Mastering Chain at Universal Mastering presented by Pete Doell

hello there and welcome to Universal mastering Studios I'm Pete Dell and we're here today in mastering Studio A and uh I'm going to take a moment and show you a little bit of how we achieve mastering basically we have a source which in the old days used to be an analog Source but these days 99.9% of the time it's a digital source so I have a computer that is the source computer and then it gets converted to analog and goes through my desk which has various signal processing things in it and gets re-recorded into this second computer uh the reason you obviously need two is because the source might be at 96k might be at 48k but whatever I need to record typically at 441 for a CD or maybe it's going to be 96 for HD tracks or something but you need two so you can have two different sample rates so you don't have to convert the files correct so they can commit It Whatever native resolution and so forth and I can do my thing and typically it's going to get converted to analog and then back to digital at whatever the delivery sampling rate is because there will be lost when you convert I guess well no you I mean if I as I was saying before if I wanted just a digital process I could do that but typically I'm going to go analog right so I have the prism converters up here and then from it it gets fed to my dangerous mastering console and on these buttons I can patch in whatever signal analog signal processing I might want uh and it also has I think we spoke earlier about a Technique we call Ms which is mid side where the stuff that's common to the left and right is can be processed separately as the med and the stuff that's not common to both sides remains on the outside and it's called the sides so this button will allow me to access that feature so I could make this EQ for example be controlling what's happening in the middle and this EQ could control what's happening on on the outsides if if I so desired um I have analog compression you know for the dynamic control to hopefully just glue stuff together or or make stuff that's poking out just kind of sit nicely uh and then I have analog equalizers um this is another compressor over here and then we switch to the digital domain over here where I have Digital Signal processors as well I have uh equal EQ I have compression and a peak limiter and one of the very biggest features of the room is the tc6000 which which can do a lot of what every one of these other pieces can do and really and more and it has four engines so I can do a number of things simultaneously I can have compression I can have multiband compression I can have Peak limiting I can have um EQ uh I can have um 51 unwrap if I was you know doing a project that required such a thing um what I do every once in a great while is you'll have a mix that somehow doesn't really make a lot of sense because spatially your ear thinks it it isn't kind of glued together and every once in a while I'll I'll actually use a a a pinch of of Reverb or a room algorithm from the TC and I'll use two engines one that's just going left the other that's just going right so there appears to be nothing in the middle to to Cloud up the image that you have achieved in your mix and suddenly it makes a whole lot of sense to your ear because you hear it in a space I got to be judicious about that but sometimes that's that's one of the uh odd uses of the 6000s Reverb stuff that Finds Its way into Mastery don't use it a lot but it's great and sometimes for for records the last thing I'll use is this and I'll use it to highpass out some of the Merc so you can actually get a really tight bottom and focused sound that you know is a good thing shall we say so beside all this uh great outboard gear uh can you tell about the the monitor face of uh your work as well yeah the most important tool we have in mastering really besides the ears are the speakers uh and because you can only you can only fix what you can identify and you can only leave alone the stuff that you know is already fine and dandy you don't need to to worry about it so your your speakers are your most important tool and I'm really lucky to have uh these full sounding uh D audio M3s um which are bi Ed externally and um they're really really great they're really great for this this size room which is a big room for a mastering room uh it's like 30 by 20 by 15 that's that's huge for a mastering room uh but these speakers handle the volume of the room just great and they don't compress big fan thank you for taking time to uh showing us um the signal chain here and the all your goodies in your studio my very great great pleasure please come again thanks

Channel: TC Electronic HD

Views: 107,341

Keywords: Audio Mastering (Industry), Music (TV Genre), pete doell, Universal Studios (Production Company), TC Electronic (Business Operation), system 6000

Id: K1Q6u7MrWR0

Length: 5min 52sec (352 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2015