Logic Pro X - #77 - Mastering in Logic

hello this is music tech help guy and welcome to episode 77 of my logic pro 10 video tutorial series in this episode we're going to master our track living on the run and originally i planned on doing a two or three part series on mastering but i decided you know what i'm just going to put this all in one long video and so we can wrap up the series um with mastering and that doesn't mean i'm not going to continue to make logic 10 videos it just means that the sort of the main series uh the main logic 10 series is going to come to a close today so um so let's let's talk about mastering before we start um start working in logic here um mastering is essentially the the preparation um and processing and editing involved uh when you are sort of preparing a song for its final destination its final media whether that be cd mp3 itunes whatever um and depending on what your your final destination is um you're going to maybe master the song a little bit differently um obviously when they were mastering to vinyl you know the mastering process included transferring tape over to vinyl and and the processing involved in between and deciding on how wide the grooves on the vinyl should be you know and things like that um nowadays in the digital realm um we do a lot of just processing to give the song just an overall lift and maybe give it some more body and maybe some more presence um so what another thing i want to make very very clear is that the way i'm mastering in this vidi video is not the sort of it's not the de facto method for mastering by any means um when i master in the studio i use a lot of hardware i use software that is more optimized for mastering i don't use logic i don't use pro tools either while i use pro sometimes i'll use logic and pro tools just for the some of the initial processing but i'm not you know using logic or pro tools exclusively for mastering so the method i'm going to show you today is what i like to call the the quick and dirty method it's basically all plug-ins no hardware and will give you a louder track a fuller track and a wider track and so those are some of the things that we're going to be processing and affecting on the master uh the frequency balance uh the dynamic range the dynamic balance giving the song a bit of a a volume boost and also enhancing the stereo image um also mastering includes simple things like just trimming and making sure that there isn't three seconds of silence before the song enters it's pretty embarrassing when you you know if you release a song on itunes and then you have to wait three or four seconds for the song to start just because you didn't trim properly so um also you to think about the context is this are you mastering a song for an album or are you mastering a song as a single if you're mastering a whole album you want to master the album as you know you want to master the entire album together you don't want to master each track individually because you want the the dynamic and frequency balance between the songs to be somewhat similar you want to match it doesn't mean that the composition or the groove or the feel of the songs has to be the same it just means that you know you don't want one song really quiet another song really loud and one song really bright and another song really dull so you want to sort of match the um the overall dynamic and frequency balance of the songs on an album as opposed to a single here we're just doing a single so we're okay it'll it's a bit simpler and then lastly one of the things you should do during the mastering process is check your master on every speaker imaginable listen to it on both both uh pro and consumer grade speakers listen to it on multiple pairs of studio monitors listen to it on headphones good headphones bad headphones earbuds car speakers your laptop your iphone listen to it on everything you want the master to sound good on all media not just your room with your speakers in your acoustic environment um because that's just going to give you one eye one sort of sound and only one perspective of what the master is is gonna sound like and it may sound completely different on someone else's system all right so the first thing i'm gonna do um with my track here my un unmastered track here this is the same bounce um that i bounced out in the previous episode when we finished mixing the song one of the first things i'm going to do actually the first thing i want to explain is make sure that when you import this file in that you change the sample rate and the bit depth of your project to match that of the file you don't want to down convert the file to 441 or something like that or 16 bit and then master you're going to want to master at the same sample rate and bit depth of the file and then down convert the file to whatever format you need to go to um so the first thing we're going to do after after you import the file of course is going to do something called dc offset removal dc offset is essentially when your waveform is not perfectly centered on the dc line dc standing for direct current whereas the waveform itself is a fluctuating ac voltage ac current or at least the waveform is a digital reproduction of that the problem with dc offset is if that if your waveform is slightly offset from the dc line it means that one side either the upper or or bottom side of the waveform might be slightly higher or lower so when you go to limit your track which we're going to do with the sort of the the end stage of mastering to get the loudest volume possible out of our track um it means that the top end of the waveform might be all the way up to zero but the bottom is not quite there yet and i i'm talking about top and bottom and it sort of seems you know parallel to panning and and you know position but it's not we're i'm just talking about the position of the voltage on the actual uh on the dc line and how far above or how far below that line it is so it's actually really really simple to do dc offset removal you just click double click on the track it'll open it up in the track editor by default you go to the file editor and in the file editor let me just zoom out so we can see everything here you just hit command a to select all and you go functions remove dc offset or press ctrl d it'll detect any dc offset here we have barely any 0.012 percent and then you say remove that's just going to give us a little bit more headroom to work with now no one ever ruined a recording by not using dc offset unless the dc offset was really bad you know 5 10 20 um what dcl offsets usually caused by is just um some sort of like electrical inconsistency in gear either in the mic the preamp the compressor um even maybe even the plug-in um and sometimes it'll occur for no reason at all you know just because we've summed all these tracks together and the overall average voltage is a bit higher or maybe a bit lower than the dc line so it's something very simple you can do to buy yourself a little bit of uh extra headroom and also center the waveform better on the track the next thing i'm going to do is open up my mixer command 2 and i'm going to put my master fader actually out in the arrange area and the way you do that is you right click and you say create track or you can press ctrl t now the reason why i'm doing this is i want to i don't want to create regular fades on my track uh or on my region the reason for that is that i want the fades like the fade in fade out at the end of the song even if even if there if there isn't a noticeable fade in fade out there's a quick fade fade in out i don't want those fades to be processed so i want the fade to be the last thing um the last thing that happens to the audio before i bounce it so um what i'm going to do is instead of drawing in a fade like this i'm actually going to draw in an automation fade on my master track here my master fader so i'm going to hit a to pull up automation choose volume as the automation parameter and i'm just going to zoom in and listen for the first sort of audible sound in the track so we can hear somewhere about here just after measure two probably can't hear that too well let me just pull it up here yeah somewhere in there just after measure two we start to hear that uh that fade in of that original that initial effect so i'm going to do is i'm just going to draw in nice little fade with automation here whoops there we go and typically for fade-ins i do um i like to do logarithmic fades and the way you can do that is you use the automation curve tool and you just pull up toward the end of the track it's going to go to the very end here there we go and then just listen to the end of the song one two three that's always been the way i do it i just listen for the the very end of the song and then count to three and then that's where i'm gonna end the song at it's just uh it's def it's not you know scientific at all it's not it's just uh i'm not counting exactly three seconds or anything like that i just i count to three and then what i'll do here is i usually put an exponential fade in so just using the automation curve tool drag down actually that might be just a hair long there we go and so the song would end like there somewhere so and that just gives us a little space between the next track on the album too if this is indeed going on an album all right so that's that let me just hit a to hide that it's gonna collapse the master fader there no reason to really have that up anymore by the way if i sound like i have a cold or something um i i i'm losing my voice so that's why i sound like kermit the frog today i just i almost didn't do this video today but i decided to go ahead and and just deal with it and uh you guys can make fun of my voice later um all right uh next thing i want to do is i want to check mono compatibility this is actually something i should have done in the in the previous episode uh before i bounced the mix i just forgot to um checking mono compatibility basically means that we're going to con temporarily convert this to mono and what we're going to hear is all of anything that's out of phase between the left and right channel is going to have some phasing sound some comb filtering sounds maybe even some phase cancellation issues um this is something that's pretty common to do because you want your song to still sound okay even on a mono system that sums the left and right channels together like a lot of smartphones a lot of smartphones have one speaker now i'm not in the school a lot of people are in the school of thought that they they actually um they mix in mono until the very end that's not i mean that's that's a good school of thought if you want to follow that you'll always have mono compatibility you'll always have minimal phase issues i i don't subscribe to that same school thought um to me it's 2014. stereos are recordings are in stereo you know and if you're not using earbuds at the bare minimum to listen to music then you're that's your your own fault that's the way i feel about it so i'm not saying that i'm gonna change my mix drastically if it doesn't sound great in mono but i might change it a bit just to sort of reduce some of the phase issues between the left and right channel i can tell you right now that i'm going to have some phase issues because i use that sample delay effect on the vocals all over the place and that effect alone will cause phase cancellation in the vocals everything else should be okay though um there'll be some minor phase issues between the left and right guitars but everything else should actually sound pretty good um if those issues bother you then go you know go turn that sample delay off on your mix and rebounce it and you won't have the mono compatibility issue so the way i like to check for mono compatibility and logic is i use a plug-in called the directional mixer it's under metering or excuse me it's under imaging i take that back we're going to come back and use this a little bit later for mastering but what the directional mixer does um what it can do for us for checking mono is we can take the stereo spread and make basically make it zero so it's mono we're gonna use this later as a processing plug-in to sort of increase the um the stereo field but for now we're just gonna narrow this down to zero and we should hear the track in mono so let's just take a listen so you can hear us as i pull that out of mono um the vocals really come through a lot better and the reason why is because like i said before it's because of that stereo delay effect that i used or that sample delay effect that i used in the previous episode so the only thing that's really sounding bad in mono is the vocals but um i'm not going to change it uh if you feel like changing it you can i'm not gonna change it because it doesn't bother me that much you know if you're listening to music on your iphone then you probably don't care too much about the fidelity of the of the audio anyway um okay so i'm just gonna get rid of that plug and that was just to sort of test the mono compatibility here you know i would say it's not great but it's not it's not the worst it could be we're definitely getting some phase cancellation in the uh in the lead vocal all right first thing i'm going to put on here is the multimeter it's under metering we used this a bit before i'm only pulling this up really just to keep an eye on the correlation meter which remember shows us the phase between the left and right channels we want to keep it in the blue and not in the red it's also going to show us the frequency balance and also our headroom and our levels and volume so when i hit play here the dark blue meters are showing us the peak levels and the light blue meters are showing us the rms levels the peak level is basically the top of the waveform here whatever the the loudest volume is at any given point in time rms stands for root mean squared and what is essentially is the overall loudness or the perceived uh power or loudness in the mix the higher the rms is the more perceived loudness you're going to hear the higher the peak is the more those top levels are going to be one of the functions of mastering is actually to pull those two values uh to put peak sort of hitting zero pretty cons not all the time but every single time there's like a hard drum hit but then also pulling up rms to give the song a volume lift but we don't want to do it too much though um because we also don't want something that um loses clarity you know you have uh too much of a lift i'm sure it's gonna be loud you know it's easy to make something loud but it's difficult to make something loud but still have clarity so i'm just gonna keep this meter up just as a reference um the next thing i'm going to throw on here and actually i'm going to do is i'm going to pull up the uh the mixer here i'm just going to pull up a little sliver of it over here on the side there we go and i'm actually going to put the multimeter on the the master output over here i'm not going to put it on the the actual audio track itself uh the next thing that's going to come up after the multimeter is i'm going to use a linear phase eq i typically don't use too much eq mastering unless i have to unless there's something that needs to be boosted like the high end or low end significantly um well you can tell that it needs a boost um really you shouldn't do anything significantly with the eq and mastering so let me rephrase that what i do do with eqs and mastering as i will turn on a high pass filter and what i'll do is i will scoop out everything at around around 24 or 25 hertz somewhere around there and i'm gonna make the shelf here or the slope i should say a really narrow slope so i'm just turning on the high pass filter changing the frequency to 25 and then making the slope 48 db so why do that well there is a lot of energy in the low range particularly in the sub frequencies and there's a lot of energy that doesn't need to be there because we're not going to hear it anyway and so by and some people will even go higher up than 25 they'll go up to 30 even then you're sort of cutting into the audible range but the problem is that there's a lot of sub low frequencies down here that just don't need to be there there's no um there's no typical stereo system or no typical speaker system or driver or amplifier that's going to be able to play that frequency anyway you're not going to hear that in your car speaker you're not going to hear that in headphones so it's just eating up extra energy that we can repurpose later get a little bit more headroom and push the volume of the track up further so we're just buying ourselves a little bit more energy there all right so that's that and again i'm using the linear phase eq because it uh it doesn't have the the phase interactions and sort of the coloration in the tone that the the channel eq does um so that's why i'm using that it causes a little bit more latency but that's okay next up under specialized is the exciter plugin it's exciter plug-in is um a sort of an aural exciter um it basically can boost the harmonics above a particular fundamental um when you boost harmonics you get a bit of a lift in the overall body in the presence or in the brightness of the tone now this works really great on guitars if you just throw it just in the guitar tracks um using it on the master you're going to want to deal with really really low boosting low levels so the more of this harmonics knob is going to go up the more of the the presence boost you're going to hear there's also two colors color one tends to be a little brighter than color two and then you can choose whatever the fundamental frequency of the boost is what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put this just below about 2k because i want the sort of range that the vocals and the the the body of the guitars are in i want that range to be boosted a bit so with harmonics all the way down harmonics up a bit there you go i just figured i'd pull it up and sweep it through so you can hear the effect that it has um so i ended up pulling it down just a hair a bit in the lower range actually i think i'll pull it down even further yeah we'll go with that um again i'm going with really really really low numbers here i'm not trying to i don't want this to sound like you know she's singing through a megaphone i don't want the mix to sound like it's going through a megaphone i just want a bit of sort of like a mid high boost on everything all right next up is the multi-presser the multi-presser is under dynamics and what the multi-presser is is it's a multi-band compressor the way multi-band compression works is it splits up the frequency range into different bands with this plug-in it can split up the frequency range into four different bands sort of like an eq does um and then you can click on these little white bars and you can set what the the crossover frequency between the bands is and then in addition to being being able to boost and uh dec uh boost and cut each band like an eq you can actually independently compress each band so that's really cool so if you want um sort of the mid-range to be a bit more dynamically level you can compress it a bit more and if you want the highs to sort of ring out a bit more and have more dynamic range to them you can compress those less again with mastering the goal is not to com to drastically change the track so i don't want to really hit i don't really want to hit the each of these channels too hard i'm not really going to use a ratio really any higher than about five or six to one so most of these controls they look a little foreign right now but they're essentially the same as any other compressor that we've talked about um what you can do is for each band you can solo that band so if i just want to hear the low range i solo that band i can just option click on this there we go i can add compression to this by increasing the compression ratio right here and then also lowering the threshold of the compression i like the fact that the each meter sort of gives you a visual of what you're looking at so when i hit play the light blue meter is like the input signal the darker blue meter is the output signal that's the the signal after it's been compressed so this little top little triangle here is actually corresponds with the compressor threshold up here so you can sort of visualize where you want the compressor to go and just maybe just have it tap the top of the meter or maybe have it go up dip down a little bit further into the meter so the other thing that you can do in here is there's actually an expander i don't use the expander at all um because i don't really need expansion if you don't if you mix properly you don't need expansion so i'm going to pull the expander threshold all the way down and with the ratio at one it's you know the expander is basically off so you just leave it alone so let me just hit play here and i'm going to go through each of the bands and just pull down the compression threshold a bit and pull up the ratio a bit me and the bars up here will show you the gain reduction on each channel too what i like to do is i like to just make the first band just sort of the sub lows everything like below 100. um two and three are sort of like the meat of the song the mid lows and then sort of the one to five uh k range that i told you guys to be careful about boosting too much and then sort of like your ultra you know your upper highs up here um so in addition to compressing each band you can also add or boost the out the makeup gain for it so let me just go through and sort of balance the way i want it will never change and this is what i was saying uh earlier um why i don't use a lot of eq when mastering because you can really get the the spectral balance the frequency balance from a multi-band compressor rather than having to uh do it with an eq the other thing we can control is we can control the individual attack and release time of each band typically with the upper frequencies i want more of the transients to come through a bit more so on band 3 and band 4 i'm going to pull these the attack time up a bit just to let the transients come through a bit more even on two a bit on on the sub lows i want sort of dynamic consistency so i actually pulled up the ratio a bit it's got the hardest compression threshold and uh the attack time i'm set pretty low because there's really not a whole lot of transients down in this area that really need to come through let me just play around the release times as well let me go back a bit here oh yeah that sounds about right um one last control that's in here is um well first of all there's output meters you want to make sure that you're not clipping it all in in the plug-in you can also sort of just reduce the output a bit if you think the signal out here is a bit too hot you can pull it down so i'm going to do that the next thing that's up is going to be the stereo spread plug-in and that's going to be under uh imaging stereo spread the stereo spread basically splits up the frequency range into these different bands and then you can pan them left or right um right now this is a really really drastic stereo spread effect this is not what i want but i'll play it for you anyway the problem with the stereo spread is that if i do a really hard spread like this instruments that were supposed to be in the left might accidentally show up in the right and ones that were supposed to be in the right might accidentally show up in the left so if i when i do use this frequent the stereo spread um the stereo spread plug-in i only apply it to the highest frequencies and i also pull down the intensity a bit in the lower range a lot in the lower range really and then a bit in the higher range i just want a very slight frequency spread in the upper range um i also you can also control the number of bands with the order knob here so if i pull this all up to 12 it'd be 12 bands pull it down you know they'll be six bands so i want as many bands as possible because i want these bands to be really narrow all right i think that'll work um there's actually another plug-in i'll show you guys later in the video called um well i already sort of showed it to you once it's the uh the uh um the directional mixer we'll actually use that for stereo spread later uh but for now we'll just go with this one all right we're good they're still not clipping uh the last processing plugging i'm going to throw up here is the adaptive limiter it's under dynamics adaptive limiter the adaptive limiter is a mastering limiter it's a lot like the say like something like the l1 from waves or the l2 from waves it's a plug-in that sometimes gets overused a lot because some people sort of think of mastering as being synonymous with volume and it's not always about volume it's about giving the song a bit of a lift but at the same time maintaining overall clarity um so there's only three controls in the adaptive limiter um there's an input scale it's the volume of the signal before it goes into the limiter so you can decrease that a bit if it's too loud coming in um the gain is how much gain you're just pure volume you're adding to the signal and the output ceiling in limiters is the threshold now the difference between something like a limiter and a compressor is that a limiter doesn't have a ratio actually the the on most limiters the ratio there is technically a ratio but it's a fixed ratio that's usually something like 20 to one or a hundred to one or a thousand to one or infinity to one so basically what i'm saying there is that the signal does not in a limiter will not surpass the output ceiling and if it does surpass the output ceiling it's only by a tiny tiny little bit so what we can do is set the output ceiling for wherever we want the max the peak volume of the track to be and then pull up the gain to get volume and heft out of the track again you don't want to pull it up too much because then you're going to lose clarity so you got to sort of find a nice spot for it to sit and if you left yourself a lot of headroom over here when we were mixing too you're going to have to add more gain but you're sort of going to be able to preserve the clarity if you mixed at a too too loud of a level you're not going to have much clarity when you add gain to this so i'm just going to pull the input scale just down a hair i'm not actually going to set the output ceiling at point o at point negative 0.1 db that's just a habit of mine because sometimes limiters aren't a hundred percent accurate at keeping things from um clipping um and like i said before some some limiters don't i mean don't have a an actual well most limiters don't actually have an infinity to one ratio which means that that sometimes sound can get slightly above the output ceiling which if your output ceiling's at zero it means you're going to clip a little bit even you know albeit just by a tiny little amount so i'll usually set the output ceiling at about point negative point one um or some somewhere between negative point one or negative point three i'll put it on negative point one so let me start with the gain all the way down then i'll pull the gain up and you'll hear the difference now like i said before you don't want to really pull this up too much because you'll end up with something like this just get a mix that's just really pounding and just doesn't you know just hasn't have any clarity to it and i still like to see a little bit of a bounce on the output over here i don't like to see it just all the way up at red all the time so all right so that's the last processing plug-in we're going to throw on here let me just throw another multimeter on here at the end so we can just compare the before and after so here's our output multimeter here's our input multimeter just make these a bit larger here let's see what the two look like after listening to it i feel like i want to get more a bit more of just a mid-range body out of it let's pull that up there maybe even a little bit more of the high end so let me just jump back toward the beginning here just finding a different position for the exciter there all right so let me just turn off the multimeters i'll play the before and the after so that's pretty nice um again it's we didn't completely change the the tonal you know the total balance of the song it's not a you know it's not a complete um shift away from what the original mix sounded like but it's just a bit of a bit of a lift you know a bit more presence a bit more body a bit more power um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just select with my cycle mode up here i'm going to select the range for bouncing so i'm just paying attention to where my fades were here we go just before the fade and this one's going to go just after the fade at the end and there we go now you might think oh we're done let's just bounce the song well there's one more thing we need to we need to do and actually this we can do this you know in the bound in the bounce window um so i hit command b to bounce um you have to you never want to bounce to mp3 and just call it a day you always bounce to um an uncompressed format so pcm and choose wave or aiff but you want to convert down to the format that you need for your project now that's a loaded that's sort of a loaded statement there because if you plan on taking a bunch of masters and putting them in a cd authoring program and then burning them all to disk chances are the authoring program will actually convert them down to 16-bit 44.1 for cd in case you didn't know this cd regular old cdrs you can only the audio on them only can have a bit depth of 16 bit and a sample rate of 44.1 so even if you recorded the song at 24 48 or a sample rate of even higher than 48 you're still gonna have to down convert the down convert the audio to a format that works for disk even for itunes when you send something in just like cd baby or band camp it ends up getting converted down to 16 bit 441 anyway so that it can be converted to an mp3 file so what i'm saying is that in the end you're going to have to make it 16 bit 44 1 no matter what unless you're like sending something off for like film or dvd or something like that where they can take higher bit depths and sample rates so what i'm going to do is i'm going to bounce this out at 16 bit 44 1 which is actually lower than what we recorded it at and and yes there is a reason why we record higher than what we're going to bounce to but i could spend a whole video on that so i'm not going to bother trying to explain that now what you want to make sure you do is make sure the file type is interleaved so you get one file rather than two files and this is the only time you'll really really ever ever have to use the dithering option just i usually just choose the power dither one power stands for psycho acoustically optimized word length reduction basically what dithering does is it adds a not even noticeable very low level noise to the audio in order to optimize the quality change that happens when we go from 24-bit to 16-bit the whole point of dithering is to make um the the downgrading from 24-bit to 16-bit seem like it's not there um seem so that you can't tell um so i mean if you've ever mastered something in the past and you didn't dither it's okay no one ever ruined a recording by not dithering you know um it's it's okay it's not the end of the world it's just something that's pretty common practice and the only time you really ever want to dither like i said when you're down converted you're down converting your bit depth when you want when you're going from 24-bit to 16-bit or maybe 32-bit float to 16-bit those are the only situations where you need to use dithers when you're converting your bit depth down to a lower bit depth sample rate uh doesn't matter if you're just converting sample rate dithering is not not an issue um i'm going to make sure that my normalized function is off because i don't want to normalize something that's already been limited to negative you know negative point one so we're gonna just leave it um and then i'm just gonna do an offline bounce and everything else looks good and we'll just hit bounce i'll just give this a name i'll call it lotr master number one okay so while this one is bouncing i want to talk about one other method um that you can use for mastering in logic um a plug-in and i got the idea to do this from a plug-in that i've used for mastering more recently um i haven't used it for a long time but it's a plug-in called vitamin from native instrument or not even it's from waves actually uh vitamin from waves what vitamin does it's sort of like a multi-band compressor it's not really a compressor it's more like a multi-band enhancer that lets you apply different amounts of stereo spread to those frequency bands so what it does is it breaks up your master into five different bands sort of like the multi-band compressor did and then you can independently control the uh the spread on each band the problem with using the stereo spreader is yes i can just apply it to the high end but i can't just shift like let's say i wanted to shift the stereo image to be wider or narrower without actually affecting the the frequency balance um you can't really do that with the stereo spread plug-in but you can do this excuse me with the directional mixer plug-in so what i'm going to do to get this set up is first i'm going to get rid of the stereo spread plug-in i am going to uh bust the output of the audio track to bus one it's gonna create an aux track for me and i'm actually gonna create three more aux tracks i'm gonna hit ctrl control n three times i'm gonna make the inputs on those buses also bus one now the reason why i'm doing this is as you may recall in the multi-band compressor and the multi-presser you can split up the bands just by soloing a band so what i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate my multi-presser on each of these aux tracks in the first one i'm going to solo the low band in the second one i'm going to solo the mid-low band in the third one i'm going to solo just the high mid band and the fourth one i'm going to solo just the high band so now i've broken up my bands to four distinct aux tracks and i can rename these i'll just say lf lmf hmf and hf there we go let me pull these down just a hair and the great thing about this now is well first first of all i did tell you guys the rule eq before compression um here i'm not really going to worry about putting the you know the linear eq on each of these i'm just going to throw it after um you know after the multipressers so what's happening here is we're taking the audio track splitting it into four sending it to all four of these aux tracks and all four of these aux tracks are summing down to our master output master output which is going to the master fader so i'm going to go ahead and just leave the exciter right on this track if you wanted to you could just throw it on one of the individual tracks maybe like the mid band or the guitar is or the mid low band where the low end of the guitar is i'm going to keep it just right on the track though the limiter i'm going to keep the same the only thing i'm going to do is i'm going to to each one of these i'm going to add the under imaging the directional mixer now typically high frequencies i want them to be more spread out and lower frequencies i want them to be more narrow um so that's what we can do now we can independently control the spread of each one of these channels so i'm just going to pull up the high frequency spread here and just jump up a bit so narrower wider they go to the high mid frequency band now this band has a lot of the content of the of the vocals in it so i'm gonna go pretty easy on it if anything yeah i'm going to narrow it a little bit more just to make the vocals a bit more defined on the low bands i'm actually going to on the mid low band i'm actually going to spread it just a hair it sounds a bit boxy in that range and a bit muddy so one easy way just to sort of break up that muddiness is to do a stereo spread on the low like the sub low channel though this one i'm really going to narrow the spread there we go now the only thing that's tricky about doing this method um is that sometimes if you adjust the the directional mixer a bit too much it's going to cause some phasing phasing issues between the channels because you're just sort of haphazardly taking frequencies in a high band moving them over left or right but then they're staying in place on another band and that that in itself can cause some phase issues so you have to be careful about how much you do this and when you do do this you just do it do it you know just be very careful about um you know making too drastic of changes to the master and it goes back to what we were saying before we don't want this we don't want to change the overall character of the song too much we want to more or less just give it enhancements but still maintain the natural character of the original mix so let me play this back for you oh and then this also gives us you know now we have four faders to control each of the four bands we can add other effects to this if we want to but again you have to be careful because the more you deviate from what the original signal was here the more you're going to sort of start getting phase cancellation issues which can be detrimental that can be helpful but they can also be detrimental so all right so let me just go ahead and bounce this one as well and then we'll listen to both of them back to back all the same settings and i'll just call this one master two all right so while this is bouncing um what i will say is that this series has been a lot of fun a lot of fun to do um i've really um myself have learned a lot about logic 10 you know working through 77 videos actually 78 if you include one addendum video um 78 videos uh that i've done for this series um it's really been a lot of fun i've learned a lot about logic that um you know i've had to really sort of dig really deep into the you know the depths of uh of the logic manuals to find some things to find some things that you know i've used before but maybe have never tried to explain or um you know or teach you know so it's it's been a lot of fun um sort of tapping in into that and uh it's been a lot of fun mixing this song i hope you've really enjoyed uh your time mixing the tune um what i'm probably gonna do in the next episode is that it's gonna be sort of like a finale episode where i just sort of talk about my thoughts about logic maybe give it a a rating um things i didn't like things i did like what i'm going to do for the future you know future logic videos what am i going to do so i'll probably do a separate sort of appendix video for that just because as you guys can tell i'm i'm really starting to lose my voice right now so i need to uh i need to let my voice uh you know rest a little bit before i do another video so so but while we uh you know let's listen to these masters uh we shouldn't just let leave them unlistened to um one thing just to keep in mind as well is that you shouldn't um you shouldn't just create one master for a song typically what i'll do is i will create multiple masters multiple versions for the artist to listen to and then they can just pick whichever one they they like the best so i'll do like a really loud one i'll do a really bright one more of a darker one a quieter one so a lot of times you know i'll give i'll give the artist three or four or five versions of the song they can pick which one they like the most i think i like number one the most on this song just because there's a lot going on in the tune and there's i can tell there's some phase issues going on because we did that uh that multi-band thing on number two but let's listen to a little bit of each of these so here's number one we don't have to look too far to see the face of destruction for me me oh all right that was the first master uh and this is the second one let's jump ahead of it we don't have to look too far to see the face of destruction me will never why change you lift me there we go uh yeah i like the first one better the i think the method we used for the second master might work better for like pop music or dance music uh we need a really sort of hi-fi spreaded uh sound um for rock music you know i just think the spread isn't really adding anything because the the guitars and the drums and the the bass are really making the song really dense already um so i i would go if i had to pick between the two i'd go with the first one so all right guys so i hope you enjoyed the video um thank you for putting up with my froggy voice i hope you've enjoyed the uh the series um like i said before the series is not over with you know i'm i'm probably i'm gonna keep making logic videos this is not the end um this is just sort of the the informal end of the main series i'll continue to make uh logic videos because there's still a lot of things that need to be covered um but yeah i hope you guys have enjoyed enjoyed mixing this song mastering the song and again if you want to purchase this session to mix and master it and follow uh this eight i think it's 18 or 19 part video series on mixing and mastering i'll put a link to it in the video description below so thanks again guys for watching this series i appreciate all the support i hope you've enjoyed this series as much as i've enjoyed making it you

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 621,316

Keywords: Logic Pro, Logic X, Logic Pro X, Logic 10, Logic Studio, Mastering, Mixing, Mix, Master, Compression, Audio, Multi-band Compression, Multipressor, Limiter, Adaptive Limiter, Stereo Spread, Recording, Session, Sound, Studios, Dither, Bounce, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, living on the run, Mastering Engineer (Film Job), Records, Album

Id: mXR9UFh4scQ

Length: 55min 36sec (3336 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 14 2014