Mastering with REAPER stock FX Plugins.

so a couple days ago i did a video on mastering and publishing your music i had a few comments about not using the reaper stock plugins for that tutorial so if that's what you guys want to see using stock plugins for mastering that's what we're gonna do and so let's just jump into it [Music] the order of operations let's do a quick recap first imported the tracks got them organized figure out the track order add some metering plugins so that you can see how loud it is and then balance out the different levels i use the item volume knob in that case to do that but there's lots of different ways to adjust volumes in reaper and the idea is that you're adjusting that before it gets into the effects chain but some other people will do that after you could use the track volume after the effects chain doesn't really matter unless you're using like analog processing plug-ins where they need to be in at a certain level but i'm not in this case so i gain stage by boosting the levels usually at the beginning and each song is going to have its own level that is right usually there i'm i'm listening for the loudest section of the song like the chorus or wherever there's the most you know the most busy section and if i'm not looking at a vu meter which is calibrated to minus 10 decibels then i would be looking at a short-term luf-s meter playing a few seconds of that and figuring out if that's the right level for that section and if that's the right level how does that compare to the previous and next songs so after getting the levels right we put on a master limiter which helps keep things below -1 dbfs which gives room for streaming headroom if there's anything that's too loud that gets pushed down by the limiter and we need to make sure that we're not pushing things too loud so that the limiter is not working in its kind of transparent range we did eq which helps balance the tonal differences between the different songs corrects issues and can kind of give an overall tone to the songs altogether if we're doing any subtractive eq there that's going to reduce the level that's coming into the limiter which which means things like bass drops and things like that if we're eq some of the base out that's not going to overload the limiter after that we're doing multiband compression i used an ozone dynamics processor for that but today we'll be using re x comp and that is one of the stock plug-ins it's a multi-band compressor i find it a little more difficult to use less interesting to look at missing some of the features that i rely on in the ozone modules at the end of the day you can get basically the same results so after the multi-band compression i used some stereo widening tools to narrow the low end so or mono the low end so the uh kick drum and things like that are not going back and forth between different speakers and it just sounds a little more clear and punchy in the low end there isn't like a tool for that built into reaper so we kind of have to do some um messing around to get something similar to that but i'll show you that later on today and yeah so that's the order of operations it's usually loudness limiting eq and then any other issues that come up multiband compression is very common stereo widening or managing the stereo field in any way is very common as well as saturation effects exciting dynamic eqs and things like that whatever you need for the track whatever tools you're comfortable with using use them use the best tools that you have available i think limiting yourself to stock plugins isn't always the best option but you can get a good master using just stock plugins and then i guess the last thing to mention is that it's not set and forget um we were going through that video very quickly just to get uh the four songs kind of in a roughly good spot but in real life in a real job i would be listening to reference tracks i would be spending a lot more time on the eq and everything for each song for everything as a whole taking breaks coming back to it later and listening listening at low levels and high levels listening on headphones listening on other speakers all those things they take time it would be very boring in a video to watch that you don't set it and forget once you get to the end of that processing chain you go back to the beginning and you refine it you're making sure that the level coming in is right you make sure that every eq point is right that you're not overloading your limiter if there's a certain spot that's over to loading the limiter figure out why is that something that you can take care of with automation is that something you can take care of with eq so uh now that we're like 10 minutes into this let's get started with the mastering all right so i'm going to open up reaper's mixer and on the master track i've taken off the stealth limiter in fact i'll just remove it entirely and we'll put on a metering plug-in for this we're going to use the new loudness meter plug-in which is right here js loudness meter peak rms lufs we're just going to put that into the master track [Music] all right so the peaks were above zero plus three and that's because we don't have a limiter on this track yet for the loudest section this hit minus 11 for short-term loudness the leofs integrated level is not accurate because we didn't play the entire song it's not taking into account the quiet intro and the less dense verses things like that so um i'm not concerned about that number at this point what we're basically looking for is like short-term lufs at -11 in the lab part sure and let's compare it to a different song [Music] and so that different song ended up with a very similar short-term loudness so there's the loudness meter and the next thing in the list would be a limiter so there are a few options for built-in limiter plug-ins that come with reaper js master limiter and you put this before the loudest meter there's also the mga js limiter the stereo version and there's also the new re-limiter at the time of recording this not even released yet but i'm going to hold on to this video until that's out where is that relimit so this is the newest one and so i'll just bypass uh all of them except for the first one so this is one you may have seen before js master limiter if i'm just going with like my default settings here the threshold is at -2 which with the master limiter applies to db of gain and then the limit decibels or ceiling in most cases i also want that at minus one so it's roughly not going to exceed minus one there are attack and look ahead and hold and release options but just keeping things the same because this is not a very tweakable plug-in here we're just going to see how this sounds with these sorts of settings [Music] and in this case i can hear that it's kind of ducking whenever the kick hits which sounds kind of weird to me this plugin uses a slider for the gain reduction meter which is kind of weird but the actual number here was about minus three so let's go on to the mga js limiter i believe this is made by the same person uh and we're gonna set this the same way so minus two for the threshold and minus one for the ceiling [Music] that's sounding a little bit better to me so here is the the new re-limiter this one is resizable which is nice and it has a kind of a waveform history in it so we're going to set this the same as always minus two and minus one [Music] and what's interesting is you can see where and by how much it's actually working these are kick drums these kick drums are loud uh these have a very quick attack that is getting through the limiter how do we manage this without kind of ruining everything how do we make it this limiter sound better overall and how do we make it just not constantly working on those kick drums maybe we should go back and forth between the different compressors again let's do the master limiter [Music] i would say the master limiter sounds the worst mga js limiter sounds pretty good read limit sounds the best or very very similar to the js limiter but it's not audibly ducking or anything like that it's not it's not distorting either which is good so what i would like to do here is just add in the js soft clipper in here and with the soft clipper and we'll brick wall at actually brick walleting at zero should handle this let me pop out these two plugins so with the the soft clipper not doing anything really but it is in itself a a hard limiter it won't pass anything past zero and because we know that the peaks of this we're hitting about plus three it should be able to shave off some peaks so that the limiter plug-in is doing very little which should clean up the sound and as long as it's not pushing things too much it should be pretty clean actually and at worst adding a little bit of saturation to those peaks that are shaving off [Music] now obviously that's too far but even setting this to like -1 or so [Music] so it's adding just a slight bit of saturation um to the uh to everything and if we're comparing other limiters there's also event horizon soft clipper and so we'll replace the jsoft clipper with js event horizon now this is this is essentially a master limiter as well but this one doesn't have any gain reduction meters so threshold at -1 ceiling at -1 and i will a b compare these two plug-ins so event horizon limiter first [Music] it's kind of subtle i feel like i can hear a bit of saturation happening with the soft clipper maybe you don't want that um i think i actually don't want that so event horizon limiter which is also a soft clipper is something that you can put on right before your master limiter and that will either distort it more which we don't want or it will shave off the peaks cleanly if it reacts fast enough without overdriving so that's the loudness section eq we're going to leave it the same this is the eq that we used in the last video and sounds right we'll say for this moving on to multi-band compression we can use one of the kako's stock plug-ins which is re-x-comp i've got a mastering starting point which is three bands first band is at 0 to 254 band 2 is 254 to 3517 and band 4 is from 3517 up to 24k thresholds are at about minus 12 each and using a 2 1 ratio this multiband compressor doesn't have that auto learn function that i really like about the ozone modules but it does have solo which is really nice so we can listen to just the low end listen to just the mids listen to just the highs and we can add in more bands as needed but it doesn't have the option of linking all the controls we can't adjust the gain or the threshold or the ratio of all three at the same time which makes it a lot slower to work with which is something that makes me not want to use it in the mastering context alright so let's hear it [Music] i'll bypass it [Music] so it's just kind of doing its thing um fairly cleanly uh taking away some of the things just in those moments when it's happening so up to 2 db on the low end 0.1 or 2 on the other bands this is my starting point but often just putting that on there kind of cleans the things up it's only a two to the one ratio so it's not too extreme pretty transparent um yeah feel free to use something similar to that or spend as much time as you need to adjust and fine-tune things all right so now the stereo balance this is something that is going to be a little trickier if you don't understand the mid-side processing this will probably just go right over your head use the ozone imager it's actually a free plugin it's a very good plugin and then there's many other plugins that can do this basically you want to narrow the low end so that it's not distractingly going back and forth i find that just like the kick drum and the bass just sounds more punchy and things so i like to do that the way we're going to fake it this time is to set up a mid side matrix put in an eq on the side channel and cut the lows from the side channel which means we need a ms encoder so if we just search for ms it's a js mid-side encoder and then we need a decoder right after that and a eq so we'll use re-eq again and that's going right between the two different encoder and decoder plugins we don't have to adjust any anything on the encoder or decoder plug-ins themselves we do need to go into the pin connector and disconnect input 1 and output 1. we want to pass through the left channel or the mid after it's gone through the encoder and only adjust the sides so only what's different between the left and right and by eq'ing out some of the lows we're making it less different and left and right which kind of brings it back into the center it's not the ideal way to do it it's not the only way to do it but without a dedicated stereo width plug-in this is one way you can do it this eq should only work on what's different in the left and right channels and if we take anything away that should kind of shift it towards what's similar and only in the center so let's hear this [Music] you can hear as i do this it's bringing it more towards the center making it more mono [Music] so now it's mono i could also increase the width of the highs [Music] a very powerful and cool effect but we want to use this pretty subtly so let's do -6 below let's say 150 hertz barely noticeable but if you're in good headphones or if you've got a subwoofer you should be able to feel that that is a little more defined in the low end kind of annoying that it is three plugins to do something that's normally one slider in ozone 9 imager you also don't have the ability of soloing that or anything like that it's just a little bit annoying but it is possible to do the same sort of effect yeah so that's essentially the same mastering job that i did in the previous video but using just the stock plug-ins the the way that i master things is pretty gentle i i would say i'm i'm not doing anything too drastic to change the sound of anything um i do often use saturation plug-ins but i honestly wouldn't trust any of the built-in stock plug-ins to provide the uh what i would need i'm a big fan of the ozone exciter module because you can you know do it multi-band and you can have like tape saturation on your low end console saturation high end tube saturation in the mids and dial in the perfect amount and flavor and even do mid side processing for each of the bands it's pretty incredible what you can do it would just be so complicated to set that up with stock plugins and it would just like you would easily add an extra hour of work to whatever you're doing and the longer you spend on a project the less objective you can be working quickly using tools that are familiar and powerful that's what makes mastering interesting for me so i hope this has been helpful answered some of the questions about whether you can use reaper stock plugins for mastering or not now you know some of the plugins that you can use um and some ideas for a being or you know what to listen for and things like that hope this has been helpful thank you so much for watching please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blog through patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more tutorials [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 9,775

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, reaper mastering tutorial, reaper fx tutorial, audio mastering, music mastering, reaper fx plugin, reaper stock plugins, realimit

Id: RUkpuA-DwyQ

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021