LEARN CUBASE - 29. How to Master. The ULTIMATE start to finish guide.

welcome back everybody it's steve from featherlite  and first and foremost i just want to say   congratulations for making it this far  truly we have done an amazing amount of   work together throughout this entire tutorial in  the last video we learned all about how to export   all of our hard work outside of cubase either  into an mp3 file or a wav file or even stems   and this we're going to do the exact opposite  we're going to take that finished wav file   that we exported and we're going to import it back  into cubase and we're going to learn how to master   and mastering in a nutshell is basically  the last final professional step that your   audio goes through before it goes out to record  duplication plants or streaming services it's   also where things like metadata and isrc codes  are embedded so those are really important steps   because they determine what happens to your  audio when it gets out onto streaming services   so let's dive in and find out a little bit  more about how to master our finished product   inside of cubase a few things to consider before  you even begin the mastering process first your   monitoring environment if you have an excessively  noisy or highly problematic or reflective room   environment consider using one of the online  mastering services or having another person do   your mastering for you while it can be helpful  to check your mix and your masters on headphones   it's always a good idea to work on high quality  near field monitors from a trusted manufacturer   once you establish a comfortable working level  it is extremely important that this level does   not change from session to session which can  skew your perception of loudness always use   a commercially mastered reference track in the  genre or style of music that you're working in   this vital step helps you compare your  work against other commercial levels   as well as tonal ranges while it's technically  possible to put effects on your 2buss and master   while you mix down you rob yourself of  the most important part of mastering   and that's the perspective of the three stages of  recording tracking mixing and finally mastering   cubase actually includes a mastering template and  it has one stereo mastering template if we choose   that and hit create and then we can take a look  at what cubase or steinberg suggests that we use   it's got a couple of different plugins here let's  enlarge the project so we can see it full screen   we'll switch over to the console view so we can  see the routing more clearly and we can see that   there's two basic effects on our stereo master  bus this isn't a good or bad starting point but   it's incredibly limiting and it doesn't address  some mastering concerns we'll need to deal with   so let's start from scratch instead we'll  create and name a new project in cubase   instead we've already got a basic one going here  for demonstration purposes let's check it out   it's a simple two-track project but it includes  the most important thing of any mastering project   and that is the reference track it doesn't matter  whether it's rap or metal or edm or pop or hip   hop it doesn't matter the most important thing  is that you have a commercially mastered track   in the genre that you're working in to judge your  work against our reference track here is a very   popular pop song which we can't play obviously  because of youtube's copyright but we can tell   a lot from the visual indication of the track  itself we can see the peaks relative to the body   of the wave which gives us a lot of information  about the density or loudness of it and we can   see the overall wave shape rather it's distorting  or rather it was imported way too quietly and the   second track here is our mixdown track so let's do  that now let's go up to file let's hit import and   import it into our mastering session let's enlarge  the clips and at this stage we simply want to   ensure that we have a good quality export not too  hot and not too quiet so if it comes in looking   like this and it's way too low it is possible to  fix at the mastering stage but you're going to be   increasing the volume of it dramatically and in  doing so you're going to add noise so it's much   easier to fix at the mix stage and simply correct  it there and export it correctly and the same is   true in reverse if the wave shape you've exported  comes in looking more like this it may look closer   to the wave above it but it really isn't if  we look at the top of the wave shape here we   can clearly see that many of those musical events  have simply been cut off and once that information   has been clipped or distorted like that there's  no way to retrieve it it's simply gone for good   so the takeaway here is that there really is no  replacement for a well-mixed dynamic performance   that's been exported correctly the first thing  we're going to do for our mastering session is   change some of our mix architecture we're going to  jump over to the console view and we're going to   move our stereo master outputs over to the right  hand side of our console view this just makes our   workflow much clearer when we're comparing our  individual track or channel effects with our   master bus effects the next step is to start  adding effects to our mastering effects chain   and we're going to start off with steinberg's  frequency eq the purpose of a mastering eq is   to make global overall additive or subtractive  changes to the sound of the mix before it hits any   downstream processing the next insert effect we're  going to use is steinberg's multi-band compressor   the purpose of a mastering multi-band compressor  is to divide up your song into individual   frequency bands and then rein in highly dynamic  performances within each one of those banned areas   the next effect in our mastering chain is going  to be steinberg's maximizer plug-in and this is   going to be responsible for the bulk of the volume  increase on our imported wave all these plugins   are part of the standard cubase pro installation  however if you're an artist you can substitute the   frequency eq with the studio eq and the multi-band  compressor can be substituted with the regular   compressor inside of cubase in both versions  you just won't have access to its multi-band   capabilities the next effect we're going to add  to our mastering effects chain is steinberg's   magneto2 this is a great tape emulation plug-in  we're going to use this to add a little character   and warmth to our imported audio track and the  final effect we're going to add to our mastering   effects chain is going to be steinberg's brick  wall limiter and where we put this is important   in the signal chain this one is going to go in the  post position so we're going to drop it down here   into this amber colored slot that signifies that  it's going to be in the post position which means   any changes made to the signal that might push it  into clipping the brick wall limiter will act as   a safety valve and catch those peaks now that we  have our basic mastering effects chain it's time   to add some effects to our master stereo out  pay attention to this little green line here   just like the channel this signifies pre and post  locations and the first is going to be steinberg's   supervision meter tool this is a powerful and  flexible meter tool and it's going to allow us   to make some critical decisions about our mix as  we go forward and then the last effect we're going   to insert is going to be in our post or amber  colored position is steinberg's uv 22. we'll get   more into this when we talk more about our export  options later there are several different methods   to set up a daw for mastering but this particular  method of just putting the measurement tools   on the master bus allows us to switch back and  forth between our reference and our master audio   without worrying about downstream effects now that  our mix architecture has been set up the first   effect we're going to work with is the mastering  eq our mix sounds like this with nothing going on   to the right of our auto listen button  is our configuration options wheel if we   click on that we can change a bunch of different  display options and hold times and peak values   we can change it from the default  graph that we see here into a bar graph overall the mix is fairly clean and well balanced  we don't need to fix a lot of different things but   on playback here if we look at the rta we can  see that there's a little bit of a build up   in the 200 hertz category  that needs to be thinned out so that's right around here that  can be lowered just a little bit   so we're going to pull just a  little bit of that out of here unlike the mixing stage the changes we make at  the mastering stage will be subtle changes just   a few db here or there in problem areas and the  other area of concern is between the 2 and 3k   area it's a little bit strident there so  we're going to scoop out just a little bit   of the frequency there as well and be mindful  that the cues that we're using when we cut will   be fairly narrow the queue is the bell shape  of the actual filter and we want to make sure   that when we're cutting they're fairly narrow  and when we're boosting they're fairly wide   this style of subtractive and additive  cueing gives us a much more musical result   all right so right around here in this area here  as we solo the band simply by clicking on the node   there's a little bit of a build up  around the 3 and 4k area so we're   going to do the same thing here we're just  going to dip this out very very slightly   and we're really only going  to take out about 2.5 k   following the eq is the multi-band compressor  and in mastering it's important to understand   that just because you have an effect in your  mastering chain doesn't mean it needs to be   used all the time if you have a wildly dynamic  mix that has out of control highs mids or lows   this can be a powerful tool but it can  also do as much damage as it can repair   so it's best to approach a multi-band  with caution in mastering steinberg gives   us some great presets to get started with and  there's a lot of stuff in a lot of genres here   but most of them are a little bit too heavy-handed  for what we're doing in this particular example so   we're going to choose a preset called  reset and this just resets all of the   parameters back to their factory defaults  and this gives us a great starting point   multi-band compressors basically break up your  song into four fundamental frequency areas low   mids high mids and high frequencies this allows  us to work on each individual band or frequency   range independent of the others so for the time  being let's think of this as four different vacuum   cleaners whichever frequency range or band  your vacuum cleaner sits on top of is what   it's going to start sucking up if it sits on the  low end it's going to start sucking up low end   and same for the highs in the mids and how much  stuff gets sucked up is determined by two things   the ratio and the threshold knobs when something  in your mix is highly dynamic or loud enough and   it crosses a certain threshold the vacuum cleaner  turns on and after it turns on what determines how   strong or powerful the suction is is determined by  the ratio knob by clicking and dragging it up here   in the range window we can change the frequency  that each one of these bands or vacuum cleaners   will work on you'll notice in each one of the  frequency areas there's a little dot at the   top of each one of the bands this is the volume  control or makeup gain for each one of the bands first thing you notice here is that  it's sucking an awful lot out of this   band range so let's bypass this  now we have those mids back that vacuum cleaner is working overtime in  this area here and it's working overtime a   little too much it's sucking a lot of  the mid-range energy out of the mix   so we're going to go to each one of the band's  threshold knobs and crank them all the way back   to zero which basically means none of them are  going to be doing anything at the moment all   right so the first thing we're going to do is  we're going to change where these sit they're   a little broad for what we're doing for a rock  song we need a little bit more even control of   these and now what we're going to do is we're  going to go through each band and we're going   to drop the threshold until we start to see  some gain reduction in each one of the bands so there's the bottom end we start  seeing that so when we start to see   gain reduction we're going to back it off so  it just starts to kind of get the very top   now we're going to move on to  the mid-range band the low mids   and because there's a lot of energy from the  guitar and the bass guitars and the low mids here   this setting is going to be different than the  low end setting will be and then we just repeat   the same process for all the additional bands the  third effect in our mastering chain is going to   be steinberg's maximizer and this is going to be  the bulk of where our volume increase actually   comes from the interface is pretty straightforward  you've got a couple different algorithms to choose   from classic or modern we'll get more into that  later but for the time being we're going to leave   it on classic our mix knob basically determines  how much of the mix will be affected by this   in this case 100 if we drop this down to anything  lower it becomes a parallel processor for the   time being we're going to leave this at 100 and  we're going to keep our output at 0 db this is   important as we don't want the output of the eq to  overdrive the input of the multiband and so on we   want to make sure that all the inputs and outputs  of the effects stay at zero or unity gain this is   known as good gain staging so that nothing is over  driving anything else and following our maximizer   plugin is magneto2 and this is steinberg's tape  emulation plug-in it's quite good and we're going   to make a few changes we're first going to  go up to the presets window and we're going   to choose a preset called reel to reel this is a  great starting point but we're going to change a   few things we're first going to adjust the high  frequency we're actually going to roll this back   by about a db or a bit more and this is just going  to kind of take some of that digital edge off of   it and we're going to make sure that the output  stays at 0 db so we keep our gain staging in check   we're going to keep the frequency knobs the  same and the saturation and leave it in dual   mode for the time being just to add a bit of  analog warmth and character to the overall mix   now we want to call up our maximizer plug-in and  put it side by side with our brick wall limiter   that's in the post position these two devices  are going to work side by side to help us achieve   our overall master level for streaming  that's around -14 lufs and for physical   media like cds that's going to be higher so in  order to do that we need to take advantage of   steinberg's metering tools which are extensive and  powerful we're going to come up here to the little   tabbed window box area up here and choose the  right one that opens the right zone and at first   we see the peak meter this is the standard true  peak meter in cubase and we can see that the brick   wall limiter is doing a great job at keeping  our true peak level at right around -1.0 db   that gives us plenty of headroom come down here to  the lower right area and choose the loudness meter   and this opens up steinberg's l-u-f-s meter or  loudness units full scale meter and this is the   meter we're going to be using to set our streaming  levels with if you're working in cubase artist you   won't have the full size loudness meter features  and write zone features that cubase pro does   however you can go up to your 2buss inserts  area and on the very last slot after the uv   22 dither module we can come down here and select  another version of supervision once inserted we   simply need to change the metering configuration  choices we go to level choose the drop down menu   and select loudness this is exactly the same  loudness information and readout as the full   size cubase pro only it's in a configurable  module that we can move around so from here   we'll get that exact same play out information  we want to make one change to the meter and we'll   come up here to the configuration wheel and we'll  open the module settings and we'll choose 18 db   scale and all this does is give us a much broader  view of the range of the digital meter readout   if you're working in a version of cubase that's  before version 11 and doesn't include supervision   you can use the ulean lufs meter this is one  of the best commercially available meters that   measures loudness and true peak meter reading and  this vst plug-in just happens to be free of charge   i'll leave this info in the links below you'd  simply insert it in place of the supervision   in its current slot location directly after  the last thing in the master bus which is   the uv 22 dizzer module and you are good to go  for metering back in cubase professional and   its full size lufs meter we're going to come up to  the configuration wheel and the first thing we're   going to change is 18 db scale this just gives  us a broader overview of the meter reading itself   and as we hit playback we can see that our reading  currently is it about minus 15 or a little lower   than that the lufs meter takes its reading over  time and it averages the overall playback level   of your song and gives you a reading here at the  integrated mark most modern day streaming services   including itunes and spotify require your master  to be submitted somewhere around the -14 l-u-f-s   mark if it's higher than that or significantly  lower than that they will re-encode your master   without your permission to make it reach that  playback level and that presents some problems   if you send them an excessively quiet master and  they re-encode it now it'll be a noisy one because   they're going to bring the noise floor up as they  re-encode it if you send them an excessively loud   master with very little dynamic they're going  to re-encode it and now you're going to have   the exact same level of song as everybody else  except your song is going to sound really lifeless   because it won't have any dynamics so we're going  to hit playback and we're going to begin to raise   the optimize wheel here on our maximizer until  we see our integrated level begin to increase   now this measurement is going to be made over time  in fact the entire length of the song which means   if you have dramatically quiet sections of your  song and loud sections of your song you'll need   to let it play through the entire length of it  before this measurement reflects any accurate   meaning there's a couple of different schools  of thought where this is concerned since most   of the streaming services require your master  to be submitted at -14 you need to keep in mind   that this is an average reading over time if  your song has significantly quiet sections   then those quiet sections are going to factor  into that overall reading which means you might   need to master it a little higher than -14 to  make up the difference between the balance of   the quiet and loud sections and this is where  our commercially mastered reference track starts   to play a really important role in the mastering  process when we switch to our reference track and   play it back even though we can't play it to you  because of copyright reasons we can clearly see   that the overall integrated reading is higher  than -14 lufs this is because it takes into   consideration the loudest and quietest parts of  the song and still probably would be re-encoded   on some streaming services if you'd like to  find out exactly how much of a penalty your   master is going to incur on a streaming service  there's a website designed specifically for that   the loudness penalty analyzer website allows you  to drag and drop your master directly onto the   applet without uploading it and it'll give you  a numeric readout of exactly how much it will   re-encode your wave by i'll leave this information  in the links below as it's an incredibly helpful   site in the mastering process and finally one last  step to checking the mastering process and this is   incredibly important is to make sure that both  the channel volume of the song we're mastering   and the stereo outputs of our main outputs are  both set to zero db or unity gain as this directly   affects the meter reading itself command clicking  on either fader will return them back to their   zero db position and as we mentioned before this  is also why we only have measurement plugins on   the master bus nothing that can change the volume  output as we switch back to our master we can see   as we increase that optimized level that we're  getting a higher integrated reading as we continue   to play back our master and check the integrated  reading we can see this is more than enough level   to meet the requirements for streaming services  in fact it's a little bit too hot and we could   back it off since there is no actual advantage  to mastering any hotter certainly not where   streaming services are concerned because of that  re-encoding process so as you can clearly see   today's mastering process includes making several  different masters for different applications   for cd duplication your masters are going to be  significantly hotter and that integrated level   will be significantly higher now it's time  to move on to our main stereo outputs or our   2buss and look at some of the effects that  we put on that earlier the first up is our   supervision plugin and we're going to change the  display to a panorama this gives us a stereo view   of what our mix looks like we got a v3  on the right and some things on the left   but overall it's correctly centered if this was  radically to one side or the other we might need   to go back and do some repairs at the mixed stage  before proceeding to master and the next thing   that we want to double check before we finish our  mastering process is the phase of the song itself   we want to determine whether our song has any  significant phase problems we do this by coming   up to the readout and change the display to face  scope the face scope is a powerful tool to let us   know if we have phase related problems on this  particular display we can see that the bulk of   the song's activity is correctly centered between  the x however if all of the song's material was   completely at the top of the display or the  bottom we would know that our song had phase   related issues that needed to be addressed  before moving on to our final export stage with all the audio adjustments made to our master  completed it's time to move on to the final stages   of the mastering process and that's our audio  exports and we're going to be doing several for   several different applications the first of which  is going to be our mp3 export and that's going to   be for all of our streaming services and social  media this is going to have slightly different   requirements than our wave file exports so we need  to do one thing first before we can export and   that is come up to our two bus our stereo master  out and make sure that our uv 22 dithering module   has been disabled we won't be using that for our  mp3 export from here we go up to our file menu and   navigate down to audio export and choose the audio  export dialog box from here we can give the song   file a title we can also choose destination cubase  has a default destination that's buried inside the   project folder but we're going to change this so  that it's on our audio masters hard disk instead   once we hit save that simply establishes that  location and we can also change the type here   so our first type of export is going to be an  mp3 file we would normally choose the bit right   here but we're going to choose high quality  mode for our mp3 which is going to disable   that option and we're also going to choose the  highest quality export option which is 320.   once that's done we're going to click on edit id3  tag information this opens up the metadata box for   our mp3 here we can establish a title for the song  we can enter our author and our album information   as well this allows us to assign a track number  to it and the year that it was produced and also   open up a genre box which has an entire list of  song genres so simply pick one that's close to   your particular genre for your song and finally  a comments section or field and this can contain   quite a bit of information this can be album  information production notes or if you've been   given or have purchased an isrc code or number  for your production by one of your cd distribution   companies or streaming service companies like  cdbaby or distrokid or tunecore that information   would also be entered here as well the last thing  to do is just confirm that our stereo output box   is checked from here we simply add the job to  the queue and hit the start q export button and   for the last set of export options we want to make  sure that our uv 22 dither module is re-engaged we   want to make sure that that's now active and we're  also going to choose 16 bit here because we're   going to be going from a 32-bit float environment  down to the cd distribution requirements of 16-bit   and we're also going to choose auto-black this  just means that when there's no music present   it'll gate the effect of the dithering module so  there's no musical artifacts once those changes   are made we simply go back up to the same file  menu navigate down to export and open the same   audio export dialog box and then from here we also  change from mp3 to wav file and we make a couple   of other changes as well we want to make sure that  this is at 44.1 k and that our bit rate is at 16   bit these are our cd delivery requirements these  boxes here we're going to leave in their default   positions we covered these in a previous video so  you might want to go back and get more information   we want to confirm our stereo output box is  checked and we also want to clear the queue and   add this current job to the queue we also want to  do a separate audio export that's specifically for   video so we're going to retitle our wave export  and we're going to check the destination for that   as well and then we're going to come down here  and choose 48k since that's the delivery standard   for video we're going to leave this at 16 bit  and we're going to come down and hit the add   to q button to add that job to our list and the  last export job we're going to do is for high-res   audio since many places like itunes can actually  receive high-res audio files and play them back   now so we're going to change this back to 44.1  k but we're going to change the bit depth to   24 bit and we'll title that accordingly and then  we'll add that to the job queue as well from here   we simply hit the start q export button and all  of these jobs will export for us automatically so there's a step-by-step walkthrough of  mastering your audio inside the cubase   environment for streaming services  for social media and for other   physical media platforms hey if you learned  something or if this was helpful in any way   please hit the subscription and notification  bells it really does help keep the channel going   be creative stay safe and we'll  catch you guys in the next video

Channel: Featherlightstudio

Views: 126,026

Keywords: Steinberg, cubase, cubase pro, cubase artist, tutorial, mastering, how to master, mastering audio, master file, streaming, podcasting, streaming master

Id: kWvAN9-2v8M

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022