How To Master Your Song in 5 Easy Steps

what's good youtube you already know who it is man it's your boy q aka the wave man man man man here with wave knobby.com to bring you guys another tutorial hey stop playing me stop playing me stop playing me look skin says [Music] welcome back everybody to a wave knobby tutorial where today we're going to show you how to master your music super easy with five simple steps yes five simple steps guys these steps are super easy i'm gonna just break them down like this man the first thing that we're gonna learn how to do is get our saturation okay guys um harmonic saturation helps with perceived loudness okay guys so there's a difference between perceived loudness and actual loudness when it comes to um limiters and you know luff's and stuff like that but we're going to keep it super easy guys the saturation harmonic saturation is going to help us get our perceived loudness okay the second thing that we're gonna do is compress all right we're gonna master compress bus compress um our record all right and what that's gonna do is help us kind of smash the record not not smash the record but we wanna get the record um you know a little bit more contained so that we're able to push more in the uh limiting stage our record to maximum loudness okay um the third thing we're gonna do is eq our record so that it has more life and more brightness which also helps with perceived loudness all right fourth thing we're going to do is add some width to the record and of course the fifth thing that we're going to do guys is add a limiter to that thing make that thing go to the super loudness that we want it to be at the loudness we want it to be at so that it can compete with these records that you guys listen to on a daily let's get into it so the first thing that we're going to do right now guys is add our harmonic saturation the reason we're going to want to add our harmonic saturation like i told you guys in the preview is to add to our perceived loudness okay guys like i said so what we're going to do guys i'm going to show you the plug-in that we used here looking at the screen you'll see i used the crammer tape all right guys now this is one of my favorite plugins to use while mastering because simply this adds a couple different things to the record while i like to use it okay now when we're working in the box guys things can get really digital really fast and when i say digital i mean like it could get tinny things can get almost too perfect you know what i mean so what i like to do is kind of go into the record guys especially in the mastering end of things and kind of dirty it up all right add some body to it add some some grunge to it in a way all right guys so i love to use the kramer tape um and like i said guys this is to add our harmonic saturation so what i'm going to show you what we did right here guys is we added the crammer tape and i like to use a preset to start off with is in the mastering and it's called mastering clean open okay guys now what you're going to see right now guys is a whole bunch of different things right here guys but what this pretty much does is it adds kind of like a a tape saturation to it okay guys what we're going to do right now guys is we're going to bypass this unbypass this so that it's active and what we're gonna do right now guys is we have a noise right here now nine times out of ten if you listen really closely you could probably even hear the noise right now so what i'm gonna go ahead and do is slide this down so we can get rid of that noise okay that's the one thing i don't want right now okay and times that can be a really good thing um probably during mixing stages if we want to add some noise to some pianos to add some character but in this case right now guys i do not want noise all right so we're gonna turn this down right now you probably literally heard the noise just go away all right so let's go ahead and play this with and without so you guys can hear what this is actually doing um you'll probably be able to hear it a lot better once we get to the final stages and i run back through this but what i kind of want you guys to listen for is how it kind of rounds out the whole song as a whole okay it kind of makes the bottom end the bass and the drums kind of more warmer and more more more body to it and what it kind of does it just adds just the warmth to the whole record alright guys so let's listen to it [Music] all right guys if you could hear that it kind of like i told you guys before it kind of adds more weight to the actual song which i love when i'm mastering tracks i like to make my my masters and my mixes and my my songs in general just sound heavy all right guys so that's that's kind of what we want to achieve right there okay the next thing i'm going to show you guys what we're going to do right now is we're going to actually compress okay this is bus compression okay this is the famous ssl bus compressor okay guys so what we're actually trying to achieve when we're using this bus compressor is actually kind of to it's going to add some more weight okay that's naturally what it does and it's going to kind of glue this track together okay guys and basically what we're going to want to do is kind of squash this just a little bit so that we're able to kind of push the full volume um at the end to get more loudness okay guys so what we're gonna do right now is bypass this okay guys and just to make this a whole lot easier guys what you could do to achieve this is go to load and we're going to want to go to mastering and this is going to be a beautiful preset to get you guys started off with okay guys now there's going to be a couple things i'm going to show you how to kind of gauge this meter and understand what's going on okay guys so while we listen to this track guys i want you guys to look at this meter right here okay guys this is going to be of course how much dbs this is kind of going to be taking away from the peak and what you're going to really want to listen to is the kicks okay when that kick is starting to hit you're going to see this meter start to boom boom boom boom boom okay guys now what we're gonna really want to do is not allow this to go anywhere definitely not past four guys once you get past there you're you're taking too many dynamics out all right you're starting to lose a lot of dynamics once you get past there so what we want to do is kind of aim for anywhere from two to three i would say okay so that would be somewhere around here in the middle okay guys so we're gonna be playing around with this threshold and that's what we're gonna do guys to keep it super simple for you guys that's what we're gonna do okay we're gonna play with the threshold so that we get a little bit of that glue while not taking away too many dynamics all right so let's get into it we interrupt our program to bring you this important message do you want to sound like young boy every time i come around you ain't nobody you know post them along [Music] [Music] [Music] if you want professional sounding vocals to record it through one of our wave monopoly presets that's exactly what you'll get we have many different presets from many different dolls including pro tools fl studios logic ableton and studio one and no worries if you don't have waves plugins we offer both waves and stock preset plugins so head over to weigh monopoly.com and pick the perfect preset for you we're gonna play with the threshold so that we get a little bit of that glue while not taking away too many dynamics all right so let's get into it [Music] all right guys that's where we're going to leave that right there guys because as you can see we're kind of getting around two dbs um and and two and three db's reduction all right guys we don't want to take too much out guys we just push the threshold up just a little bit so that we're able to achieve that guys all right guys now that we got this guys and like i said i don't know if i said this before but just make sure that you're at the loudest part of your records when you're mastering because you're going to want to use that in order to really catch those peaks properly so that your record does not become distorted if you were like say for instance um mastering a verse the whole time but then the course gets super big and then it starts to hit too much distortion and starts to start clipping all right next we're going to be eq'ing okay so the eq that i like to use guys is the puketek from waves okay guys now the reason i like to use this is because this is actually an analog style um eq and what that does is it adds some certain harmonics um that you probably wouldn't get in a parametric eq and this kind of just adds to just some musicality of the record okay guys and this is the emulation of the the pultec eq which is a super classic eq guys and for it to be modeled uh digitally is a blessing to all of us so let's get right into it okay guys now as you can see to break it down basically guys it's basically boosting and attenuating okay boosting and attenuating different frequencies okay so this is the low frequencies we got 20 we've got 30 60 hertz 100 hertz that's the lower frequencies okay guys so when this can really affect the base the kick things like that and we have higher frequencies right here okay guys starting at 3k 4k 5k 8k 10k 12k and 16k okay um hurts so that's pretty much that guys and then we have our attenuation this is the frequency that we're attenuating as well okay guys so like you can see right here guys we went ahead and did was we did a kind of a boost and an attenuation and this is kind of a technique that is kind of really unique to the pull tech style eqs is what basically happens is when you go ahead and boost any frequencies and in our case we're boosting the 60k range to kind of bring some more punch and some more weight to the lower end to bring that back up um so when we're boosting we're again going to attenuate and what this allows this this technique allows us to do is it creates some pretty unique curves that are very unique to the pultec which makes the pultec itself alright guys so what we went ahead and did was we basically boosted some of the low end okay guys we boosted it about 1 db and then we attenuated 0.8 db okay guys and what that adds is weight okay and then what we went ahead and did was at 12k we boosted almost 4 db so 3.8 db and attenuated at 2 db okay now i'm gonna go ahead and play this with and without so you guys can hear what this is doing okay let's go ahead and do this now [Music] so guys if you could hear that i know you heard that what that did was added so much more life to this record okay guys not only did it add life but i was taught that when you're working with these um eqs and these mastering eqs and eq just a lot of things in general um the record almost sounds faster like it speeds up and that's because literally it's breathing life into the record okay guys so let's listen to that again and just listen to how much body it brings in and how much life it adds to the high end which also adds to our perceived loudness as well as you can kind of hear how it almost sounds like it speeds up when i went ahead and added that pull check in okay let's listen to it right [Music] now [Music] so guys as you can see what we're doing right here guys we're adding a lot of body want to bring a lot of body in there so that we have a big sound and record and we want it to breathe life all right we want it to be an energetic track okay guys so that's what we did with the eq now next thing we're going to do right now guys is i'm going to bring in the s1 imager and this is pretty much just a stereo imager guys so what we're using this for is basically adding some width to the record just to continue to make that record big and kind of give it some more stereo feel guys so it's not just mono coming straight through the track so that when you're hearing it it sounds loud sounds wide and big all right guys now it's very easy in the mastering stage to go overboard with this okay so like i say less is more less is more charming ultra you know the rest all right so what we went ahead and did guys with this was simply added some width to it okay we added 1.2 right here as you can see this will probably start around one and we didn't want to add too much guys because you want to get most of your width and your stereo fields during the mix and you could achieve that with with many different things panning um you know reverbs delays you know all types of different things um but we went ahead and just added this to the end to just kind of add that last touch of why uh the last touch of width okay guys so we went ahead and added 1.2 and guys like i said do not go overboard with this okay don't don't do it trust let's go ahead and listen to what this did for the record [Music] [Music] all right guys like i said less is more guys as just a little bit of width but like i said guys that little bit of width goes a long way especially when you listen to the little instruments the hi-hats the snares you'll hear kind of widening out all right guys and the last thing that we're going to want to do now to bring this record to full mastered level guys is bring the volume up okay without clipping without distorting well we'll get into that so what we're going to do guys we're going to use the l2 this is a l2 ultra maximizer okay guys this is a limiter by waves as you can see we're pretty much we used all waste plugins right now guys okay the techniques can be applied to any plugins guys and we'll go over that more in another video but we're using the l2 ultra maximizer guys now the main thing that i'm going to want to show you guys right now is where we're going to kind of want to place our ceiling okay right now in this case we want to place our ceiling at negative one the reason why negative one is because guys i'm mastering as if i wanted to put this song up on spotify okay guys and and that's where we want to put it okay spotify actually recommends that we put this at negative one so that's for kind of streaming services uh i guess you would say base rule because there's a lot of things that go on when it comes to um the converting when you put your songs onto streaming services kind of a a limiting of their own actually okay guys so to play it safe guys if you want to get what you're hearing in your system onto spotify without it you know getting pushed down too much or without it being distorted once it gets to those platforms guys negative one is your number all right so what we're gonna do right now guys is pretty much it kind of find your peaks okay the reason why we're going to want to find our peaks guys is we're going to want to find a peaks on this side so that we're able to push the volume up and kind of push it a little past even getting maybe a little bit of distortion in there just to get some more volume and some more um loudness leveling um so that we're not clipping too much guys okay we're gonna be attenuating here we're looking for maybe one two three dbs of uh you know of peak reduction guys uh but nothing too crazy okay negative all right nothing too crazy so let's get into it guys [Music] okay guys i'm comfortable with that okay guys there's not too much distortion going on guys we're only probably getting about one i would say you could push it to about negative three um you know peak reduction right here guys just to introduce some more distortion but to play save guys i'm getting about one on those kicks those those kicks that you're hearing guys i'm getting about negative one peak reduction right there uh dbs of peak reduction um so i'm pretty comfortable right there guys so as you can see guys we finished our signal flow of our mastering chain and what i'm gonna do now is go through each of these take them out and put them back in so you can actually hear what they're actually doing at higher levels okay guys it'll be a little bit easier to actually hear what they're doing okay let's get into it the first thing we're going to do guys take out this crammer tape like i said we wanted to add some harmonic distortion adds weight to our track so let's hear what happens when we take it out and put it back in let's get it watching [Music] all right guys like i said that as that harmonic distortion that body to the record to where we get perceived loudness let's get into the next thing ssl compressor okay guys you're gonna feel a lot of the weight get lost when we bypass this plug-in guys and that that weight kind of adds back and it kind of puts some glue to the record to where it sounds you know more together and gel together guys let's listen to it now [Music] i know you definitely can hear that let's get into our eq guys now this is going to bring life this is also going to bring punch and kind of speed up the record in a way if you guys can hear what i'm hearing guys uh let me know in the comments if you can't say hey hey man i don't know about that one all right let's get into it man watching me like youtube [Music] amazing breathing life at this point guys all right let's get into the s1 imager a little bit guys you'll hear a little bit of this with you know like i said guys you want to achieve most of this in the mixing phase but let's go ahead and listen to it all right [Music] now what i could hear specifically guys when i get rid of this s1 imager guys the vocals sound like it's literally coming straight through the middle of the track and what happens is the vocals kind of go a little bit more to the side guys it kind of spreads out just a little bit more and gives us some more width on our track all right guys and of course you already know what the l2 limiter does guys let's get into it [Music] that's how you master your track five easy steps you already know what time it is man see you guys in the next video benzos

Channel: TheWavMan

Views: 100,470

Rating: 4.9561687 out of 5

Keywords: How to master your song in 5 easy steps, Thewavman, how to master your song, how to master a song, mastering, how to master, how to master tutorial, mastering in 5 easy steps, 5 easy steps, pro tools, mastering in pro tools, fl studio, logic pro x, audio engineering, music production

Id: AgiTIlfNb_0

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021