Mastering Like A Pro with Stock Plugins (Logic Pro X)

all the way from the start I can feel it in my heart like all the way from the start. Hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well today's video we are going to be revisiting mastering a track start to finish top to bottom using only stock plugins in Logic Pro X so this is something I get a lot of questions about to do an updated video we're gonna utilize all the most recent plugins here and even if you're using other plugins outside of this the approach is going to be very similar let's take a listen to it dry let me put on just a metering plugin so that we can keep an eye on that throughout the process here and then we'll dive in and start building a custom mastering chain with our stock plugins all right so that gives you a good idea of what we're dealing with you can see that we've got about five DB or so of headroom if you want a little bit more what I usually do is just set up VCA faders so this will you know keep all your auxes and send relationships intact and you can just bring everything down accordingly I also like to use these when I'm creating stems very easy to create your beat stem or your vocal stem at the end of the process but just brought that down and then what I want to do is just go ahead and switch our metering over to true peak and RMS obviously true peak has become a lot more important these days in terms of streaming you tend to want to be at about minus one and the next thing that I like to do with the metering here in the the logic multimeter is just go ahead and give yourself some goals to shoot for in terms of you know RMS and LUFS so depending upon where this is going to be delivered that will inform you know how you want to set these but I'm gonna go ahead and just shoot for around - 9 - 10 LUFS integrated which is going to be competitive in terms of loudness across the platforms obviously when it's normalized it's gonna be at minus 14 if you're curious about that I will put a link to some videos that explain that further we're gonna shoot for that here and then as far as RMS let's just say we're gonna go for more around probably - 9 - -8 let's just put it at minus 9 for now so again they just give you some points to shoot for in terms of level so we should be good there I'm gonna go ahead and just slide this over to my other monitor here so I can keep an eye on it throughout the process but we'll bring it back over so you can take a look so the first thing we want to do is just give ourselves some kind of deductive EQ especially to clean out any low-end in terms of mastering so this is not always necessary but it's certainly good to at least have the option to clear some things out so what we'll do is we'll just set up our low-cut here and then I'm gonna move this Q up so we've got a steeper slope and generally these days you know you're not gonna be wanting to roll off anything above 30 especially in this style there's just a lot of low-end so I'm gonna set it at about 25 for now I don't think we've got a ton going on down there so it's pretty clean already but again just as a sort of a safety precaution there next what I'm gonna do and this is just kind of generally good practice in terms of mastering it comes down to preference some people like the sound of using just a standard EQ cuz you get some color out of it but I like to go ahead and just use linear phase EQ which I'm not gonna go into too much explanation about this but they tend to be you know more pristine and less colored and just a better option in terms of being really surgical with your eq's in the mastering stage so I'm gonna switch over and you'll see that it will retain you know whatever we did in the channel EQ but again just in a linear phase option here that's going to be a little cleaner so next up what I'm gonna do is go ahead and add an additive EQ after our deductive EQ the vintage EQ collection is really really solid but the graphic EQ especially to me is a very nice choice for mastering and what I'm gonna do is over on the output model let's choose smooth and we're gonna utilize this drive because it just gives us a little bit of saturation a little bit of level and I'll show you how that works let's put this at about 3 on there so you can hear just by turning that on we just get a little subtle lift and so now what I'm going to do is just tune this which allows us to change these notches and I'm going to move these hires so that we're getting more towards about 20 K on the upper end and we're gonna add just a little bit of 20 K air let's try maybe a DB, DB and a half and then down here at 10 we'll do about a dB so just getting a nice air on there and you know if you want to really just get a better idea of what you're doing you could see that I was just moving these up and exaggerating a little bit so that I can kind of train my ear to what exactly we're tuning there and then just kind of rein it in bring it back and check so the next thing I want to do is just go ahead and feed our additive EQ into a multiband compressor and in this case in logic I believe it is called the multi presser yes does not have an updated GUI but that's alright it still works it's gonna do what we needed to do but so what we're gonna do is just go ahead and bypass the other bands here these lower bands we're not going to utilize these what we want to do is control the extreme high end of the mix and so you just notice in in some modern masters once we start boosting things and this mix has already got a nice sheen on the vocals and what not we don't want it to be really fatiguing to our listener and once we get above you know about 15k that's sort of that dog whistle kind of area where it can just be sort of a sensation and so you want to make sure and control that in your mastering, so we're just gonna set that band up here to 15k and let's slowly bring down the threshold just so that we can see where the attenuation starts happening here let me slide this over so you guys can hear more of the hook so we're seeing a little bit of attenuation but what we want to do there is just kind of set that threshold to where you know in the extreme peaks or you know the louder points we just kind of kiss it a little bit and control that high end so now I'm gonna raise the ratio up let's just do something pretty extreme almost like a limiter I'll just go as high as it'll go and we're gonna keep the release pretty fast attack will slow that down just a touch so it's very subtle when I turn it on but you can hear it's just kissing that snare drum there's a little bit of excess brightness in that also you know a little bit of sibilance in the vocals so just a means to control all that and make sure that we're not taking our listeners heads off with that top end alright so for fun let's try and add the exciter which is something you don't really hear a whole lot about in the Logic Pro X stock plugins but it's it's a pretty good exciter and it is under specialized we're gonna go ahead and what we're gonna do is set this to you know about 7k 8k because we want to just add a little bit of excitement to the top-end of the vocal and some of you might be saying well this is kind of counterproductive since we had boosted the high and then we you know fed the multi presser but what we're doing here with the exciter is actually a little different than just an EQ boost you know we're adding some harmonics which is a little bit different sort of sound I'll show you here in a minute and we can actually select some colors for it too to add some variation but let's slowly bring in some harmonics so as I'm switching between color one and color 2 - I like the sound of color 2 it just sounds a little smoother to me adds something nice to the vocal and doesn't make things too harsh up there so we'll leave that again just something really subtle all right so now let's get on to the stereo spread which unfortunately there's not a great option in the stock plugins and logic as far as mastering goes for this but we're gonna make something work it will do the job we just got to get our hands dirty a little bit so we're gonna pull up this little un-updated plug-in stereo spread little utility here and when you first turn it on warning I'm gonna press play but this is not gonna sound good not pleasant but what we want to do is just make this very subtle so first things first let's control the frequency of what we're actually gonna affect with the spread we don't want to widen any of the low-end or really anything in the low mids at all all I want to do with this is just brighten some of the top in so let's just put it around say 2K 2 and 1/2 K so we'll go to the lower control I'm gonna bring this percentage down and we're gonna slowly bring it up from 0 but let me just put 0 for both of these the lower and the upper will leave the order as is for now you can play with that and see the different effect but for this purpose you want to leave that so let's go ahead and start with the lower here okay so I just did it you know again exaggerated just so I could hear what's happening you don't want to get carried away with this be careful so we're gonna keep that real subtle so is the same thing with the upper not bad actually turned out pretty good there again just be really subtle with it and know that this is something that a little bit goes a long way all right so we've got some interesting things to do here with our limiting our maximization once again logic doesn't have you know a really serious Maximizer or you know something along the lines of like an ozone Maximizer with that kind of transparency but there are some options so I want to share those with you the first option and this is something that I did for a while although it's not really the most ideal option at this stage is to use a bit crusher and I know that probably raises some of your eyebrows here as to why I would use this but what we can do with this is we can actually make this function as a clipper like hard clipping so if we set the resolution all the way to 24 keep down sampling at 1 mix 100% and just set the clip level to just below zero it's going to act as a clipper meaning that it won't allow us to go above zero so I raised the drive control and it's not gonna allow it to go above minus 0.2 dB where I set it so that was useful for a while just to keep from clipping hard clipping has kind of come in vogue if you will in terms of mastering it has a different sound it can tend to be more transparent in the sense that it's not like a limiter you don't really have that pumping it's just gonna you know flatten it off so depending on what you're going for you know if you have really impactful dynamic drums a clipper is a good option as long as you're not just hammering the master buss it'll just kind of clip off the extremes there the other thing about the bit crusher is that it's not true peak so you guys have heard about true peak limiting again I'm gonna put some links if you're not familiar with some of these terms but if we just have this set to just peak then even though we set this to below zero so you can see if we're on peak it says yeah we're below zero but in terms of true peak which is a little bit different it will actually say that we're clipping so that's not an option if you're concerned about you know keeping within the true peak standard which streaming and all that is using that so the bit crusher it's an option for you guys I just wanted to show it to you but what we're gonna do is we're gonna utilize a combination of phat fx as well as the adaptive limiter so let's go ahead and pull up fat fx we're gonna do some cool things with this this is a great just Swiss Army knife plug-in a lot of stuff in here so speaking of that let's first just go ahead and turn off a lot of this stuff and we can turn it on slowly here so you'll see in the master section of phat fx we actually already have a limiter which is great once again this is not a true peak limiter which is why we're gonna utilize the adaptive limiter with this but this is useful because we can go ahead and do exactly what we were doing or something similar to the bit crusher just go ahead and select hard clipping and then we're just gonna put the output at zero for now and then let's go up to the base enhancer and we're gonna add some low end this is a nice effect here in phat fx I'm a slide this over all right so I'm gonna leave the type to warm we're getting some nice roundness and fatness down there at 50 Hertz again be careful with this don't over push it the mix already you know has enough bass you don't need to get too carried away with enhancement in that regard but everything should be good here actually one thing I also want to add is a little bit of subtle saturation just to lift the mix up once again we'll go here I'm going to turn off the rest of the distortion but we'll leave that soft saturation type on and we're gonna very subtly mix this in so again just another nice tool for perceived loudness so you can hear with that you know the exciter some of the other things that we've done were definitely focusing on perceived loudness subtly bringing things up in a way that is not necessarily gonna affect the the master volume all that much but just your perceived hearing of that loudness is definitely going to be altered a little bit alright so finally we're going to use the adaptive limiter because you'll see right now in true peak if we are to pump up the level which we're gonna have to do to get this to competitive levels we're gonna be clipping right now we've still got a ways to go to get to our target here we're not quite there and we've got to set up a different limiter so I'm going to just go ahead and get rid of that input gain we don't want to want to use any gain on here but the hard clipper just stylistically to give us that sound and then we're gonna follow it with the adaptive limiter and this does have true peak detection so I'm going to turn that on you'll see this button here so there's an option here called optimal look ahead and this is going to give you a more transparent effect if you utilize this based on the material what we're gonna do now is just utilize the gain on the adaptive limiter to get us up to these levels that were after and be able to compete in terms of commercial masters we want to go ahead and drop the out ceilings so that we're not clipping as long as you're not clipping you're not gonna get necessarily penalized or anything like that so we want to keep you know as much of the transparency as possible so I tend to set this you know anywhere from minus 1 to minus 0.1 so let's just put it at say minus 0.5 today just for the example and then we're just going to introduce our gain here and see if we can't reach these levels and what we want to listen for here is when we start to hear any kind of pumping or if the dynamics start to get wrecked or just the overall sound of the mix starts to deteriorate then we're pushing things too hard and we need to probably make some adjustments so let's just take a listen and hear what happens okay so not bad but I'm hearing just a little bit of our dynamics getting clipped off here and let's make some adjustments probably on the phat fx I think that distortion might be a little bit much so it's good and play it back I'm gonna disable the plugins during playback and I'm gonna try to leave the adaptive limiter on just so those of you who are sensitive about game matching you'll be able to get a little bit better perspective here got a pretty competitive sound here definitely took the mix to the next level so if you're concerned about using these you know definitely get comfortable with these before you dive into third party plugins very capable you can still do very similar processing if you have any questions or comments about what we covered feel free to leave a comment below if you learned anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Sean Divine

Views: 224,064

Rating: 4.9715714 out of 5

Keywords: mastering, stock plugins, logic pro x, logic pro 10.5, r&b, sean divine, r&b master, mastering pop, true peak, lufs, streaming, spotify, apple music, rms, loudness, normalization, master, level, EQ, linear phase, low end, clean mastering, hard clipping, master limiter, adaptive limiter, bitcrusher, multiband compression, exciter, stereo, spreader, width, phat fx, bass enhancer, loud mastering

Id: QXStJgXpZKc

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020