How to Master Your Music in 5 Simple Steps

mastering is an incredibly important final last step for your song before you send it out into the world but it's often completely misunderstood by beginners this is often oversimplified or it's over complicated but in this video I'm gonna be sharing five steps that should help you get started with mastering your own music and set you in the right direction I also want to say before I start that I mean no disrespect to professional mastering engineers a lot of these people have been mastering for longer than I've even been alive and I do believe that one of the best ways to get the best result for your song is to actually hand over control of this final process to someone who's very experienced and cares a lot about the final result they're going to be up to date with the latest industry requirements and they're also going to have the right equipment the right ears and the right taste to finish your song in the best way possible but for those of us who don't have that as an option this video should help you I also have to say that I'm gonna be mastering exclusively on headphones today but that's just for this tutorial so that I can record my voice I would recommend using studio monitors and headphones in the mastering process so that you can really hear everything that's going on I will be covering the five steps in detail in this video but just a brief overview the first one is making sure that you have an aim for the project the second one is a final check so I'm going to be showing you some things you can check for to make sure that your mix is actually ready for mastering the third step is going to be looking at the tonal balance of your song we're going to be using frequency analyzers and EQ to make sure that your song is fitting its energy in the right places the fourth step is going to be looking at any sweetening or any extra creative effects we can add to just add something extra to the mix and the fifth step is making sure that your song is appropriately loud and it's this fifth step that can often be most confusing to beginners so I'm going to be focusing on that in quite a lot of detail so let's get started so in this session I have a final mix of a song here which is one of our songs called nothing to lose and it's important to see that it doesn't clip so there's no Peaks that are hitting anywhere close to zero there's a lot of headroom here and that's what we're going to need for mastering I have it sent to the master channel on the mixer and on the mixer I have a few plugins I have an equalizer plug-in I have a couple of different limiters that I'll show you later I have a tool called tonal balance control from iZotope I have a loudness meter which is a free loudness meter which I'll leave a link to in the scription down below and i also have a free frequency analyzer called spam now the first step was having an aim when you're mastering what is your vision where are you going to distribute it because the way you master will change in each situation in this case my aim is to have this song translate well across all systems so whether you're listening in ipod earbuds or great big speakers like these I want it to sound good on just about anything I want to make sure that it's loud enough and I'll talk about that more later because often people push it a bit too loud and I also want to just have a final sort of stamp of approval to make sure that I'm happy with the song this is also a good time to try and motivate yourself and get a little bit inspired because mastering is not just technical it's a very creative and musical process and you need to make sure that you're in that creative mindset when you're mastering so that you really do get the best result for your song making sure your mind is in the right place for mastering my sounds simple but it's often overlooked step two is a final check for your song and adding fades at the start in the end so I'm just gonna start by adding those fades in so on the master Channel I'm just gonna copy the value create an automation clip then what I'm going to do is decide where I want my song to start which in this case is here before there's any noise I want to paste in the value so that it's at zero at the top and I'm just gonna gently fade up it might to make sure there's no click or pop anywhere the same is true here I'm just going to listen to the decay tale of the reverbs and whatnots and I'm going to choose where I want it to fade away [Music] awesome so I'm just gonna start here paste that value so that it never goes above zero and then it's just gonna fade away so now that I've done that we're gonna start checking the song so what you need to do is listen from start to finish without touching anything so you want to press play at the start pause at the end and you can't change your volume you can't tweak an EQ you can't do anything you need to listen from start to finish and be happy with the mix and this is gonna take two things the first is listening for any clicks pops hiss consonants on words s is anything that gets in the way of this sounding really good this is your last chance to pick up on any of those mistakes is there any clipping or any of my plugins distorting in in a bad way anything like that is gonna require a couple of listens through so don't listen too loud and make sure that you're happy that there's no mistakes in the song or any sloppy edits or anything like that the second thing is making sure that you're happy like with the volume and the balance of everything the whole way through if when you're mixing you were turning the volume up or down in the chorus you can't do that now you need to be able to press play at the start and listen the whole way through and not feel like you really want to skip a part of the song or not feel like you want to turn the volume up or turn the volume down it's really important that that sort of stuff is sorted out in the mix and if you have a chorus that is too loud it's best to take it down in the mix before having to deal with it in the mastering process now it's time for step three which is adjusting the tonal balance and this is going to be trying to make sure that it works well on all systems because sometimes if I mix something and it sounds great on these big speakers it doesn't mean it sounds good on these or it sounds good in the headphones I need to make sure that the balance of frequencies is appropriate so that it sounds good on all systems this can be a really good opportunity to use reference tracks which I talked about last week so that you can listen to those and really get a feel for the ballpark of what frequencies there are and how much of them there are so your song might just have far too much bass it might just have far too little mid-range or something like that and listening to other music and then a be comparing it to your music can help you realize if there's a problem with your mix and usually if that's the case it's good to go back to the mixing stage if your bass is super loud take it down in the fixing and that way when you do the mastering it's going to make things a lot easier but there are a few tools that can help us out here so the first one is a tool called tonal balance control from isotope and I really really like this tool even though I usually tell people just to mix with their ears and not use visual tools too much this one is particularly useful it gives you a broad and a fine representation of the energies of each frequency in your mix I'll play a section of the song to show you what's happening so what it's showing in each section is the relative energy in each of these frequency ranges so it's telling me that the low-end is potentially a little bit too high but it's still within acceptable limits and that the low mid high mid and high are also sitting in the right place these lower and upper limits were set by analyzing thousands of different commercial releases in categories such as bass heavy modern or orchestral and seeing the sort of balance that these professional mixing and mastering engineers were putting into their mixes if you are within the acceptable limits it's more likely that your mix will translate across all systems if you have far too much bass it might sound really cool on some systems but it might just fall to pieces on headphones or on a different system so it can be good to use this to get in the ballpark but if you don't have this what I would recommend using is using span which is the free frequency analyzer and comparing it to as many different professional mixes as you can because while the tonal balance control tool is great it's not the be-all and end-all of plugins it's really important to use your ears compared to some real good music you like it might have been a song you mastered in the past it might be from your favorite artist if you are hearing that there's a big difference between your mix and someone else's mixed this is where you want to take that equalizer which was the first step in the chain or the EQ and you want to be doing very subtle boosts or cuts and I do mean subtle you don't usually want to be doing more than a DB or so this is you know subtle broad strokes you don't want it to be making lots of little narrow cuts and boosts like this if you're doing stuff like this in the mastering if you're having to do that sort of thing during the mastering stage it's probably because there are imbalances or resonances in your mix that you could better deal with in the mixing process but sometimes the mastering process can highlight and the next step is to add a high-pass filter so the reason we're adding this is because there's an awful lot of Rumble that builds up in the low end that can't even be heard on most devices my headphones go all the way down to five Hertz but most consumer audio equipment doesn't go anywhere below 20 some doesn't even go below 30 or 40 so what you can do is take a gentle high pass and just high pass everything below about 20 Hertz or so I'm going to show you the difference this makes by using span so on span I'm sort of gonna highlight the low frequencies so this is showing me the low end what's going on this is showing me the lowest bass note which is at about 27 Hertz or so and all of this stuff here is just completely unnecessary I'm just gonna play the song and I'll engage the EQ and you'll see those frequencies start to be suppressed a little bit now depending on which EQ you use this is going to react differently but trying to clean up those frequencies is going to give you just a little bit more Headroom later on it's going to allow you to put some more energy into some more exciting frequencies and it also means that if your mix was played back in a system that went all the way down to five Hertz there wouldn't be any strange or unusual resonances or sort of patterning or rumbling down in the low end which could ultimately be quite embarrassing because you didn't even know it was there when you were mixing these speakers for instance these five inch monitors they do not go down all the way to five Hertz so if I was producing on them there's no way that I would have been able to hear that stuff anyway step four is about trying to add something to the mix and I stress the word trying because a lot of beginners when looking at mastering they load up saturation they load up harmonic exciter stereo imaging all sorts of stuff to try and make the mix sound better and I would say just test out these things and really try to see whether you you do feel that it makes things better for instance one might be trying to add a little bit of harmonic excitement or tube saturation so I'm going to start with tube saturation here and you know I might I might want to add a little bit of saturation now my mix is already very very saturated I've got loads of distortions going on on all sorts of stuff or I might want to add a little bit of sort of harmonic excitement using a plug-in like this [Applause] and this sort of stuff really should be subtle so I'm going to play it around I'll start with it on and then I'll turn it off and you might hear that you like the sound of it with or without [Music] now depending on the device you're listening on whether it's headphones or speakers you might have liked the sound with or without and really tried to be critical here just because you've added plugins doesn't mean it's gonna sound better so try to be honest with yourself and if you don't like the result afterwards just don't bother with it it's fine remember that your mix has to sound good on its own and this stuff is just trying to give it that extra of one or two percent the next thing would be trying things like compressions so whether this is multiband compression or just using a buss compressor like this you might want to try using compression either to control the dynamic range or just to add some sort of warmth or flavor to the sound in this case I'm just going to start with a classic mix preset and then I'm going to adjust the threshold and ratio until I think it sounds good [Music] [Music] the only problem with doing this is that it's really difficult to gain match it when I turn it on and off gain is added when it's on so I'll show you I'll start with it on I would definitely have said it sounded better with it on but it also made it louder so you have to try and adjust the gain on the output until it really is the same volume and then you can hear whether it's adding anything you like and remember just be honest with yourself no one listening to your music will know that you've run it through any sort of VST or analog equipment so you need to make sure that you're listening to it and liking what you hear when it comes to compression it can be really difficult to hear what's going on as a beginner so just because it makes it louder doesn't mean that it is actually better and often compression can really kill a mix there's this dial here high-pass filter and I had it set quite high when it set low what was happening was that my kick was being compressed and that was really killing the punch and energy of the low end but because it made it louder it still sounded good but with that high pass filter turned up the kick was getting through and not being compressed which sounded a lot better now when the release was on auto it was really slow and it wasn't recovering him between the compressions so the compression was acting and then it was just staying on so what I did was turn the automatic off and set the release to fast so that it had a chance to recover it because what was happening was that the snare would hit the compression would act it would stay on the next snare would hit then it would compress more and the song was just getting quieter and quieter so I had to turn that off and set a fast release so that the song had a chance to recover from the compression and this is why I said try these effects as a beginner it's really important that you try these things try experimenting with compression saturation harmonic excitement but don't feel that you have to use it it's good to just test it mess up all the dials find out what they're doing then maybe reset the plug-in try through a few more presets and try to figure out what's going on if you do this sort of process song after song before you knew it you will start getting the hang of plugins like this and you'll start finding where the sweet spots are you'll start hearing what all the different dials do to effect the sound and while you might not have actually used it in mastering you'll slowly start becoming really good at using this plug-in to the point where one day you can use this plug-in in mastering to help improve your master the fifth and final step is going to be getting the song appropriately loud and this is where we're going to be using this free plugin here which is the Yulin loudness meter and can also use any other loudness meters you have to compare against this don't rely only on one in this tutorial we're going to be using this one I've already decided that this mastering is for online streaming and the thing about online streaming is that all of your songs on most platforms will be loudness normalized so that they will be playing back at around minus 14 l u FS the exact values do change every now and again but right now most of the platforms are at minus 14 L u FS so you need an L u FS loudness meter to be able to hear this there's not a lot of point using rms or peak loudness anymore you're gonna have to use a meter that's calibrated to the industry standard now this doesn't mean that we have to make our songs at minus 14 L u FS but what it means is that pushing your song louder only for the sake of loudness isn't necessary anymore because if you push it louder they will just take it down if you want to push your song super loud because you like the sound of it then that is perfectly okay but if you're trying to if you're stressing about pushing your song really loud so that it sounds louder than someone else's song it's simply not gonna work for us anymore there are other tutorials on how to use the loudness meter such as this but we're looking for the integrated loudness to make sure that it's not much more than -14 l u FS so let's take a listen to this [Music] now I can see that my loudness is potentially too quiet it is a very dynamic mix and what I can do now is get the limiter to try and increase that so you can use any limiter but there are ones that are specifically made for mastering for instance I have the ozone 8 limiter here and I also have the stealth limiter for the purpose of this video I'm going to be using the ozone 8 limiter the most important setting on the limiter is to make sure that you don't have the ceiling any higher than minus 1 DB this is for various reasons but mainly for the conversions that the sites do if you have it louder than minus 1 DB it's going to induce more artifacts and problems in your song and then I'm going to lower the threshold until I'm sitting at around about minus 14 L ufs [Music] now the important thing is that there's integrated in short terms so the short term is the instantaneous but the integrated is going to be across the whole song or across a specific length of time so it's okay to have the the loudest sections of your song pushing a little bit louder as long as you do have quieter sections the average needs to be around about minus 14 or so the important thing to know here is that you don't need to slam your master super super loud if you're putting it on streaming sites unless you like doing that for the sound of it so in this case what I've done is I've prepared a few examples where I have different versions of this mix and they're all going through ozone at different loudness is so one is minus 14 all the way to minus 7 which would be incredibly loud and I'm gonna play through them and at first it's gonna be a little bit difficult to pick which one might be your favorite and it will probably sound like -7 sounds better because things start getting a lot louder [Music] this is what scares people into wanting to make a really loud master but the thing is your music is not going to be played back like this online so what I'm going to do now is lower the value of these ones until they are all at the same Lu FS value so I've just spent a few minutes sort of painstakingly trying to match those and hopefully YouTube won't mess up this audio when I post this and we're going to listen to this now and we're going to compare the versions [Music] you see now how it's not as easy to pick the one that's your favorite because you're not fooled by the loudness of this version this has been brought down like it would be on a streaming site and now what I actually hear in this version is loads of distortion and really washy mid-range and the snare the actual punch and dynamic of the snare just seems to be completely gone take a little listen between this version and this version really listen for the the sort of distortions and listen for the snare [Music] now from my taste I really like this more open version with the sort of dynamic snare everything feels punchy there is distortion from the mix but it's not over-the-top in my opinion and now this version at the bottom I just think it sounds really distorted every kick drum sounds blown out the snare has lost all of its dynamics and punch in my opinion you can still hear it but it's not you know hitting you and the mid-range just has this weird washing us to it and if I had to pick I would definitely pick the one on the top this is sort of why I think it's great that the streaming sites online have the loudness normalisation because it means that this sort of more natural dynamic sounding music gets a chance to live again and you're not fooled by the stupidly loud stuff down here if you really like the sound of the distorted one and that's what your song needs then you can still go for that because it will just be taken down on Spotify you know sound just as loud as anything else and although they have the same value FS value I feel that this one at the top actually has like a higher perceived loudness [Music] so long story short pick the amount of limiting that sounds best for your song try to find a compromise between super loud and sort of good breathing dynamics and the last thing to do is to actually export the song so once you've set everything right you want to select the region of your song to be exported which I have just here you want to make sure that your master effects are turned on go to file export as a WAV file and then when the dialog box opens you'll just want to set the quality nice and high I usually have the WAV bit depth 424 but check what the streaming sites are asking for it because sometimes these things change they might want 24-bit they might want 16-bit and then you can simply press Start to begin your export and that file will be the one that you'll want to distribute it's then important to listen to the final mastered file make sure that you're actually happy with how it sounds and also check the loudness meter again in this new project to make sure that nothing does peak above minus 0.1 just because your limiter said it was doing something doesn't mean that it always behaves well and also take the chance to check for any problems that may have occurred during the export it's very rare that sometimes little distortion artifacts occur there might be a popper click it might not have started exactly where you wanted it to things like that but for now I hope those five steps are setting you in the right direction to start mastering your own music and you have a little bit more confidence to start this mastering process thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video bye for now [Music] always way to and [Music] who should be on [Music]

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 2,237,627

Rating: 4.939394 out of 5

Keywords: Mastering, How to master, mastering tutorial, how to master a song, step by step, easy, simple, loud master, how loud to master, master compression, mastering in FL Studio, mastering in fl studio 20, audio mastering

Id: h-QCQiOkufc

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/AdmiralEspresso]

Great tutorial, good work.

[u/DiscoLucas]

Yup, that's going in my bookmarks of stuff I'll never see 😂

[u/OfficialLAProject]

I subscribe to his channel. he is very good at explaining things

[u/SpendsKarmaOnHookers]

Mods should make a playlist of all the useful vids yall put in this sub

[u/fidellarry]

Good stuff 👏

[u/fuckableton]

Is this a Maximus tutorial or is he using other software?