MASTERING WITH WAVES IN PRO TOOLS 11

hi this is Brian from prevision studios and I'm going to make a video today in Pro Tools using wave plugins to demonstrate a mastering session I did a video a while ago mastering inside of Pro Tools with stock plugins as well as using the isotope ozone someone asked me to do a video using wave plugins to sort of demonstrate the same process now I have waves gold the gold bundle so I don't have all their plugins but the ones I do have is what I'm gonna need to demonstrate today so the first thing we do is open up Pro Tools and I'm going to open up a new session and I'm going to import some audio and start showing you what what I would do for mastering okay the first thing you're going to do obviously is you're going to open a new session step one is to import the audio that you bounce down your to track or your your stereo mix I'm going to use a mix of a band that I recorded and master their song here okay so here is the two track or the stereo mix of the song that I will be mastering another one okay all right so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a stereo aux track as well as a stereo master fader okay so I have my two track my sub mix and then my master so in that sub mix and we got master okay the sub mix for the eye or the input the output the input I'm going to use my sub mix and it will be routed into the master buss the audio track that I will be mastering I want it to go into the sub mix so its output is sub mix that will feed into the sub mix buss and then go into the master buss okay so now what I want to do is because I'm mastering and I'm going to be using compression and limiting which are forms of level manipulation I am going to find a section of the song that is pretty loud and I'm just going to sort of loop that that's the course so I'm for the purposes of what we're doing that I'm going to just loop that whenever I need to reference audio first thing I want to do is I've got a stereo mix that the client approved and now I have to master it there's a couple different things a couple different approaches that you can take and none of them really wrong it's basically what you're trying to accomplish first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put a EQ plug-in on my two-track channel and say we start with the QA okay I got a q8 here which is an H of an eighth band para graphic equalizer from waves' okay so the first thing I want to do is add a little high-end lift I'm going to make this a high I'm sort out of hype a high shelf I'm going to boost it around 1 and a 1/2 DB ok next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to notch out a little bit of mid frequency mud not that there's any but to say we'll make sure it's a wide Q so the lower the number the wider the spread the higher the number the more narrow the bandwidth is so you can see if I go and like a 94 I'm sad whatever I mean I would do that if I wanted to notch out a problem frequency but here you can see how narrow this notch is the lower the number the wider the band anyway okay I'm not going to show that that's not the purpose of today's video is to show you how to use a EQ but I just wanted to show the difference that right there I'll take this back up to where I want it okay ever need wolf again okay so we have a little brightness that right in there all right step two we've got an EQ on our to mix our stereo mix that sort of is now that we're listening to our mix without all the plugins all the tracks we can sort of just sit there and just listen to the song maybe we've taken a week or two away from the mix and we're hearing things now that are our ears may not have heard you know we were first preparing the mix for the client so anyway so that's why you're going to put a little EQ there it's just it's natural sort of especially we got multiple track you want to sort of tie oh man so you would do maybe a different EQ on each track next thing I would do is I would go with a compressor one option is the C one which is perfectly fine you can use AC one compressor for this purpose I'm going to use the C for this C for is more like the dynamics processor inside of isotope ozone which is a multiband compressor the reason I like using multiband compressors is they act like multiple eq's you've got each frequency range that you can adjust based upon the type of song you god so from here from 16 to 92 this whole area right here is going to control that frequency range from 92 to 4000 this is good this mid section is going to control this entire frequency range and so on and so forth you've got your gain your range your attacking your release so these are all pretty much just like the four main features you would find in any compressor but you've got four so it's like having four compressors in one and they each you can dial in to a certain frequency range that's why I like using a multiband compressor you get the advantage of having the compression but you get to dial it in on the section you want so if you want more compression on your low end and less in your high end so you want to make that maybe your your low end pump a little more you can dial in a different kind of compression on your low end then you do have on your high end alright that being said you can also look at presets now presets are a good way to start especially if you're not really sure how something works what I like to do is if I ever get a new plug-in that I like to go through the presets and see what they do how does one preset when I click on it what settings is a change how do those settings react when when they're changed over a different style of music so I'm not saying don't use presets what I'm saying is learn from a preset learn not to rely on them but use them as a way to jumpstart your mix that being said I'm going to play a little bit of this back and see what we got here story and then your ever need wolf again I'm on your program rather need wolf again damn the next thing you might would like to do is add another EQ after this compressor one reason might be that after you have instantiated let's say some compression onto a track now your low-end may be a little bit - Bumi you know you wanna you still want to have that low-end punch you just don't want to have that that boom you can control that by putting an EQ after the compressor or anything anything that the compressor adds that you don't want you can put an EQ after it to sort of minimize the effect of that compressor so in this case I will put a high-pass unless until what we got there the final thing I'm going to put on my mix bus or my sub mix it's going to be a plug-in that is a sort of a hybrid plug-in from the wave gold bundle it's called vitamin I'm going to show you a cool way to use it that I like how I like to use it again it comes with the gold bundle and I'm sure it comes with any bundle above it basically what it is it's a multiband compressor and more you can see right here it's got a b c d and a so it's got four bands low low mid mid high mid and high it's got a level for each one it has a pre cool width dial so if you want your low frequencies to be narrow or more in the center you can reduce that if you want your high frequencies your high end to be a little lighter you can increase their width which is really cool the way I do it is I so low a frequency and then I slowly introduce each different range back into the mix until I hear what I want so this is going to sound weird since I'm very muddy at first but then you're eventually going to hear what I'm doing here we go meet wolf again again you could remove because really specifically to fear other bands are reacting before I story and then you and from there Oh No our needle so I'm going here is I'm increasing my low end for my low-end start my call all right that being done now I'm ready to move on to my final oh I'm going to put a metering plug-in on there I like to use the brainworx bx meter i know this is not a waves plugin but there are plenty metering plugins out there you can use i'm not going to say that you need to use a waves fact avid comes with its own that you can use as well you can go avid master meter you could use this just to 2 meter what you're doing with you know it's a matter of preference I always like to use the brain works a B X meter okay so basically what the purpose of this right now you want to see what kind of games I walk GPS and the dynamic range in our or a negative light totally true our last update a local judge the pointy or see our dynamic range of around eight this ever to have pretty good we are now going to put in the waves l1 and I'm also going to put in the l1 ultra Maximizer I'm only going to use one right now but I'm putting them both in there because I'm going to show you two different approaches to this but I'm going to start with the l1 okay threshold is the level at which the limit team begins output ceiling is where the your Peaks will stop at so point negative zero point three means that this peak right here once once I hit play this is going to go up to negative zero point three on both sides because my limiter is going to control where my level stops at you want to use minimum attenuation we don't want to over squash it and I'm going to show you what happens the link button tolls both the threshold the output ceiling down at the same rate so we can we can hear how the limiter is affecting the music without hearing an increase in volume which is very handy I'm going to show you how that works right now so you're going to put your mouse on the link button and you're going to pull down okay so it's its point click and drag okay here we go Oh I need wolf again but we're not really getting any coloration we're getting emulation without tolerate that is not really picture too hard me damn now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start raising the output ceiling and that is going to increase the level of the mix dramatically and you're going to start hearing the song get very loud because at this point we are now allowing the limiter to breathe we're not sort of crushing the mix anymore and keep it at negative 8 we're allowing it to open up rather need wolf again all right negative zero point three our ceiling our threshold set at negative eight so our RMS was hidden at negative 10 so we've added about 10 DB of level and our dynamic range was still hating at 8 so that lets you know that despite the fact that we have made the mix louder our dynamic range in other words our lowest level to a highest level although we've made it louder we have kept the dynamic range still together so the this even though we've increased the level it still has its ups and it's downs it still has its high loud parts that it has its low parts the songs still going to breathe is still going to have its dynamic range and that is key because that is what allows a song to be listened to over and over again without causing ear fatigue if you hear a song that slam it's constantly loud it's just its repeatedly your ears don't get a break and eventual what happens is your ears just get tired and you may not even realize it but you're like hey I wanna listen music anymore it's pretty much your brains telling you to turn it off ok our ears have had enough ok keeping your dynamic range when you master is really a key to keeping a song sort of I want to I want to use the word relevant because if you put two mixes together and you hear one is over compressed or over it's got a heavy limitation in the dynamic range is maybe at 3 or 4 I do believe that a song that has a dynamic range of 8 to 10 DB is someone's going to want to listen to that more than the louder one hears because simple fact that it could be less fatiguing to the rear ok so that's pretty important there is we were able to keep the dynamic range while increasing the levels I'm going to show you the mix now with plugins and without plugins I'm going to slowly turn on each plug-in in sequence there you go that's a basic mastering inside of Pro Tools with waves plugins I'm gonna be honest with you I am literally listening to this on these earbuds so I would not say that this is really good mastering it-it's hard for me to even tell if any of this stuff really is having an adverse effect because again I'm not really getting good bass response here but I'm just trying to show you the concepts and some techniques that you might want to employ okay when you're done with this when you're satisfied with what you have the next step is to bounce down your mix you go file bounce to disk wave interleaved 24-bit mastering demo is good I want to bounce this to my desktop we just bounce that little 22 second section okay now I had it a 44.1 WAV file a 24-bit because I'm not going to use that file to burn to disc I'm going to go to use another third-party program to actually make my seat burn my CD with because Pro Tools at this time does not allow you to do that so I save that for later I still want to have a good high-quality file high-res file before I go to 44.1 16-bit which is which is what which is what the resolution is for a CD if you wanted to make an mp3 then directly from here you want to go to mp3 you'll file bounce to disk under file type select mp3 you'll see it automatically goes to bit depth of 16 and 44 and point 1 K mastering demo underscore 1 you're going to come up here with your mp3 encoder settings you've got fast encoding speed is fastest which gives you a lower quality but a faster processing or I always choose slowest which gives you a higher quality and code okay your bitrate 320 is the highest and 128 probably be the lowest you'd want to go to still maintain a high quality mp3 file and in here you would put in all your your your tag your your id3 tag information and you wouldn't click ok alright so that's how you would do an mp3 all right now I want to show you another concept real quick which is I'm going to turn off the l1 and I'm going to turn on the l1 ultra Maximizer I'm just going to match these settings real quick negative 8 negative 0.3 ok now I'm going to disarm the l1 bypass it because I'm now I'm going to use the the ultra maximize so I'm going to show you why now I'm going to show you the process of printing your mix or printing your master it's called a a stereo master print stereo print a master print it just several different names you can have for it I'm gonna show you how to set that up right now first thing you're need going to need to do is create two new tracks one is a stereo aux input the second one is going to be a stereo audio track alright rename the aux 1 print buss and rename your audio track print track ok the input on your print bus is going to be 17 18 or whatever you choose I'm choosing 17 18 I'm going to route my sub mix instead of it going into master buss it is now going to go to bus 17 18 okay the output of my print bus is going to go to my print track so I want that to be bus nineteen twenty or whatever bus you select and I'm going to change this to that bus nineteen twenty so the stereo mix is going to the sub mix sub mix is going to bus seventeen eighteen bus seventeen eighteen is going to which is the print bus bus seventeen eighteen is going to bus 19 to 20 which is my print track which stand goes back into my master bus I'm going to take the ultra Maximizer I'm going to move it to my print bus okay now the Maximizer that I moved from my for my master fader is now on my print bus and is going to have the settings that the last mix was having if you go to put only monitoring so you want to arm the print check for recording and go to track input only monitoring and that will allow if you don't look if you don't have input a only monitoring selected when you hit play you're not going to hear anything the reason being is that it is not allowing you to monitor the track that you are printing to so you want to go track input only monitoring and make sure that the print track is armed to record okay that being said real quick before we print I'm going to show you you've got the reason why the ultra Maximizer is different than the l1 is because of this section right here the dithering the dithering portion of this plugin allows you to put dither onto a track which introduces noise into a mix that is then when you lower the resolution of the mix the noise is removed and keeps your your your higher frequencies intact so that you don't have a brittle top-end or even a damaged low-end either so you would quantize down to 16 bits if you are in fact going to CD your dither type you can select between the 1 and dither to your shape it can be normal ultra moderate normal or ultra and then the domain is digital or analog and that just the digital or analog domain gives you the sort of the environment that the dithering is created in there's the matter of preference so for this case I'm not going to introduce any dithering or quanta I'm not going to quantize the track because again I'm going to I'm using a third-party program to put my dithering on when I when I bounce to disk but this is where you would do that at you want this to be your last step when you bounce okay so all right we're all set up we've got our track armed I'm now going to hit the record button and hit the play button to record the mastered mix onto my print track I need a wolf again okay there we go so this is what you would call a master print or a print master or you next your stare at your stereo master it can emit or several names for it now okay you've got the trip and the track mastered you've got it printed what's the next step when you use the print track method the next step would be to open up your Clips list right here with this arrow two points to the left okay you right-click on the track you go to export clip as files and this is goes export selected so this is where we are going to get our print track out of Pro Tools so that we can then do other things with it file type you can save it as a WAV a FA iff an mp3 or a QuickTime mp3 again is a good choice if you're going to go to a digital file you want to upload wav is a good choice if you're going to go to CD format is interleaved you can also select multiple mono if that is what you want bit-depth 16 24 32 24 is fine if you are going to use a third-party program to bring your disc sample rate obviously you have different sample rates you can you can select 44.1 K is the industry standard for audio okay you're going to choose your directory again I will choose the desktop at this point you can click export and I just took my print track and it bounced it down onto my desktop so now I have these the bounce to disk version using the l1 and now I have the print track exported WAV file that was created with the l1 ultra Maximizer and that pretty much sums it up I mean that there there's not much more that you would do inside of Pro Tools when you master if there was a feature where you could like I said burn it to disk I would show you that the program I use for that is personas studio one it matter as a matter of fact persona studio one is the program I master in I really don't master in Pro Tools I track and mix and those are the three phases you you record mix and master so if you have any questions just email me brian Buckelew at yahoo.com that's Bri a n bu c ka le w at yahoo.com you can also put a comment here and the disc and the below the description on this video or you can visit my website provision studios.com look at some of my content there message be there as well PR o VI z io n s tu di OS comm thank you very much and have a great day

Channel: Brian Buckalew

Views: 79,351

Keywords: ProVizion Studios, Mastering in Pro Tools 11, Mastering with Waves plug ins, Waves Gold Bundle, Pro Tools (Software), Audio Mastering (Industry), Waves Audio (Award Winner), Waves plugins

Id: Mhws5eXfBLg

Length: 35min 25sec (2125 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2015