How To Master EDM Properly

eep-eep what's up ninjas my name is Sam world and today I'm going to be teaching you guys how to master using a vocal kit from the new unisom vocal sample pack which is going to sound like this this is one of my favorite ones from the vocal kit you know I helped make the vocal kits with Nina and she provided the vocals for them and I used to profit 8 analog sin for this one so the thing I like about it is the sauce or just very juicy and have a very distinct sound because of the Prophet 8 it's the sound of the Prophet a bra so today I'm going to be teaching you guys how to master and if you guys are ready let's begin now the first thing I need to make sure is that this is going to be at negative 6 because that's how much Headroom I want so pretty much the way I do this is I use a utility or you can just lower the volume through here but I prefer doing the utility way as usually when I do a master I still have you know my track laid out a lot is part of the track and do that there [Music] right there's going to be fine if you notice when the clap hits the volume tends to go up so that's I'm going to base it off in the clap hits and it's going to be at six there so once we have that we're pretty much set to start our master now a few misconceptions I do want to tackle before we begin in an ideal world it's better for you to produce a song pay a mixing engineer to mix it and then pay a mastering engineer to master it why well when you're producing music you're getting used to the song you're listening over and over again and someone is going to have a more objective look on your song that has never heard it before and doesn't have anything to do with it they're going to be able to mix it better because they're going to be like okay this is my first time hearing it and I can tell the low-end sucks I mean needs more of this and this and then they're going to fix it for you then the mastering engineer is going to hear the mix and he's going to be objective as to it because he has never heard the song as well and that's where you know again he's going to be like okay mixing engineer could have done this a bit better let me add it in the master now a lot of times the master is going to be based off just a master stem that's going to look like this and that's fine and there's only so much we can do at this stage and this is where we're basing it off on that the fact that I mix this properly in the mixing stage okay so now let's begin so after I have that the first thing I want to do is I want to clean up some frequencies that we aren't really using so the way I do this is I click the headphone icon here in Ableton which is going to allow me to hear what I'm cutting I'm going to click on this you know just harsh cut and then here until I can barely hear the top end and then I'm going to pull back a little and that's what I'm going to set it at so here I can't really hear it okay there I can start hearing it pull up a little bit more back and there we go right there make sure on the drop loudest party it's the same fine so now the low-end I usually do a harsh cut as well in the thirty Hertz now there's probably going to be some smart asses in the comments that are super super nerdy and and I respect you guys but at the same time you know some of this you say our myths in my opinion one of them is going to be that all you never do a hard collect dot in digitally Q's bro because you tend to offset the face well this is a myth and it's something that gets really uh it's up for debate especially in the forums one of the things as I'd say it's true when when we're cutting the frequencies pretty much where the frequencies that are going to get affected by the face offset are going to be the ones you're cutting so if you're cutting them you're not even going to be able to hear that and you know then they might say something that affects the frequency surrounding it then yeah whatever then we're going to have to deal with it but there's stuff we can do to deal with that but that's something that you might hear in the comments and I don't think I have followers like that thing God so we're going to keep going out the next thing we're going to do is put a glue compressor and this is going to help you know bring the song together now the biggest example I could give you of a track of why you would want the gluon attractor didn't do this is because like a track that you hear and it sounds very loose like everything sounds floppy loose like you know it's all over the place like it doesn't sound like compact like a unified sound it sounds more like a ton of sounds playing at different volumes this is because they didn't do a proper master proper compression proper gain staging in the master which we're going to talk about so what I'm going to do is first offset arranged at negative 7 or sorry 7 or 6 dB now whenever you see this needle move guys just in case you don't know this is gain reduction we're losing volume because compression downwards compression pretty much you know when the threshold is hit pretty much it starts to kind of tell it a calm the down and starts to lower the volume on it so this is good because then when you bring it back up you know let's say this is the dynamic range here from the microphone to here you know let's say that we're here and then we push it down to here if when we bring this up we're bringing this up as so so then the dynamic range is this small it's no longer this you know this big it's small and it's up here so now the sounds can't really differ that much so that's why we have that compression drilling great meeting amazing video on compression called how to actually compress and you should probably check it out I always recommend that tutorial alright so we're going to pull back on it [Music] like the way it sounds now my settings are going to be on the attack three milliseconds if the standard is going to be five milliseconds but we don't have access to that into Ableton one and I don't want to go to ten and then my release will be set to point two usually I put it at automatic if you don't know what to do with it or you can use one of the mastering presets and just use the release they have and then the ratio down to two which means for every two DB that goes over the threshold one DB comes out so there you can see volume is being lost and pressures on making loud okay so we're going to play this and make up for it around four is fine now one of the things I've been doing this is option was using the OTT I love the OTT and the way I use it is I just drop it in I lower the amount to 30% around there 25% and then I just pull back on this a bit and then we want to pull it back to where the you know pretty much you see the the blocks really just barely holding on to it like so I think I'm gonna let the low-end out a bit more [Music] now with it off with it on you can see the magic it does so this is going to be again one of the things I do a lot and I showed it a lot in the hexagon revolution pack all that trackers makes and mastered without TP but the ott is awesome because you can treat it as any Q you can trigger that's compression because what's going on the OTP is upward and downwards compression okay so once we have these two here pretty much done the next step is going to be to add a saturator for me now the saturator what it's going to do is it's going to add harmonic frequencies to it and the preset I use yes I use a preset for this one it's called a bit warmer now this is going to add harmonic frequencies to it but you don't want to use it at 61 percent you want to use like around six to ten percent you know that's one of the things a lot of people have been getting taught around here in Los Angeles I've been seeing a lot on people's masters so this is a cool one to have and actually do enjoy it you can also use the ozone you can use any type of saturation you like again this is just kind of a guide on how to do it but anything can be exchanged out the glue compressor you can use maybe a the the fabfilter one if you want to use the ott from x4 go for it if you want to use a baffle - Pro to do this go for it that's the thing I'm going to explain at the end that you can do and develop your own change that way so 6% now if you ever want to hear what something is doing just make the dry/wet go to 100 literally and brace your ears [Music] like you see like around six eight percent I think would be good you don't want to overdo this and then we're done there now the next thing I'm going to be using is the ozone imager now the imager is amazing because if you're mastering your friends tracks and this is something I suggest you guys do you get a group of producers together that you know they know what the they're doing and be like hey um so I'll do this deal with you I master one of you tracks your to actually master one of mine that way we're very objective to it and you know I think that's the best way to grow that way you don't pay like 600 to get a mastering engineer to do it or mixing so what I do with this guy's is first I'm going to play and hit learn [Music] and there we go I have set the bans now one of the things that's very important and I'm going to move the camera over for a bit here one of the things very important that you need to look at the ozone is first off this plus one zero negative one if you're going into the plus one you're fine this means that your track is going to be mono compatible but if you start to go into the negative one and it stays there like it just goes there and then it doesn't move to the two plus one then that's bad because that means that your track is not mono compatible so it's kind of like just bad phase so if we check this out now on some trucks it might go down to negative one like for maybe a split second and that's fine but if it's staying there like all the time then that's when you know you have a problem okay now the other two I like is the polar level and the Lisa juice which shows you kind of like the analog you they used to have like this analog meter on there and you can see how wide it would sound and all that but I prefer the polar sample shows me a good representation of how it should sound so what I would do first is go into the mono area of the low end and make sure that everything below 150 or maybe 200 Hertz it's going to be fully mono and I need to see a straight line and you can see that's not a straight line at all so we're going to pull that down and now we got this the difference between that though this sounds a lot more driven because it's in the center of the mix so once we have that the next one is this one I would like to put this more in the center as well like negative seven around there just a tiny bit on this one nothing crazy like this one and then we can move on to the mid which can be pushed a bit to like ten and then the hi-hi-hi portion of it which again we don't have that much because we're using analog synths and they don't produce high frequencies that crazily we can go 220 around there 19 so whip it off what's it off [Music] so I really do enjoy doing that I'm on my mix every time also seven is amazing it helps in separating the bands out which again you guys know my philosophy with mixing and mastering is that if everything has room in the mix it's going to sound good okay so now we're going to keep moving on here now the next thing I'm going to do is put a fabfilter pro-q - now the thing I'm going to do with this one and this is optional is I'm going to reduce frequencies that are resonating and this is something that I learned from I think it was chimera I know I didn't learn it from him I think it was satellite production that guy is has some really cool techniques that I I agree with some some not because some of his techniques are very old-school but some you know I like to get some of the stuff I learned from him that I kind of like and then I develop it with stuff I learned from my mentors and all that cool stuff so what we're going to do here is bring this up and we're going to click the headphone button as we scroll through and I'll show you what a resonating frequency is supposed to sound like so let's look at the spectrum first [Music] there's some right here let's hear this [Music] okay look down because we got a pin point on it [Music] okay it's going to be there and you can hear that so what we're going to do is just lower down a bit [Music] and [Music] it's going to be one here when the vocals hit so again quadrant it very very tight you don't want to do a big cut there we go and now we just reduce a bit now the way I'm doing this again I'm looking for the little mountains that are just too high up and just going down on them a bit [Music] and this is going to help us in getting really loud because we're reducing on these which usually are the ones that up the limiter see it kind of got reduced there a bit [Music] [Music] now we don't really got that many to work with so that's awesome then some tracks is going to be a ton that you can reduce on the thing you know okay cool so once you have this and it's the last step and that's to use the limiter so I'm going to be using the Ableton one and then I'll give you guys tips on how to use the other ones now the Ableton one I hate because it distorts hella easily so in order to do you know bypass that what we're going to be doing it's literally just we're going to put this at the throw up on so so what we're going to be doing is just slowly limiting and then we'll limit with another one as well so and then we'll do another one [Music] now you guys know I like to use the wlm to measure my loudness because you know you do want to get commercially loud so usually with future bass it tends to be our negative 5 to negative 6 you know around there so let's see how loud we got we're almost there so maybe we can try boosting a little bit more and just yeah be careful [Music] there we go okay so this is going to be a mastering chain that you guys can use now there are a couple of things I do need to say before I end this video number one there's different ways of mastering some people like to mix master as they go already so they do most of the mastering in the channels in the bus's so by the time they hit the master all they have to do is put a limiter on some people like to wait till the end to do the master which so this is the way that you can do it now what I like to do whenever I'm not making videos for you guys is I like to work on music and I like to do my own masters and experiment with different ways that people you know teach online on the forums and all that I always try them out and the best ones I like to make videos for them so this is one of the masters that I think is really really good things that you could do differently though is that if you have access to third-party plugins you can switch out the limiters here for maybe baffled two Pro L which is amazing the dmg ones are awesome also the PSP vintage warmer is an amazing you know just I think it's a compressor that you can use you can switch up the ott maybe you just don't like the digital sound of it you can switch that out the glue compressor you can use the SSL from waves from a bit warmer you can use be excited from ozone or you can use your own saturate or fabfilter saturn you know the imager from ozone you don't have to use it if you already did your imaging inside the bus's this is just you know just to make sure that again that mono is you know under 200 under 150 this is debatable again has to be fully mono and then the pro q2 you can use anything from waves or you can even use the Ableton want to do this and then the limiters again you you guys understand everything anyways guys leave a comment below on what you thought of this video how does your mastering chain look like do you master as you go let me know and if you want to support the pack if you like the sound of the Nina Seung voice make sure to support the park support the channel and as always guys I'm always here to bring three knowledge to you guys so that you guys can learn and try and you know just follow your dreams anyways guys you guys have an amazing day [Music] and yes

Channel: Zen World

Views: 149,552

Rating: 4.8827987 out of 5

Keywords: How To Master EDM Properly, How to mix and master edm, master edm, how to master future bass, how to master in ableton live 9, how to master in flstudio, how to master music, how to master edm, MASTER EDM SONG, HOW TO MASTER EDM MUSIC, How to master edm with ableton, HOW TO MASTER EDM WITH WAVES, How to master edm zen world, how to master edm sadowickproduction, how to master future bass music, future bass start to finish

Id: h8DRWciEWsQ

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017