How To Master DJ Mixes Like A Pro For FREE // Audacity Tutorial

hi guys i'm dj blighty welcome to my channel and today's video how to master your dj mix like a pro we'll get into that right after the intro who the hell are you [Music] right let's get into it so firstly i want to apologize to anyone who is here from my how to record a dj mix video from over a year ago i just want to apologize for taking so long to bring this video to you um the comments literally so many of you asked for a mastering video and i've been putting it off for so long finally it's here for you so um yeah let's get into it this is going to be an explanation as well as a demonstration so i'm going to go on to the mac and show you my process because i know a lot of you have heard my mixes on mix cloud the goal being for it to sound as professional and as close to the original track as possible so the first thing we need to clear up is the fact that the tracks you use in your mix have to be good quality so if you're using youtube rips or anything that's less than 192 uh kbps on mp3 it's not going to sound great anyway um the old british saying you can't polish a turd uh couldn't be more apparent here because if you're trying to make something sound good originally wasn't good no matter how much tweaking and everything you're not gonna make it sound good so that is the key before anything make sure all of your mp3s are at least 192 ideally 320 or even wav so you've got lossless audio once you've got that established the next thing which i did touch on in my previous how to record a dj mix video is the fact that you must ensure that you record your dj mix at a low level i'll show you exactly how low when i go into the mastering process on my screen but it is important because you can bring volume up you can't if it's clipped and it's gone past naught db you can't bring it back down there's no rescuing it once that has happened um so the software we're going to be using today is called audacity the reason i'm showing you on this software is because it's available for free on both windows and mac so it's open to all users there's plenty of programs you can use to master your mixes to name a few you can use adobe audition you can use any digital audio workstation so you can use ableton logic pro x all of those can do this job but audacity is really what it's what i use is simple and it's free so as i said you don't have to pay for it if you want to check it out it's easy to access just by googling it just download it for your system and you're a way to go so i'm going to jump over to my laptop screen now and we'll go into the process okay guys so the first thing we're gonna do is go ahead and grab audacity so if you haven't got it already you can download it just google audacity and um you'll be able to download it for free for windows or mac and then once you've got it we're going to go ahead open it up should look a little something like this if you get the latest version uh then we're going to go and grab our mix so i've just put a short one here just so i can demonstrate to you and everything processes nice and quickly so if you haven't already done so uh please go and check my how to record a dj mix video where i run through all the settings um and show you basically how to do that but the two important factors that we need to recap on are the fact that we need to record in high quality audio uh a lossless format such as wav like i have here or an aiff file and that means that we can make adjustments without affecting the quality when it compresses to mp3 so it should be quite a large file and you need to record in a low volume so if you just run it back once you've loaded it you should be able to look on the db meter so yeah i'm peaking at like -14 which is great um so the first thing we do is we're going to trim the intro and out draw the mix down so ideally i leave a lead in of about 0.5 seconds so all you do is literally just click drag across with your mouse go to edit clip boundaries split and command x to delete it or you can do it through the um options up here so then it literally goes straight in and we're going to do a similar thing at the end of the mix but what we're going to do because this isn't actually a finished mix this is just a portion of a mix that i've just trimmed down to demonstrate to you i'm gonna try and find a way to fade out of this mix nicely okay so i'm going to look for an echo on this one i think so i'm going to zoom in i'm going to select this little end sound here go to effects echo you can preview here that's a bit fast so i'm going to take that down to half and i've just remembered you need to expand how far the echo you want it to go so not just the sound so it'll tail off nicely let's just preview that before we apply it 0.5 again that'll do nicely um not quite long enough trying to show you how to master like a pro and i'm acting like an amateur it's not on is it all right let's take that a bit further and apply that again okay so that should fade out nicely okay so we're going to trim this down now inside so it pretty much fades to nothing and then we're going to select from the sound again to effect and fade out okay so usually if you listen to my dj mixes you'll know that i have my tag at the end so that's something i will show you quickly uh let me just grab my mix cloud drop uh serato drops mix cloud and then what i'll do is i'll reduce the volume of this right down so then i can adjust that later select it command x then we'll put the cursor over to the end command v and that puts it roughly where it needs to be and then you literally change the tool to this one which allows you to drag and then we can press this one to check it a bit loud but then we're going to be bringing the volume of this one up let's have a look so about there there we are perfect so yeah if you um don't record your drops while you're doing your mixes live and you want to do them you can literally do this at any point in the mix but the important thing is to make sure that the volume matches um the actual mix so they're not too loud or too quiet but it's just a case of using your ears more than the graphic equalizer up here so let's get into the nitty-gritty probably the reason you're watching this video and what you want to know so what we're going to do um we know that we're around -14 db at the moment we're not going to touch this at all we're going to leave that at naught and we're going to leave the pan in the center we're going to use this tool to select the entire channel so the whole mix then we're going to go to effect and we're going to select normalize we're going to normalize to naught point naught initially that should take us right up and what you'll see here is i've got loads of peaks on the screen so that one is really what's taking or driving this one up to a high level see it clipped up there so it's uh probably a filter when you use the filters on the mixer that usually causes peaks like that so that brings us on to the next step which is to use the multiband compressor so go all the way down here and you'll see the settings that i've used which have a nice roll off at about -20 db and go up to about what would we say that is about -4 so we're going to apply that i'll process quite quickly um something to note as well when i said about my mix being about minus 14 db you need to make sure your mix is never above minus 6 db because that gives you plenty of headroom to actually master the the mix as a whole then okay you can see we still got a couple of little peaks here so what we're going to do is go in and sort that one out before we go into the rest of the track so we're going to select that little section just by highlighting it we're going to go down to limiter here oh wrong one limiter hard limit settings no not hold 10 apply makeup gain no we're going to limit this to about where we think it is at the moment so let's try six see if that does anything that's taken a tiny bit off so we'll go one more db so this is really about cleaning and polishing that'll do nicely that puts it where it needs to be there's a couple more so we'll just do those quickly same process down to limiter yeah it's all about polishing um that was a bit too much on that one polishing your mix so it's all like pretty much a consistent sound level throughout um if you've ever listened to any of my mixes you'll notice that they never distort and um most of the time they sound quite clean so do that one minus six that's better okay so what we're gonna do next is we're gonna gonna gonna we're gonna gonna select all again and then we're gonna normalize but this time we're only gonna go up to minus one i'll go into that towards the end of the video while we're doing that so once we've normalized we're then going to go back to this limiter and what we're going to do we could do this more dramatically but i like to do it really gradually so it takes a bit of time so we've normalized to minus 1 db and what we want to do now is go down in one decibel increments so we're going to go to -2 on the hard limit and apply that and you'll see the peaks start to get shaved off there we go then we're going to normalize again to 0.1 and we're just going to repeat this process until it looks pretty much flat but we don't want it too flat because by shaving all the peaks off you're gonna risk distortion um you'll see that in actual tracks when they're mastered like some of them are mastered really loudly but with mixes because you've got different songs and different things going on you don't want to take it that far because it's not an original recording it's a replication um of a recording so essentially you're going from most of the time mp3 into a high quality wav or aiff lossless format and then you're going to go and compress again so you don't want to take it too far just give yourself a little bit of room to avoid distortion it took me a long time to actually get to what i'm doing now to be honest i used to have um pretty sounding mixes back in the day even ones with distortion so we just keep repeating this process until it looks something like this i think i'm going to push that just one more time if it's too much you can always reverse the steps and go back let's have a look okay if we zoom in we can see exactly how flat these peaks are that should be okay actually um so i usually load another mix i won't do it now because it'll take too long but i usually load another mix just to compare the wave just to make sure it's similar so now we're gonna normalize to minus one db and that is pretty much the final step yeah that's a bit too flat for me actually that's flatter than i would normally go so i'm just going to undo that last step and leave it like this okay so we're peaking now by normalizing to minus 1 db meaning that nothing in this mix will go over 1 db now i'll explain why there we go um why that's so important and that is because when you compress this to export it now i'll start doing that while i'm talking so what we do is go to file export i actually missed the step there let me just check the volume of this drop at the end tiny bit quiet now so we're going to bring that up to about -7 perfect okay and i forgot to take this bit off the end being sloppy there we go just x that off okay so file export exporters mp3 and then we're going to make sure it's at the highest which is 320 kbps uh whatever you want to call your mix in here save okay any tags um okay and then it's exported and then it'll go to wherever you've put the file but the important thing uh we need to do there with the -1db is know that when we upload this to a streaming service so whether it's mixed cloud or youtube soundcloud or wherever else that they're going to use compression their end so by leaving that 1db headroom it means if any of the compression that they have their end it won't distort um the sound too much and you've got room for movement because they they won't go crazy with it they won't be like you know 6 db compression or anything but yeah that 1db of headroom always gives you space when you're um when you're compressing down to mp3 when we just exported and when you upload to streaming services so that is pretty much job done so yeah that's my process how i use audacity to master every single one of my mixes um if if you've got any questions feel free to hit me up in the comments below i'll do my best to answer you if you've got any requests for future videos please feel free to ask and i will do my best to supply that to you so i hope today's been useful and you've taken a lot of info away from it thanks for watching i'll see you again on the next one real soon peace

Channel: DJ Blighty

Views: 75,925

Keywords: how to master a dj mix, how to master dj mixes, mastering dj mixes, professional dj mixes, how to master like a pro, master like a pro, professional mastering, dj mix mastering, free mastering, mastering a dj mix, dj lessons, dj tutorials, audacity, mastering for beginners, mastering tips, mastering lesson, mastering tutorial, dj mix tips, pro sounding mix, pro sounding mixes, pro dj mix, pro dj mixes, master in audicity, audacity tutorial, record dj mixes, edit dj mixes

Id: QB8sjzR3F3A

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020