get more professional sounding mixes because we're talking over two hours of mixing tips that aren't accessible anywhere else but in the academy so you really don't want to miss out on this opportunity all you got to do is go to attestamusictech.com to sign up and again this is all free stuff but only for a limited time and when you do sign up you don't only get access to the two mini courses but you'll get special offers and content only subscribers see and also you get automatically entered to win one of our free monthly giveaways of industry-leading plugins from fabfilter and plug-in Alliance and if this promo is over by the time you guys see this video don't worry about it because I always have great offers going on for all my Academy members so go to intestimusictech.com and check out all the goodies I got going on for you guys so mastering is definitely one of those skills that takes a lot of practice and a lot of study to be able to finally start getting it right but it's such a great skill to have in the toolbox and in my opinion it's definitely worth the time to learn if you're making or working on a lot of music so like always I hope this information was helpful to you guys in some way shape or form and I'll see y'all next week in the next video [Music]

Channel: Intession Music Tech

Views: 4,118

Keywords: #intessionmusictech, #mixingtutorials, #protoolstutorials, #homestudiorecording, #jamixdowns

Id: snzZjtDiiQk

Length: 60min 42sec (3642 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023