HOW TO MASTER LOUD - INSTANTLY Get FAT, Clean + In Your Face Results

what's up everybody in this video I want to talk about loudness in mixing and mastering and if one of your goals is to be able to produce clean and High Fidelity high quality Masters that are also loud then you're going to want to tune in for this discussion I wanted to start off by challenging the really mistaken and misguided assumption that it's normal or necessary to be able to push a limiter more than a few DB of gain reduction on your master to achieve these types of loud results when I'm talking about loudness I'm talking in the range of negative 8 LS maybe upwards of5 LS in the drops of songs or the chorus of songs that's what I'm meaning by this range of loudness and this is a very typical range of loudness when you get into the field of Pop hip-hop and electronic music and that's the field that I do Engineering in it's very common to see those types of loudness levels depending on the genre when I was first starting to produce I was guilty of many of the mistakes that novice producers and engineers when it comes to trying to master or engineer your own music I pushed limiters on the master because that's how I thought that everybody operated I was getting five six sometimes more decb of gain reduction in my limiter and as soon as you start verging into that territory of gain reduction with any limiter including the best limiters on the planet I use all of them then you start to get the telltale signs of garbage loudness loudness done wrong bad loudness you get inter modulation Distortion you get aliasing you get dull transients you get unwanted pumping and all of these artifacts that are associated with a song that has just been pushed too loud and uh it sounds bad to everyone including myself I don't Advocate that type of loudness but it's not necessary as I eventually learned from studying other engineers and just pushing my own Edge in terms of my capacity to engineer music and just learning more techniques and and software uh I'm now capable of mixing and mastering songs in that loudness range that I mentioned and having them sound very clean and in my opinion I I'm not making sacrifices to be able to do that there's always a trade-off between loudness and and quality but uh there's an acceptable range where you're not sacrificing a huge noticeable amount of quality to achieve uh a particular level of loudness that might be appropriate for the genre that you are engineering for so we're going to dig into a session and I'm going to show you two different mixes of the same song and in one of the mixes it's the original mix um that I received from the artist none of these techniques have been applied or a few of these techniques have been applied and then I redid re-engineered the mix on the song and I'm going to show you the difference that that made in its capacity for loudness and going to talk to you about really one Central philosophical error or mistake that a lot of producers and engineers make that prevent them from getting clean loudness all right let's hop into it and check out the mix all right so here's our session in pink up top we've got a really well-engineered reference track from a producer that I love and I I really like using this to compare my masters against in purple we have the original artist mix and then in green we have my re-engineered mix and between the purple and the Green Mix I wanted to compare them as closely as possible kind of the best Apples to Apples comparison that I could come up with so I've taken both of them and I've normalized them so that the sample peak level on each is up at zero dbfs so we've pushed them both up to the zero dbfs point and trying to get them so that they their sample peak level at least is matching and then what I've done is I dialed in my mastering chain for my version The Green version and then I copied that mastering chain over to the purple artist mix so again we can compare with the mastering chain on as closely as possible to an Apples to Apples comparison and then what I did is I adjusted the limiter threshold on the purple version so that we were getting the same amount of limiting gain r ction as we were on my green master so let's start by having a listen with the mastering chains off on both and just listening to the uh to the mix okay so here's the original artist mix [Music] okay so what are we noticing is the difference main difference between the two well there's big spectral differences between the two because uh of some stuff I'll explain in a second but there's a massive loudness difference right so if we take a look at the loudness of the mix we're seeing -14 and a bit integrated LS in the drop versus on mine we're seeing 11 or so uh few differences uh few reasons for that one of them is that the original mix was really really um light it was quite anemic in the Bas department and that wasn't conforming at all to the reference track the reference track has a lot more base and so I increase the amount of low end substantially in my re-engineered mix that's partially what's responsible for the increase in loudness and then there's a another aspect to it which is I have uh used a bunch of techniques to be able to control and contain peak level in my mix and those techniques were not applied in the original artist mix okay so they've allowed me to reduce peak level in a way where I still have Crest factor and in a way where I still have punch in my drums but I've been able to take the entire mix and uh and and push it up because I've been raining in these Peaks and uh that's really helped out a lot in terms of its uh its perceived loudness now let's listen uh with the mastering chains on okay so I'm going to turn both mastering chains on and the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to open up uh Vox Ango span and the limiter okay so the limiter I'm using DMG Limitless in this case um I always test a bunch of limiters but in this case I'm using uh I'm using Limitless and I'm going to open up span as well and uh span the way I have span set up is uh I have the reference track loaded in to the side chain input I have a whole video on how to do this routing by the way it's it's a bit complex and if you want to learn how to do this with Fox anko span which is free um I'll put a link to this uh the video that I have on that in the cards and in the description but uh basically you'll see the reference track Spectrum come in in a green line and the mix that we're playing is in a blue solid area Okay so that's uh that's how we're going to set this up let's do the same thing over on my re-engineered mix so we'll just pop uh Limitless open like so and then we will also pop box angle span open and I I want you to pay attention to uh a few different things here so uh first I want you to pay attention to the Spectrum and the spectral differences between the the mix that we're working on and the reference track okay so so pay very close attention to the two spectrums and again green is the reference track and blue is our track and then um in Limitless I want you to be paying attention to these meters here which will show how much gain reduction is happening in the limiter okay and then the amount of uh LS loudness that's happening uh at the end of the limiting process okay so let's let's have a listen to the uh to the original artist mix [Music] he okay so we're seeing um a few different things and hearing a few different things first of all uh if we fire this off the original artist mix I want you to look at the massive discrepancy there is in lowend and mids and the amount of additional high-end that there is in general I found yeah there was just lacking in lowend it was lacking in loudness in general and uh it had a really really bright um top end the high hats were were really high in level and really abrasive so just look at the spectral [Music] differences okay and we're also noticing here that the loudness that we can push to we're getting about three DB of gain reduction on the limiter I've adjusted the limiter thresholds so that we're getting about 3 DB of gain reduction on both master so we're getting an Apples to Apples comparison as much as possible and when we get that amount of gain reduction we're getting a master here that's negative 89 LS right whereas in the re-engineered mix we're getting uh much much louder than that with the same level of limiting right and and this is an acceptable level of limiting 3db 2db of limiting that's acceptable I'm not hearing limiter artifacts from that now if we start pushing it harder if we try to match the level of loudness in the artist man to the level of loudness that I'm getting in my re-engineered mix we'd have to push the limiter much harder and much harder than this we're going to start to get artifacts you're really going to start to notice that and that's what I try and avoid at all costs so you're also seeing the the spectrums are much more Inc conformance the amount of bass and the amount of high-end uh we're still a little brighter on the top hand but in general the spectrums are agreeing with each other and um about spectrums you can only use meters for some things I'm using them to to just broadly show for you guys because you can't hear in my control room what I'm hearing uh and I'm not even I don't mix this stuff on headphones I'm mixing this on on Main monitors that are full range um it's just showing you uh a comparison point that can help to guide you and help you avoid um any any type of broad spectral mistakes like this that are that are taking it away from from where the genre would be okay so now that we know the differences between these two what what did I do in my version that hasn't been done in the original mix well if you start to take a look at them you pretty visually you can start to see well there's these little stray Peaks all over the place when you start to pay attention these little little Peaks that are just above significantly above the average level obviously but they're also significantly above the average peak level and those that pop up every you know four six uh seven beats these little summing points they're they're likely from Individual transients like drums or or percussive elements or they're from elements that are stacking on top of each other that have momentary Peaks that are at the same same place and when they sum together to the master you get these weird little stray Peaks and if you leave those to be dealt with in the mastering process you're going to be left with a a mix that can't be pushed as loud because the only way to deal with this is to Ram them into a limiter or a Clipper and at a mastering level you're really going to hear that there's only so much you can get away with there so the big misconception and the big mistake is that you can just not attend to sample peak level and microt transience in your mix and just leave loudness all up to the mastering phase and that you can take your mix and just run it into a limiter and you're going to be able to get L enough and be able to get a clean track and you're just not that's not realistic so part of this is about managing expectations and so when you look at these let's look at some of these little stray Peaks let's let's really go in on this and uh and take a look how long is this in in duration right if we scroll right in these are sample points 1 2 3 1 2 3 that's three samples you're never going to hear that missing okay when you take that out um and and then take a look at where the where the peak level is in uh in the re-engineered master it's it's nowhere near the same amount um because that's been attended to using a variety of techniques um that uh that I've come to use uh hard clipping is one of those techniques uh manual limiting manual compression is another one of those techniques and um you do this in the mix you don't do this on your master if you do it in the mix and you're working on individual sounds it's going to be really transparent if if you try and deal with these transients these these micro overs uh that are happening on the Master Level you're you're going to hear it so if we look all throughout the premaster the mix you're you're seeing a ton of these little stray Peaks you know let's let's Zone in on another one again these are almost always a couple of milliseconds to a couple or maybe downwards of a couple of samples long you take a look at this again you know these are sample points 1 2 3 you can see 1 2 3 there's about 2 DB difference or more between my re-engineered mix and the original and that has allowed me to push the level up through that normalization process uh of my re-engineered mix much much higher in level and I don't have to push the limits hard so it's kind of like a have your cake and eat it two techniques It's the Best of Both Worlds you can get a a very loud very clean sounding master and you don't have to make these sacrifices that you would make by pushing a mix into a limiter harder and getting all of the negative artifacts that correspond with that right on well I hope this is sinking in now that the potential for loudness really starts very early in the production phase and certainly a lot of that potential is created in the mixing process and there are particular techniques and tools that you need to be aware of to be able to create a mix that can be pushed into a mastering chain in a way that it is made loud without making sacrifices you're not going to be creating those artifacts that I talked about earlier in this video any mastering engineer can take a mix and push it loud and make all of these sacrifices and it can be a bad garbage sounding loud track you know Lander can do that any automated mastering service can do that any limiter can make a bad loud track but if you want High Fidelity high quality clean loud Masters then you need to be very specific in how you handle that right so I showed you the before and after of applying a lot of these techniques but I didn't show you and really going into detail about what these techniques are and how to achieve those so I've actually filmed a completely separate video that I would recommend that you watch next which will go into some of the main techniques the the primary techniques that I'm using to be able to create uh this potential for loudness and to be able to transparently rein in these Peak levels these microt transients in a way that uh allows you when you go to the mastering process to be able to do this really clean really nice and get great sounding results so watch that video next uh if you haven't subscribed to the channel already then please do and slap the Thumbs Up Button if you like this video drop me a comment let me know what you thought about this one and if there's anything else that you'd like to see from me next until then happy music making I'll catch you soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Warp Academy

Views: 27,054

Keywords: Loud mastering, music mastering, music mixing, mixing tip, loudness, how to make your master loud without distortion, how to get a loud punchy master, loudness and dynamic range, how to master loud and clear without sounding harsh, managing your dynamic range, how to make a loud master, how to get a loud master in fl studio, how to get a loud master in logic, how to get a loud master in ableton, loudness wars, perceived loudness, mixing tips and tricks, mixing tutorial

Id: YpbV0INpHgc

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024