How to Setup a MASTERING SESSION in Logic Pro

just setting up a dedicated mastering session will likely improve your final master and this is for two reasons first and foremost is because it forces us to think of mixing and mastering as two different processes and that's important because they are when we're mixing we're focusing on everything going on in the track when we're mastering we're focusing on just that final stereo file and making sure that it's going to hold up against other commercial releases and if you're working in a project of multiple songs making sure that they'll all sit well together within that project and then two a dedicated mastering the session allows us to do a few things that lets us really focus in on the mastering process we'll look at that a little bit later in this video but for example we can lay out all of our songs that we're going to have on a project together and listen to how they'll flow together and make sure that all those transitions are going to be smooth we can also compare our mastered version up against our unmastered version and make sure that there's nothing we're losing in the master so our Master is actually sounding better and not just sounding different or louder or more processed or whatever you might be hearing if you try to do it inside your mixing session so in this video we're going to walk through the entire process from exporting out your song to create a mastering session and then how to set up a mastering session to have all these different components easily and in just a few minutes okay let's jump into logic so our first step is to export out our song from our mixing session before we do that really quick I just want to play a little bit of this song so you know that I'm someone that you might want to learn from I think it's important that you like the sound of the music of the people that you're following so that you're not following someone teaching you stuff when you don't like the way their music sounds so hopefully you enjoy this by the way if you haven't been following along this is a song that we just finished mixing together I've gone through and done a few minor mix RW Visions so if you've been following along with that Series this is going to be kind of the before and after we're going to compare it to the static mix here which is just our level set and then the Final Mix that has all the EQ and compression and all that stuff going on so check it out the mix first then we'll jump down to the static mix which is kind of the before instead of crying at the table instead of giving names instead of lying that you're stable instead of pushing it away you say it's just to get out yeah it's just to get out out now say yeah say all get okay so just to give you kind of an update on where it's standing I think a big improvement over that static mix and again these are just the fundamentals if you don't already have my six-step checklist to a PR mix that's the process that we just follow to mix this in real time on the Channel go back and check out those videos but also be sure to grab the six-step checklist to a promix for free from Link in the description below it just goes through this process it's the same six steps that all professional mixes have and how to do them specifically inside logic it's really going to help you out if you're struggling to get a final result that you're happy with you have to get the mix rate before you move on to mastering so definitely go through this six-step process and then come back and go through this mastering series with me let's go ahead and jump into exporting out so the first thing you need to do is set your cycle region to be at the actual start and the actual end end of the song So if we go to the beginning here I just made sure that I had everything basically the way I like to do is just find just a little bit before the first hit so for me it's just a little bit before bar two just enough so that we make sure we're not cutting anything off and then at the end you just want to listen through and make sure that everything has enough time to ring out and you also might want to consider using your master trk here to automate down a fade out just to make sure that everything fully has faded out by the end if you aren't seeing your master track it's just command shift and M on the keyboard will hide or show the master track so be sure to set that just a quick fade out at the end just to make sure that it sounds right at the end I think a lot of people skip over that okay so with our cycle region on you want to be sure to turn that on now before we bounce this out you want to turn off any sort of limiting that you put on at the end of the last video we talked about using a limiter to bring it up to more commercial volume as we're doing our mix revisions we want to go ahead and turn that off because that's a step that we're going to do in the mastering process so turn off any sort of limiting that you have I'm also going to turn off my level meter I'm sure there's no actual sound impact from this plug-in but I just turn off anything that doesn't need to be on it's kind of a a paranoia thing I don't know anyway and then you just want to hit bounce on your master Trek here you can see this in this window by hitting I or you can go over to the mixer window and hit this little b and c in the bottom right corner there and then we just want to make sure that we're bouncing out a PCM that you have wave selected 24-bit and then whatever the sample rate of your session is is fine and then I like to turn off dithering for this we'll turn it on when we're exporting out our final Master dithering is complicated it doesn't really matter all that you need to know is that you don't need it on in this phase but you do want to have it on for your final master so we'll turn it off here and then we'll have offline bounce and because I set my cycle region you'll see this is roughly the time of my song If you don't set your cycle region or if you have a selected a region of audio then it's just going to do that or it's going to do the ENT length of the session pretty much so be sure to set your cycle region and you should should see the appropriate amount of time for just your song We'll go ahead and hit okay and pay attention to where you bounce this out because we're going to need to go find it in just a second once it's finished bouncing out we're just going to create a new session we'll close this session and then in this session we just want to create an audio track and then we need to go to our finder and find where we just saved that bounced version of our song so be sure that you're clear about how you're titling your track so it's easy for you to find it whatever makes sense to you and we just want to bring this into the new mastering session but right off the bat we also want to go ahead and take it and hold option on the keyboard and drag this down to create a duplicate of this and what I like to do is call this top one unmastered and we'll mute it and we'll call this one mastered and that way anytime throughout the mastering process I could quickly solo the unmastered one just to quickly tell if I'm making progress in my mastering if I'm liking what I'm doing and not just that I'm changing it as I said before okay so this the second thing is to bring your song into the session the third thing we need to do is bring a reference track into the session so a reference track is just something that we can quickly reference to make sure that we're going to stand up against commercial releases Andor other releases that are out so in this case I'm going to bring in the last single from my band so that I know that it's going to hold up against recent releases for us I will also typically bring in one two three other professional Masters to compare it against I'm not going to do it in this video just because of copyright strikes and things like that but you want to have if other releases that you've done so you know what will stand up against your other releases and then other professional mixes that you can quickly reference again against and then we just want to mute that track as well so this is going to be one of our references this is our Master track that we're going to be focusing on and then if you have other references you'll just put them down below this and mute all of them that way if you don't have anything muted you're hearing your master track and then you can jump into one of these solo tracks to either hear your song unmastered or one of the reference tracks okay so with nothing else soloed the next thing we want to do is go on ahead and run the mastering assistant now we're not mastering or song with the mastering assistant I'm going to teach you a process for getting a better master in my opinion than the mastering assistant will typically give you but it's kind of just like having a second mastering engineer Master the song and then you can compare yours up against this AI mastered version and just see what you like better and if there's anything you like from theirs better that you want to try to do in your master it's free so why not do it right we're going to go ahead and turn that off and then the the last thing we're going to do in this setup is under metering we're going to pull up the multimeter and this is just a great way to know everything that's going on inside your master I've done an entire video where I talk about this plugin a link to above here but this is going to be the meter that we're going to keep an eye on especially when it comes to making our song loud so that we know how loud we're getting with our mix but also as we're comparing seeing the frequency response of our mix against our other reference tracks this meter is going to allow us to do that so I can now just have this meter up I can listen to my master once I get into it and then I can quickly solo this other master and compare tonally what I'm hearing volume wise what I'm hearing just to make sure again that they're going to stand up against each other in a final released version so that's how you set up a mastering session now in a second I'm going to show you if you are ever working on EP or album how to lay that out in your session so stick around if that's interesting to you if not then this video is done for you but it's important that you set this up you actually take the time to do this because it's going to do two things one it's going to shift you out of mixing mode it's going to make you focus into mastering mode which means that you're going to make sure that you get your mix done before you bring it in here because it's a real pain to keep going back and forth between the two and two it's going to mean that you're really focusing in just on what you're doing in mastering and you're not kind of jumping back and forth between mastering kind of and fixing it in the mix and just letting that be nebulous if you treat it the way that professionals do which is that you have a dedicated mixing engineer a dedicated mastering engineer you're likely going to get a better final result this is a simple process it's a simple setup but it's important to do this and next week we're going to be using the setup to actually go through the mastering process so definitely come back for that and if you don't already have it be sure to grab my six step checklist to a pro mix from Link in the description below it's really going to help you out it just goes through the six steps that all professional mixes have and how to do them specifically inside logic if you've liked any of the Snippets you've heard of this mix then you're definitely going to appreciate that checklist because it's the exact process that we followed on this channel in real time so you can see me go through it and you can use that that checklist to guide you through the next time that you're working on a mix but anyway let's jump over to an EP mastering session so you can see how I lay that all out okay so here we have an EP mastering session and this is a little bit different because two of these songs were mastered and released as singles first so the way I've set this up I have this song that was already mastered so I brought in the mastered version of that and then I brought in the first unmastered song and I set up my mastered track and then my unmastered track and then this song was mastered so I just brought in the final mastered version of that and then I brought in the next song that was unmastered and I have a mastered version and unmastered version and then finally the last song it's an EP so it's just five songs we have the mastered and unmastered versions and then throughout I have reference tracks that correlate to the different songs so uh I could quickly go between this song this master here and check again this other those are pretty different songs but they you can get a sense just that if those were back toback in a playlist they're not going to be like oh God that sounds way off compared to that other song right so that's the idea here is basically that you can lay them out as if you were just going through all the songs so you could listen through this from start to finish and I can check like how does this transition from the end of this how does it naturally transition into the next song here as we get into it does that sound right volume wise does that sound right tonally right same thing as I get to the end of this song [Applause] [Music] here right I can make sure there's the right amount of space so one thing I'm also checking is how long do I want it to be before that next song starts so I can feel for that and then the way I set my uh cycle region is just basically making sure that I have the right amount of length so I sometimes will go a little bit past where the song actually ends so that it goes into the next song at the right moment for me so you can get really intentional with it and then you're listening to the tone across all the tracks and then I have the mastering for each individual track on these individual tracks and then I have on my stereo output the one meter that I can listen or pay attention to all the mixes and all the Masters through make sure that they're all looking and sounding right and are hitting roughly the same LS and all the different volume scores that you want to be paying attention to and that the EQ analyzer is looking roughly appropriate across all of them there's nothing really glaringly different I can look at all that information very quickly with just this one meter that's set on my stereo output here so that's the way I set up an EP mastering track it would be the same for an album just obviously with more songs and you can see that it's just more helpful than just doing this in each individual session and at the end of the day it's actually going to be much faster doing this in one session as opposed to going into each individual session of a mix and trying to just do your master there export it out check it against all the other songs this in the end of the day is actually going to save me a lot of time and it's going to get me a better result at least in my opinion and my experience okay so hopefully this video was helpful if it was be sure to like it it helps other people see it I know that we haven't even gotten into mastering yet but I promise next week we're going to do a deep dive into mastering in logic so definitely come back for that if you don't already have it be sure to pick up the six-step checklist to a pro mix it's really going to help you out and I'd love to hear from you have you been setting up mastering sessions have you just been doing it inside your mixing session let me know in the comments below if this video was helpful be sure to like comment subscribe and I'll see you next week we Deep dive into mastering one at a time I can only one at a time time I'm the gold briak champion

Channel: The Band Guide

Views: 4,481

Keywords: setup a mastering session in logic pro, mastering in logic pro, how to master a song in logic, mastering tutorial, advanced mastering tutorial, logic mastering assistant, automation in logic, mixing vocals in logic, music production, the band guide, thebandguide, Logic Pro x tutorial, Logic Pro x, logic pro, logic, advanced logic tutorial, plugins in logic

Id: 4wtj11BalTU

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024