How to Master a Song Start to Finish: Every Effect Explained

[Music] what's up everyone in my last video I showed you how I prepare a song for a mastering session in particular I walked you through a bunch of neat tricks and steps that you can take in isotope RX audio editor to get the song dialed so that your mastering chain doesn't have to work quite as hard in this session I'm going to show you the entire mastering process start to finish I'm going to show you the full mastering chain each effect that I used why I used it the settings that I used what order I put it in all the juicy good stuff so let's go hit the control room and I'll show you the mastering [Music] chain so here is the control room let's start off by doing a quick tour we've got a custom mixing console desk that I built with my buddy Ezra who used to be a professional cabinet maker it is a wonderful desk to be able to work from has some rack mount space that I haven't filled up cuz I'm more of an ITB engineer it's got slotted areas and kind of a snub-nosed design so that the desk is not in the reflection path of the monitors we have a little slot where my MacBook Pro tucks underneath it so you just see the screen revealing more desktop space to work with it's connected to an Apple Cinema display if you've seen my previous videos you'll know why I chose these These are the nyman k420 flush mounted midfields and they are absolutely badass monitors I'll drop a link to my video explaining how I chose these what I like about them and the other speaker I compared them with if you want to check that out and in general I did an entire video series on the construction and the design process all of the Acoustics print that went into creating this room and I'll drop a link for that and a card for that in this video too if you want to Deep dive into the studio design but uh yeah my main engineering headphones here are the odsy lcd5 open back for doing YouTube videos and stuff I have a Lu LCT 440 pure condenser mic running through a road Caster Pro which is fantastic uh just bakes in these effects that I don't really need to change much in post the entire room and ceiling has floor to ceiling wall to--all heavy acoustic treatment done with multiple layers of different types of porous absorption on the rear wall this is what is receiving the full frontal impact of the base from those nyman cage 420s we have 3 and 1/2 ft of insulation in the rear wall modules we have graduated density and we have custom fabricated CNC warp Academy backlit panels those are also functional slots or slats they're kind of a slatted diffuser module adding some scattering into the room and we have horizontal slats that are also providing some scattering little bit of uh live energy back into the room in a very controlled fashion we've got some acoustic furniture that uh I built that's been routered and slotted so sound pretty much just passes through it and then uh over here we've got a backup set of headphones these are odsy uh LCD Xs and uh I really like those ones the low end in particular we've got switches over here for ventilation and extra power and speaking of ventilation this room is airtight it's hermetically sealed because sound will go wherever air goes and so up there you have the air intake vent running from a Panasonic Erv that's mounted behind this speaker wall and then you have the exhaust vent up there and then the floors because we don't want any forc aair heating the floors have three strips of in floor heating and they are all controlled from a little panel right here so the room's warm and cozy when I want it to be right on well that's a little room tour I haven't done that before so just wanted to walk you guys through the space that I work in here in the control room let's get into the master sweet so I just wrapped up the mastering session and I'm ready to show you the results so let's start by having a quick AB to the mix versus the master the mix will be in blue and the master will be in green let's check it out Joshua [Music] Tree what have you done to me joshu tree I say what have you done to [Music] me no Point looking for a rainbow I feel the pain go what have you done to me honestly brother it just sounds perfect I don't know whether that just makes me a super easy uh low maintenance client or just makes you a really really epic mastering engineer um I'm sure it's a mix of both but um honestly yeah I I just really appreciate you for just kind of honoring and and uh preserving the mix that's there and just enhancing it such a beautiful way I can hear everything um and it's just yeah it's perfect I have no notes no changes let's go with this master unless there's anything that you're hearing I trust your ear and I'm just yeah learning to just trust it more and more all right let's get into the mastering chain now first up in the chain is a Clipper and this is a clipper called gold clip by Schwab digital I have a whole bunch of different Clippers and I'm quite fascinated with them and this one is the one that I've been using of late on my master it's a excellent mastering Clipper or bus Clipper I wouldn't use it on a track it's uh it's meant for heavier weight duties and uh if you want to use a track version of it that's a lightweight Clipper check out orange clip from Schwab digital as well but this Clipper is special it emulates a particular very expensive piece of Hardware uh an ADC that is in a lot of studios and has particular Sonic characteristics to it and that's where you see some of these other parameters like gold it's not just a Clipper it does other things so what am I doing with it and why am I putting a Clipper first in chain well the concept of using a Clipper is to shave off uh the way I'm using it anyways is to shave off microtrans these little blippy tiny transients that are a few DB above the normal peak level in the song and these are transients that might be a couple of samples to a couple of milliseconds long usually the crack of a snare hit or maybe the bite of a of a bass or the snare or the kick transient something like that and they're just these little things that pop up that can cause effects Downstream of them that are sensitive to level like compressors saturators limiters Dynamic EQ to cause audible artifacts so imagine if you have a snare transient that's like two samples and it's a couple DB louder that's going to trigger the gain reduction circuit in a limiter and cause it to dip everything else full band or it's might cause a saturator that's been very carefully set up to oversaturate and you get a crack of a snare that is particularly crunchy sounding and you don't want that well putting a Clipper first in chain cleans that stuff up and it is able to do so very transparently the other school of thought with clippers is that you put it right before your limiter that's also valid it's a different approach I used to do that but now what I'm using the Clipper 4 first in chain is to kind of feed the mastering effects that are Downstream of it a more consistent signal and consistency when it comes to setting effects down the road like thresholds and things like that really matters so let's take a look in the display what I'm clipping and you'll see that it's really not much it's like the occasional little little microt transient coming by I'm not I'm not really digging into the meat or the body of the [Music] signal what have you done to me okay now the algorithm I'm using here is uh soft Clipper which is not normal for me A lot of times I hard clip but I went for the Classic Soft clip mode in this particular instance because I felt like it suited the song it's giving me just a little bit rounder uh transience a little warmer transience on the drums and I like it now the other feature that I'm using in this which is not a feature of a standard Clipper it's this gold parameter and what this is doing it's activated by this knob here and what it's doing is it's simp similar to upwards compression it's inflating blooming out low-level material so it's giving it a compressed sound it's it's giving it less dynamic range it's bringing up lowlevel material but it's doing so in a way very different from a compressor because a compressor has attack and release times and this does not okay so let's AB with this on and [Music] off what have you done to me J Tree so you can start to hear it in things like drum Tales you can start to hear it in the bass it just gives that information a little bit of Bloom and in general I really like that so there's the Clipper that's gold clip now next up is a EQ and in the mix I noticed a few things when I listened to it one is that the vocal is not as compressed uh as vocals in a lot of songs in the genre and and I was hearing certain syllables just pop out to me in the vocal uh I was hearing sometimes a little bit of chest Tone come in a little bit of proximity effect with the mic when you move back and forth and I was hearing uh definitely some some fs and and s's the sibilance uh pop out of the mix and so if we take a look at brq 3 and how I've set it up I'm using it for some general EQ duties but uh I'm using it for a bit of cleanup as well so you can see I have these three Bells they're all centered in the mid Channel okay so you can do that by clicking the EQ node and you can change the channel that's on here they're all in the mid they're all Dynamic no static nodes here and I've fussed with the threshold to get these just right now I'm talking small adjustments 2 DB 1 and A2 DB and what that's doing is just just controlling the vocal in a little bit that it's not getting uh stepping on the rest of the track you have to be so careful and gentle with Masters I'm not in control of the mix here so I'm having to do this on the entire stereo Master Okay and then uh the other thing you're seeing is just a little bit of control on the kind of kick and base region and I'm just doing a little tiny subtractive Dynamic cut and then I'm giving it uh you know once I dug into these two regions 5K and uh about 9k uh I I wanted to compensate for that by just giving a little bit of a a high shelf okay so uh let's bypass it and we'll listen to it with it off and [Music] on what have you done to me JH tree I say what have you done to me [Music] now there's a particular part of the track where I really noticed this and that was right about here okay let's bypass and I want you to listen to the vocal okay B it's cold outside but the weather gets warmer okay you notice the vocal is just a little jumpy there it's just just just pop popping out a little bit you can hear the you can hear the fundamental of the vocal around around 225 HZ or so just just jumping out a little bit so uh let's listen to that now with the EQ see and you can see the dynamic nodes activating right and that's because I have very carefully set um thresholds and things like that some of them I'm using Auto but in many cases I'm using a manual threshold on this and I've adjusted it okay so let's listen without baby it's and with Baby it's cold but the weather War nice okay now I felt like it needed a little extra the sibilance was still popping out to me and so when I when I have that happening uh in Fab filter prods there's a preset called vocal dsing in music which is a great starting point uh for this type of thing and that's what I'm doing I'm using it to try and just grab the vocal sibilants and pull them down Okay so this preset uh is entirely oriented towards the mid Channel you can see it's using some look ahead it's very tightly uh band past uh rather um band selected into that sibilance range for the vocal and uh let's have a listen to that bypass and then on J [Music] what have you done to me J Tree I say what have you done to me yeah I don't love to do this type of stuff in Masters I I'd rather not have to do that I'd rather go back and do it in the mix but um when you're in the mastering phase and you need to go to something like this definitely this process works you just have to be uh very careful with it that you don't step on other things in the music so I'm listening to other elements that are in that frequency range and there's a plugin that helps me do that and this is a plugin called peel and uh it's it's neat because it lets you draw a box and you can listen to Just what's in that frequency range and exclude everything else and just what's in that area of the stereo field and then you can invert it if you want to okay so let's let's listen to this and and use [Music] peel okay so I was using Peele to be able to help me hone in on the areas that I was going to be working with using the filters here in prods and using the nodes in proq3 so uh that just helped me to to zero in nice I'll leave that deactivated now um another thing I'm very judicious about very careful about on a master is using saturation you can really ruin a Master with saturation because of inter modulation and when you feed a saturator a complex signal then it creates um some IND difference partials okay um and there's a video I'm going to link you to below it's not one of mine it's from David Nai at mixbustv and he demonstrates for you the effect of using multiple tones into a saturator causing inter modulation so I want you guys to watch that so you have the background and I don't see any point in Reinventing the wheel David's already covered that video uh that topic very well well but uh basically if you're going to put a saturator on a master you better know what you're doing because it's very easy to ruin the master and cause really nasty sounding and low frequency muddy intermodulation uh summon difference partials so if I do use the saturator on the master I better have a really good reason okay now why am I using this uh on the master what's my really good reason one is because I just felt like the track in general could use some grit you know I have references that I'm comparing it to that the artist has provided and I'm like they're using some saturation probably in the mix probably on buses um but if you're really careful and really Surgical and I'm able to be with this plugin blackbox analog design uh this is a physically modeled on a piece of Hardware this is the brainworks Edition this is the midside Edition the HD2 Ms and it is uh an absolutely fantastic plugin this is like one of my one of my tools that I use day in and day out so how have I set this up well let's let's have a listen to it without it and and with it okay let's turn it off Joshua [Music] Tree what have you done to me okay so first of all I've set it up into midside mode which is really key if you're going to do it on a master I would re recommend midside mode and then I've taken parameter link off so that when you make changes to the mid it's not making them on the side that makes no sense and so here's the mid and here's the side Channel okay so let's go into what I've done one is I have uh this plugin adds gain okay this is like a sports car you're driving this thing there's no drive by wire there's no automatic shifting you have to manually gain adjust it down so that you're making an Apples to Apples comparison so do not just turn this thing on it's going to make everything sound better because it's going to fool your ears with loudness you have to very carefully gain stage it down and compensate for it and I do that by soloing the mid Channel and then turning bypass on and off and then soloing the side Channel and turning bypass on and off and manually by ear gain matching them okay so let's uh let's let just demonstrate for you how how I would do that okay let's listen J Tree what have you done okay so I'd go through that process back and forth and and gain match them and get as close as I can I'm not fussy about it being absolutely perfect but I want to get it so that I'm not hearing really big jumps and loudness okay so now how have I set set this up I've engaged the saturation circuit in both I've adjusted the amount of saturation in both you can see I'm using much less saturation on the side signal and then you have the ability to EQ what the saturator is seeing and how it's processing harmonics you can see I've excluded a bunch of low end using a 12db per octave highpass filter on the sides Channel again that just gets any bottom information out of the sides so that it's not causing extra saturation on the sides it's not high passing the actual signal we're hearing it's just High passing what the saturator is seeing okay and then um I've left the pentode and triode right where they are and uh then I've adjusted the output to again match them and then I've uh done the same thing on the sides and I've gain matched the sides even though they're receiving much less saturation I've gain matched the sides so that it sounds you're not so you're not changing the midside balance the last thing you want to do is start fussing with these controls and then all of a sudden when you turn the plugin on you lose sides level you lose side level or you lose or you increase side level you don't want that okay so uh so that's what I've done so here's where we're at and then the other thing I do is I'll solo so you can hear exactly what the saturator is adding so I can hear how much crunch it's adding and then you have the ability to use this density control and what it's doing is it's effectively adding negative gain before the saturator and compensating it with positive gain the same amount after the saturator so that you get less saturation without fussing with all the settings it's a really handy feature um if if you're finding that things are just a bit too crunchy and so if I copy the a state and I pop it into the cstate and I turn up density okay let's just listen to to what that [Music] does what have you okay let's engage Solo in the C state you here it's just just a mess right it's just a mess and then you listen here right it's warm it's fuzzy but it's not a mess okay so so this can be really helpful in allowing you to dial in the density parameter okay so obviously we're not going to go with the c State we're going to go with the a state and then um last two things I'll explain here is I'm using the air amount and the air on the sides Channel and what the air is doing is it's a high shelf filter and it's adding some uh very high top end about 10K and up uh to the sides of the signal to the side channel of the signal and uh just giving it uh some extra stereo width really the perception of stereo width without changing the midside balance because you can do that with the width parameter down here stereo width I don't touch that ever I don't I don't like those you start turning up the WID there you do do so at the expense of the mid Channel and you make your whole Master sound hollow uh I think that's a big mistake in mastering if you start to mess with stereo width on that simple of a level you have to be doing it uh using uh mseq or or a multiband setup or something like that just a simple push-up on the width I would just never never do that I think it's a huge mistake okay final thing is I'm running it in parallel so you know if you Max this out doesn't really matter what you're doing you're you're you're going to hear it quite a bit and I like this blend of the Clean dry signal with the affected signal of the plugin nice there's a little miniature master class on the blackbox analog design hg2 M isn't that a mouthful hey okay another EQ okay what am I doing with this EQ this is the TDR Voss slick M the mastering EQ okay and I am using two EQ uh nodes in this one of them is I'm using us a a uh a shelf I'm using a high shelf here from 4K and up and I'm giving it 1.5 DB I'm just giving the whole top end a little brightness okay so I'm using that and then uh I'm the second one I'm using is a also a high shelf but it's set at 26k so this is a really the center frequency is Hypersonic however it is affecting the audible range slightly and what this is doing is it's allowed me to lift and bring a little bit of air into the top end of the track without grabbing and affecting things like high hats and crashes or the sibilance range of the vocal okay so let's listen and I'll turn turn these on as we go what have you done to me sh a tree I say what have you done to [Music] me yeah I really like the the sound of this Hypersonic High shelf uh giving it a lift in the very top and just yeah does so in a way that it's not pulling and grabbing the uh harsh kind of elements that could just be made too bright up next we've got a compressor this is a very nice mastering compressor called Unisom by Tone projects and I don't often actually use compression on my masters I was talking a lot about this in my interview with uh Nicholas D Lorenzo and some other things that I've done recently often times when I AB the master and I just turn the compressor off in the chain I like the sound better so uh I would say use compression if you really think it makes it sound better but don't compress your master or your mix just by default okay when you're using saturation for example it can take the place of compression when you're using clipping or what I'm doing in Gold clip with the gold knob it can take the place of compression you know what is compression what what do saturators and what does the gold knob do they all increase lowlevel material they reduce dynamic range they increase loudness and in the case of a a compressor and a saturator they will rain in and attenuate peak level gold clip doesn't do that the Clipper does that but the gold parameter doesn't okay so um you have to think about why you're doing that and in this case listening to uh the mix without Unisom I just was listening for gel I was listening for again the presence of low-level material feeling into does anything need to come up you know and maybe it's an EQ move but it's not always compression but maybe it's compression okay so let's have a listen and then I'll I'll walk you through what I did in unison what have you done to me Jos tree I say what I you done to [Music] me no point looking for a rainbow yeah right on so what this is doing for me is it's bringing a sense of cohesion of containment to the mix and it's bringing up in particular the base I'm hearing that come up in the mix and some of the guitars and uh just giving everything a sense of gel I know that kind of sounds cliched the glue compressor the gel that it adds you know but but I really do there's a reason why people say that stuff it's because it can and in this case does add a sense of gel and cohesion to the to the piece let's go over the settings okay this is a really deep uh compressor oh my God if you go down here uh you can make your head spin if you want to go into that stuff there's an amazing video that uh Nicholas D Lorenzo did on everything in unism I'll link that uh just be prepared for nerd level 10 uh cuz he he goes full nerd in in that video um I'm using the easy setup here and let's take a look attack time 50 milliseconds I don't want this taking out any of the transients okay the Clipper has already helped with shaving off microt transients I don't want to dig into the transients here okay so I've really backed off the attack release 250 medium fast I left it at the default 2 to1 this is mastering we're not really getting heavy-handed with the compressor I've adjusted the side chain so this is excluding the kick really um and the base from the low base from the side chain signal so it's not overt triggering the compressor the last thing I want is for the kick to be pumping the compressor okay uh I've got uh I think that's default knee on it I haven't adjusted the knee the curve I've set to be a bit more linear uh it's a little louder and um yeah I like that release parameter um using full wet I've adjusted a bit of makeup gain and then I've taken it uh 50% between stereo link and stereo UNL uh I don't like fully linked devices a lot of times um especially with material like this it preserves a sense of WID width and spaciousness when you're allowing a degree of stereo uh lack of stereo separation or rather what did I mean to say there lack of stereo linking right when you're allowing stereo Left Right Independence okay let's uh now that you know what it's doing uh let's have a listen again I'll start with it off what have you done to me okay one final thing I'll point out some of you may have noticed oh Drew why aren't you using the highest quality setting pristine that must be an oversight no it's not what is is quality doing um Quality I don't like it when people call this setting quality U this is oversampling at least I I I hope it is unless I've completely misread the manual this this should be oversampling any device that can create harmonics in the digital realm will have oversampling and the reason why it'll have oversampling is to prevent aliasing now uh if you've been watching my recent videos especially the one that I did called the science of clipping you'll also understand that oversampling and down sampling does more than just address aliasing it creates overshoots it increases sample peak level and unless I'm hearing audible aliasing in the signal which I am not then there's no reason for me to enable oversampling I'm not using this compressor in a way that it's generating harmonics right I'm using a very slow attack time and I'm using a kind of medium release time if I had attack time set at zero and release set at 5 maybe I might be getting a little bit of modulation envelope Distortion that could cause some harmonics but I'm not and um so in this for this reason I'm just setting it to real time I don't I don't need or want oversampling it's not providing any audible benefit in this case okay so I I really would encourage and hope that people are stopping making the association between quality and oversampling they are not the same thing okay let's continue now we're at the limiter limiter last in chain and uh really all I'm doing is tickling it just to this isn't a banger right this isn't a EDM track uh and really all I want to do is is contain the Peaks um get the loudness level to be on par with uh angus's other releases that I've done for him which is around the negative 10ga 11 LS marks in the chorus of the song and uh you can see I have Limitless and pro2 that are set up here and uh I have those set up identically or as identical as you can get Limitless as multiband pro2 is not uh and I have them set up so that I can ab between them just by pressing a key what was the key c yeah so if I turn one on I can press a hotkey and just easily switch between them okay so uh the limiter that I well you guys tell me which limiter you like better okay I'll switch between them and let me know in the comments which limiter you think sounds best and then I'll let you know which one I chose okay what have you done to me JH tree I say what have you done to me no point looking for r rain I feel the pain go what have you done to me Joshua Tree what have you done to me Josh a tree I say what have you done to me oo it's a tough call hey um this is my first time listening to it in these headphones um I mixed and mastered I mastered um this session on my main monitors on my noyman and uh I preferred the sound of pro2 but now that I'm listening to it on the headphones I think I prefer Limitless um yeah we'll have to we'll have to think about that more let me show you what I'm doing in both of the limiters okay so I'm uh pushing up gain I'm using the modern style I'm using a little bit of look ahead uh just to prevent uh any Distortion usually I don't hear Distortion anyways but this is not a loud track so a little bit of look ahead's good um I changed the release uh phase a little bit um yeah I'm using a output level of zero uh sorry of negative 1 uh and that is just to allow because I know this is going to the dsps this is going to be on Spotify and apple music and I know that they're going to compress it and that that's going to add a little bit of um codec artifacts that will increase through uh compression amplitude noise gain and I simulate that actually using isotop ozone 11 I use their codec preview to simulate what that sounds like and how much level that it could add and then I adjust it so that I'm getting uh enough ceiling on the final limiter that that's not going to cause a problem with uh with potential Clips okay so uh yeah um let's have a listen with the with the [Music] limiter JH tree I say what have you done to me no point looking for okay so you can see the limiter is really just getting triggered by the drums that's that's what's hitting it we're seeing a very small amount very acceptable range of gain reduction on uh on the limiter okay so now let's uh fire up Limitless make it active uh don't be intimidated by all this stuff uh you can hide this stuff um I I dig into it sometimes uh especially this Advanced area uh but yeah you can you can kind of use Limitless out of the box and just play with these parameters here you can use some of the presets but uh I'll show you how I have it set up let me just play you uh the song first what have you done to me J okay so we have uh the threshold set6 that's the same as pushing 60b up into a fixed threshold like pro2 does we have the ceiling set at negative -1 that's the same thing as setting the output parameter to negative 1 in Pro L2 we have the release set to 250 milliseconds and then down here you can see have adjusted stereo linking so that we're at uh 75% we have uh2 milliseconds of look ahead just like pro2 and then uh I've adjusted the Dynamics so that it's prioritizing the transient aspect of the limiter versus the release phase of the limiter um more so and um yeah I'm not doing anything else in the limiters now what you may have heard and what I'm hearing and what I often hear in Limitless is it sounds a little smoother in the low end and it sounds more open in the top end and that's why I was like oo I think I'm liking the sound of Limitless usually I prefer Limitless over pro2 in most of my work especially when the limiter is working harder now why might that be well um I really like the way that Limitless has been designed I've had pretty extensive chats with uh their team and Dave gamble uh one of the owners of DMG and one of the coders I think he coded a lot of the he certainly knows a lot about the code whenever I talked to him he's nerd level 10 for sure uh full respect uh but Limitless is basically a limiter that has been designed to be a sample Peak limiter so it's not oversampling uh which is a really key difference you'll notice in pro2 I also was not using oversampling at all I do not over for sample limiters typically I'll do another video on that because it's a deep dive and we don't want to get into that here um so Limitless has been designed in such a way that it minimizes the amount of limiting and it does that by splitting things into bands so it uses uh crossovers it uses crossovers that are linear phase so we're not getting phase smearing from the Crossovers and it's using crossovers that are completely transparent because they're what you call linitz Riley crossovers uh they're they're double cascading Butterworth filters um for the high pass and low pass portions of the crossover um and uh it's able to provide just the right amount of limiting kind of goldilock Zone limiting for each one of the bands and unlike some multi-band limiter algorithms you have control over how much band Independence there is so if something big happens on the bottom band if it pulls down the next band up or not that's what's called separation here and if you have it accentuated then it can really quite noticeably EQ your song and if you have it at zero it it functions like a single band limiter I have mind set straddling the pond there at 100 there is a bit of separation between the bands and uh it just basically provides an algorithm where you get the least amount of limiting necessary in each aspect of the audio range and that makes sense to me and it causes less Distortion this limiter produces less aliasing then without oversampling because it doesn't even have oversampling okay this limiter does not have oversampling as an option yet it's one of the flagship limiters one of the best limiters on the planet okay that should get you curious if you're not yet it produces less aliasing than other limiters that are at 4X oversampling the math behind this limiter is genius and I I know quite a bit about how it works um but I yeah I have to always pull myself back from going nerd level 10 in these videos cuz I think we've been on this one long enough haven't we are you guys getting tired of watching me uh talk about audio okay let's wrap it up then the last two plugins ozone I already explained what I'm doing there I'm just using it to preview the lossy compression codec and then uh the uh this one the ab metric AB I'm just using to show uh true peak level and RMS and uh Peak loudness range and all of that stuff here and and integrated LS just as a final okay and then um yeah we don't need that that's not doing anything and then I use Vox Ango span this is just what I'm doing to compare spectrums with the uh reference track okay so so they one goes into the side chain input of the plugin and we can see two spectrums overlaid I've gone into this in detail how I set that up in another video I will drop my Vox Ango span setup video for the free version of span you don't need to have the paid version of the plugin to do this and it really helps you just kind of avoid making broad spectral mistakes like oh my high hats are like 6 DB louder than the reference or I'm missing 5db in the bass or something it just looking at it visually can help you avoid mistakes like that if you don't have the best studio or the best monitoring system so let's go ahead and render this CU I'm going to show you actually the full process how I deliver this to my client and there's a platform that I've been using lately that uh is pretty sweet that I would like to share with you guys so uh we turn all that stuff off we're going to stay with Limitless I would normally do my final uh touch-ups and delivery in RX you know do fades and stuff like that but in this case we're just sending the client the master so they can approve it okay so uh we'll go ahead and render this all right so let's fire this over to Angus and see what he thinks I'm using a service now to send Masters out called uh samply um Big Ups to my buddy Sam Ryan who uh turned me on to that one so let's get samply all spooled up so we just create a new project here there we go and then I can uh just go ahead and drag the file over so all we do is we click to copy the link and then I can text it to Angus sweet so there you have it I know this was a longer and more detailed video but I really wanted to show you the the full process and explain the nitty-gritty of why I'm choosing these effects because when you get to your master uh these little Details Matter and a lot of these plugins that I'm using are deep plugins with a lot of settings on them and it takes quite a bit of iteration and experience to be able to to get those right and it takes getting them wrong sometimes which I've done for sure um to be able to figure out what not to do yeah so if if you liked this video I am making a lot of my mastering sessions available for free I will drop the playlist for that below this video so you can check out the other sessions and in general if you want to learn more about audio engineering and mixing doing your own DIY mixes I have a whole playlist on mixing as well including a lot of the techniques that I would use um in all kinds of different mixes in different genres sweet drop me a comment let me know what you thought about this video and if there's any requests you have for up upcoming content or if you have any questions about this and if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet please do we've been growing a lot lately and uh I want to thank everybody who's been supporting the channel it's been so nice to see so much activity and Good Vibes around here so please subscribe if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up if you like this video and I will catch you on the next one happy music making take care [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Warp Academy

Views: 12,106

Keywords: mastering every step, loud mastering, music production, how to master, how to master a song, how to master music, audio mastering, mastering tutorial, mastering a song, how to, start to finish, mastering masterclass, mastering tips, music mastering, music production tips, audio mastering tutorial, best plugins for mastering, advanced mastering, mastering chain, mastering compressor settings, how to clip your master, mastering mix, how to master in ableton live

Id: xnTpwu0YbU0

Length: 44min 11sec (2651 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024