Logic Pro Mastering Presets

hello and welcome my name is george my channel is all about helping you get the most out of logic pro so that you can record and produce your best music in your home studio today we're going to be looking at how to easily and simply master your music in logic pro mastering's an important part of the process and one of the main things that we do in mastering is to make sure that our tracks don't sound too quiet or too loud when compared to other master tracks if your track's too quiet for example it might be perceived as not having enough energy and just not sounding as great as one that would be louder and if your track is too loud on the other hand well you might start encountering some distortion and that doesn't sound all that good either so let's jump into logic and i'll show you an easy way to get this done [Music] so for starters i have a track pulled up here and you can see i have my master bus selected right here so you can see that track right here output one two and if i press play on this you'll see where my levels are currently at [Music] [Music] okay so you saw there i was kind of hovering around this area and the loudest that i got was minus 5.6 db so that means i have 5.6 db of headroom before i hit 0 and start clipping so that means i can make my song quite a bit louder before i upload it online to soundcloud or spotify or press it to a cd so mastering is going to help us achieve that and when we talk about mastering we're talking about applying plugins on our master bus which is this right here and all of our tracks end up passing through this master bus so that means any plug-in we put on here is going to affect our entire mix and our entire song so i open up our mixer for example all of my tracks end up going to my stereo out so my brass for example you can see here stereo out my strings are being sent to my stereo out and so on and so on same with my piano and every other instrument and track they all end up here to my stereo out track now logic pro actually includes some mastering presets that we can check out and these are channel strip presets so one way of loading them in is if we select our master output in the mixer which is right here and we go to the very top to settings then we're going to go down here to factory and you'll see this list of different presets that we can try and there's also a few more here under legacy logic we have some tools some metering tools and then some more mastering plugins here and some garageband presets as well here another way we can access these same presets is through our library which we can open up using this little icon here or the letter y on our keyboard as well so for example if i select factory here now you'll see all those lists of presets and now when you're first starting out one thing i would suggest is just going through some of these presets and seeing how that affects the sound of your song and at the same time you can take a look to see what plugins have been loaded in so if we start from the very top and go to add low end density now we can see all these different plugins that got added to our master output so we have a compressor here we have this sub base exciter an eq the multi-presser and the adaptive limiter so i'm now just going to press play and i'm going to scroll through a few of these different presets and see how that affects the sound of my song as well as the level [Music] [Music] okay so that's one way of just auditioning some different presets and see how it fits with the song that you're working on now if there's one that you find that works really well with your song then that's great but there's a few settings you probably want to still tweak i'm going to switch back to this one called broadcast ready because it's one of the simplest ones out of this list you might get overwhelmed with all the different plugins that get loaded in on some of these channel step presets but i'm going to show you which ones you want to key in on and make sure that you tweak those settings so that they fit with your particular song i'm just going to start by closing all these windows i'm also going to start by turning all of these plugins off so to do that i just hover over here you can see the little on and off button over to the left and i can just turn those off and i'll start by opening our first one which is our compressor so as i mentioned before all our tracks are going to be passing through our master bus right now so everything is going to be passing through this compressor and likely on your individual tracks you already did a little bit of compression so you don't need to over compress on your master buss so what i'm going to do is i'm going to press play and i'm going to adjust my threshold just so i'm compressing around 1 db maybe a little bit over 1 to 2 but not a whole lot a few other settings i might want to look at is the makeup gain and the auto gain i personally like turning the auto gain off just so logic's not compensating the gain for me and i'm going to turn my makeup to zero for now and if i feel like i need to boost some more gain later then i can do that so i'll press play and i'll adjust the threshold once again to get kind of around -1 to -2 db of gain reduction [Music] [Music] okay so just dialed that in a little bit got a little bit compression you could hear there it was kind of moving with the base so it was kind of compressing the base a little bit there and maybe just gluing it in a little bit better with the rest of the track so this overall compressor is just gonna kind of glue all of our tracks together just a little bit more the next plug-in we have is an eq i'll go ahead and turn that back on too and the same principles with the compressor apply to the eq so once again the eq this is going to apply to all of our tracks because they're all passing through here so this isn't the place we want to do any drastic boosts or cuts this is just kind of one final polish where we can maybe add a little bit of air like you can see here or do some little subtle cuts so we don't see any big boosts or any big cuts just little small subtle ones if there's anything that needs real fixing then you want to do that in the mixing stage and fix that on your individual tracks so just visually we can see here there's a little bit of a boost in the top end here and a little bit of a boost in the low end as well and a roll off right for the very low frequencies at 25 hertz so we can do a little before and after and see if we like these eq changes [Music] [Music] actually i kind of do like what that's doing is just kind of smoothing it out a little bit if we wanted to tweak the eq further then we can simply go and change any of these values by boosting or cutting them or moving these frequencies around as well or if we were happy with our mix to begin with well we don't have to include the q at all we can just leave that muted the next plugin we have loaded in here is a multi-presser and this is a multi-band compressor so you can see up here we have three different bands so we are compressing three different frequency ranges independently so it's kind of like three compressors in one but you have different settings for each frequency so right now band number one was off band number two here you can see goes from 20 hertz all the way to 390 and band 3 will go 390 to 5000 and band 4 5000 to 20k so i could go ahead and adjust the threshold of each individual band by changing these values here or since i've already have my compressor applied at the very beginning i'm just going to leave this bypassed i don't feel like i need any further compression on this track so i'll close this one for now and now we've got this exciter and this is just going to kind of add some harmonics in there based on the frequency we have set here so we can toggle this on and off and see if we're liking what's happening there [Music] [Music] okay i'm kind of liking what that's doing as well just adding a little bit more crispness in the snare drum and the hi-hats a little bit so i'm just going to go ahead and leave that on there as well and the last one and perhaps the most important is the limiter so it'll either be just the regular limiter or the adaptive limiter and they both work very similar i'll go ahead and turn this one on and you'll see we have a couple settings here we have gain and out sealing so gain is that's going to be gain that we're adding into our track to make it louder and out sealing that's going to set how loud our track can actually get so the ceiling here so we can have it set all the way to zero so that the limiter is not letting our track go above zero db or we can set that lower to minus one db for example now how much gain you add in and where you set your out ceiling is going to depend a lot on where your track is going to end up so for dealing primarily with cds for example well then generally you would have that set all the way to zero now these days most people are going to be uploading their music to streaming sites and most streaming sites prefer to have this at -1 now for talking about spotify for example well let's take a look at some of their recommendations on the spotify website they talk about here a little bit about how they apply normalization to tracks and that's to ensure that all the tracks that are played on spotify are gonna sound like they're relatively the same volume so that you don't get one track from one artist that's really quiet and then when you flip to the next song it's going to be really loud because when we're dealing with playlists we're dealing with songs from a lot of different artists that may sound quite a bit differently so if songs are too loud well spotify is going to adjust that and bring those down and if they're too quiet they're going to do the opposite and bring it up so you can see here that they say the they adjust their tracks to 14 l ufs and if we scroll to the bottom here they have some mastering tips for us so they're telling us to target our loudness level on our masters to be -14 integrated l u f s and to keep our tracks below 1 db at true peak max so this minus 1 db true peak we go back to logic that's our out ceiling so that's why i have this set at -1 and then true peak we want to have that on because that's how they're measuring that as well now the gain this is what we're going to use to target our -14 u f s so one more plug-in we need to add is something that helps us measure the loudness the l ufs that spotify is talking about so let's go below our limiter here click on that and we'll go to metering and we'll go to loudest meter now you want to make sure that this meter is the last thing in our chain so this isn't going to change the sound of anything it's just measuring how loud our song is so place this over here and now there's this little line here and this is going to help us just visually see where we are and we're aiming for minus 14 so i'm going to bring this up to minus 14. so i'm going to play our song and we'll see where we currently land i'm also going to hit the start button and that's going to start measuring our integrated l ufs levels [Music] so we can see on our loudness meter here this is our integrated value so this is the average value from when i hit start to when i stopped which is currently minus 18 and we want to get up to -14 so that means we can bump up the gain on our limiter which is going to bring up the volume of our overall track and then we also have m and s m for momentary so that's kind of a real time reading and s for short term so that's just a little bit longer than the momentary and i is going to be the average so the whole time that we press play so where i had my cycle currently enabled so i'm going to bump this up another let's say 4 db so let's try five and a half and let's see where that puts us now [Music] so now after making a few adjustments as we're going there i'm showing at minus 13.8 so that's pretty close to -14 now one thing to be aware of is i'm only listening to the end of my song right now which is the loudest part of the song but spotify is going to measure the volume of my whole song so you want to make sure that you do the same process and listen to your song in its entirety and then you want to shoot for -14 so if you're a little bit too high then you want to bring the gain down if you're a little too low then you want to bump the gain up once you've achieved that minus 14 db range well then you're all done you can bounce out your track and start uploading it to some different streaming services now one thing to mention too is each streaming service is gonna deal with audio a little bit different so they all have different requirements and they're going to normalize them them a little bit different so some are going to make your tracks a little bit quieter some are going to make them a little bit louder so i first suggest that you decide which platform you want to optimize your music for and then go seek out the requirements for that platform and then master your track according to those requirements another helpful tool and website is this loudness penalty website and all you do is drag and drop your file in here to see how different services would normalize your music so for example we'll go ahead and drag and drop the song we're just working on and see how that comes out so you can see here youtube spotify title and apple would all bring the volume down a little bit but pandora on the other hand they would boost it up so you can see how different platforms will react differently to the files that you upload so just as a recap we have all these different mastering presets available to us in logic pro to use as a starting place i suggest the broadcast ready is one of the simplest ones and the three main plugins you want to change with any of these presets are the compressor and dialing in the threshold just to around -1 or -2 db take a look at the eq and make any changes that you need to there or go ahead and bypass it all together and then the limiter where you want to set your output if you're dealing with spotify to minus one and then adjust the gain depending on how much you need to add back in to end up with the amount of loudness that you're targeting and we're using our loudness plug-in at the very end of our chain to measure that so i hope that's going to help you get started with some basic mastering and logic pro if you want to improve your workflow in logic pro don't forget to download my free logic pro hotkey cheat sheet by following the link in the description below i hope you enjoyed the video and we'll see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Georges Couling - Knuckleduster Music

Views: 12,833

Keywords: Georges Couling, Knuckleduster Music, mastering in logic pro, free mastering presets, mastering presets in logic pro, how to master, how to master a song for spotify, mastering in logic pro for spotify, mastering plugins, free mastering plugins, best mastering plugins, stock plugins, logic pro 10.5, true peak, lufs, streaming, spotify, rms, loudness, normalization, level, eq, linear phase, low end, clean mastering, master limiter, adaptive limiter, bitcrusher, multiband compression

Id: U-PBtfLG92Q

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022