Perfect Mastering Chain (How to Get Loud & Clean Masters Every Time)

hey it's Will from EDM tips so in today's video we are going to go into exactly what mastering is and why it's important the equipment that you need to actually do a good Master how to check your music is actually ready for mastering and of course the entire process including adding harmonic excitement reductive EQ compression sweetening EQ the stereo field and loudness too we're also going to be answering the question how loud should you master for Spotify and I'm going to give you a secret little hack for getting your music sounding louder than everyone else's so let's touch upon why mastering is so important and there are a few reasons for that I think before actually so the first that it polishes and makes your music sound better this is like adding the icing to a cake everything has to be already in its place but you just want to bring out that last bit of flavor get everything nice and loud and sounding as good as your favorite artist which brings me on to point number two you want it to be hitting the industry standards in terms of the frequency spread and the loudness predominantly so if your music is uploaded to a streaming service or you can download it as a however on MP3 you want it to be standing up against similar music in your genre now the third reason is if you have an album or an ep the chances are you want everything to sound like it's kind of coming from the same place and that's when you will have mastering just to make sure every track is finished off in the same way and it doesn't jar too much when you switch from one track to the next and the final reason is if you're having your music released on a record label for the same reason as 0.3 those guys will want their music to have a certain sound to it and a certain frequency spread and loudness which again is why mastering is so important now there is a fifth reason as well but it's not really used so much nowadays and that's mastering for vinyl there are very specific mechanical limitations to having a record released on a vinyl record but I'm not going to delve into that today because I want to focus on what most of you guys are producing and that's music for electronic release so let's hop into the door and I'm going to show you this mastering chain so the first stage is our setup how do we set up our door projects regardless of which door you're using to be most effective for mastering I also want to touch upon the headphones I'm using I do all my mastering in my headphones I'll probably get frowned upon for that and get some nasty comments but this is just what works for me because I know these headphones really well now these are the Sennheiser HD 650s but I've linked to a few other recommendations for mastering headphones below as well now regardless of whether you're using headphones or monitors if your room isn't set up really really well for mastering I recommend using sound ID reference which is a piece of software which you can put on your computer and it will attenuate whichever monitors or headphones you're using to create as flat a frequency response as possible and that's really what we're after when we're mastering because we want to know exactly what the true sound sounds like because it's going to sound different on different systems so starting off with as close to a flat response as possible is really important okay so I'm using Ableton today but as I said doesn't matter which door you're using I've got a blank audio track and I'm just going to open up another one now one is going to be for our reference track which is very important we'll touch upon that very shortly as well and then one is for our track as well so we just call this track next thing we want to do is make sure that we have a mono switch on the master Channel now this is something that I've devised because I don't have a audio interface that allows me to just switch to Mono but basically it's going to sum everything to Mono with a click of a switch just a keyboard shortcut and that's just going to make our ears have to work less hard to determine what's sounding good in terms of the frequency balance because we're not going to be distracted by the stereo field so that's the first thing I would do next I'm going to put a couple of really important but free tools on each Channel I'm going to use a span which is a spectrum analyzer quite useful you can resize it there and I'm going to put a Julian loudness meter which measures the luft's values which you've probably already heard of somewhere else but the last value is how we measure the average loudness of the track so now we have both of those on our reference track and both of those on our track so let's bring in our track and let's bring in our reference track that's in the same style that has kind of the sound that we're going for so the track we're going to be mastering today is by me and my studio partner the visionaires and it's called plan nine it's a remake of an old 808 State Track and the reference track I'm going to be using is 17 by MK I'm not going to play that track so I don't want to get flagged for copyright but you can see that it's much louder because it's already been mastered whereas our track is peaking at about minus six perhaps a bit quieter than that so we've got plenty of Headroom now having your mix down peaking at about -6 as opposed to zero DB is important when it comes to using analog modeled plugins and we will be touching on those shortly but we want our signal to be going in to them at the optimum level now if your mixed out is peaking at zero it doesn't matter you can just bring down the wave until it's peaking at about minus six it's not an exact art but that's a good rule of thumb so once these are both in we want to get them comparable in volume so it's easier to reference them and that means I need to take down this reference track so it's a comparable average volume to our track so the peak volume is as you would expect the loudest point that the peak hits in a track but the average volume is the energy level over several seconds or more and incidentally that's what the lufs measures so a really quick lesson on loudness things sound louder to our ear if they are more prolonged for instance that might have a peak that's the same as me just going ah but me screaming is going to sound louder because it's the same volume prolonged for a long period of time which is why you get these kind of sausage shapes when it comes to mastering music anyway so let's get these average volumes matched about right so with your track I recommend going to the busiest point which is usually the last chorus foreign [Music] and then let's see what we are hitting in terms of average volume because we know we're peaky at about minus six and a half minus seven and this integrated lost value is about minus 19.3 I'm going to take that up a tiny bit I want that to be hitting at about minus 18. because that's a sweet spot when it comes to the analog model plugins so I'm just going to boost it up a little bit and let's have a look whoops minus 18. that's pretty much fine as I said it's not an exact art that's close enough so now we need to get our reference track hitting the same and to do that all I'm going to do is put a gain plug in at the beginning of that chain I'm going to bring it down until our average volume of that is hitting about minus 18 as well and it's usually about -12 Peaks that you take it down excellent so we can see that they're about minus 18 and a half and ours is minus 18 and a half so now we've got the average loudness is matched we can compare things a bit more closely so what I'm going to do is open up this spectrum analyzer on the reference track and on our track and we just want to make sure or rather have a look to see how we're looking in terms of frequency spread this is our track and this is the reference track now it's important to have these windows the same size so the graph is the same scale and if we look over here and see where the kick drum is hitting or the base it's thinking about minus 42 decibels on the reference track now on ours it's hitting about -45 so we can already see there's a bit of work to do in terms of frequency spread ours is quite High here it's not quite high enough up here compared to the reference track and it's not quite high enough in the low end so just having those visual cues makes it much easier because sometimes your ears get tired sometimes you lose objectivity so now we've got our track and our door set up right it's time to listen through to our mix down and actually determine whether it's ready for mastering at all I've actually created a free checklist as well that you can download below which you can go through every time you finish a track to make sure it's ready for Mastery so what I recommend is listening through your track with completely fresh ears are you happy with how it sounds ideally when a track hits that mastering stage we should already like how it sounds it should sound pretty much finished we just need to increase the loudness are there any pops or hisses on the vocals is there any audible Distortion or clipping that you don't like the sound of what I do is also reduce the volume of my monitoring until it's really really quiet and then listen through can I hear the main elements that's usually the kick the main clap or snare the bass and then the main vocal or lead instrument if I can hear all of those when the monitoring is really down low that's a good site then I turn the monitoring up louder are any of those too overbearing another question to ask yourself when you're listening through your mix down do you find yourself turning up the volume in certain places turning it down in other places because it gets either a bit too loud or quiet you really want to just be able to leave the volume completely alone when you listen through and have everything be the correct relative loudness for example your verses are probably going to be a bit less intense than the choruses and your break is going to be less intense than the verses now if you struggle with balancing your mix I'm linking to a video right there which is going to show you the mistakes you're probably making and how to solve them so you can watch that after this video okay so assuming our mix is ready to be mastered and the last thing to check is when you've attenuated your reference track is the frequency spread kind of roughly in the right direction we saw that it was with regards to my mix down and our reference track so we know that this is good enough to be mastered now you can also use this tool tonal balance by isotope which is also going to give you a similar idea in terms of the frequency balance and whether your track is on the right path so we can open it up on our track it's got presets for different kind of music so let's put EDM and then play our track and these bands here are collated from many thousands of tracks in this genre and these are the average frequency bands now we can see how the white lines here are actually more or less in the middle of these bands so we can again see that our track is along the right path as well as here so this is a pretty useful tool as well although to be honest I personally prefer span it's just the way I work so assuming our track is ready for mastering the next thing we need to do is zoom in and just add a little volume fade at the very beginning and at the very end just to make sure that we don't end up with any pops or clicks when our track goes through the compressors and other parts of the mastering chain I'm just going to do a tiny little fade here barely Audible and our tracks starts on a transient as well I probably shouldn't have done that but I have and that's what we're working with and then go to the end of the track and just fade it out in the manner that you would like to hear it faded out if there is a big Fade Out [Music] quite like let's go a bit longer actually so we've just faded it out at the beginning and the end so the next stage is the coloring phase and this is optional but I always recommend trying it because usually it's going to sound better so once again I'm going to Loop the busiest part of the track the final chorus living room and then what I'm going to do is add my coloring plugins now these plugins need to come in before our reference plugins and we always want to keep these referencing plugins at the end of the chain so we can actually reference all the changes we make as well so the first thing I'm going to bring in is this fantastic tool called the Oxford inflator now this is kind of a saturation slash harmonic Exciter and I'm just going to feed in a little bit of it and it's going to bring some high-end energy to the track so let's try that [Music] but it's important to do an A B test and gain match this because things tend to sound better when they're louder anyways so we need to make sure that the peak volume is the same as it was before we apply this effect so let's go to our track before we apply the inflator [Music] about minus six see now that's a bit louder so we're going to take down the output feelings [Music] that's about right [Music] so the peak level is the same but it just sounds a bit louder and a bit fatter and that's the beauty of the Oxford inflator now next plugin that I'm going to recommend you try is the Bark of dog this is again a free plug-in and this is just going to add some extra low end so what I like to do is Boost it up quite high and then use this Hertz control to find The Sweet Spot of the fundamental of the track this is good if you find that your track always lacks a little bit of low end when compared to your reference tracks if I push it up too hard [Music] so I can hear about 44 Hertz is where there's some real low end power coming now I'm going to dial this right back and just tweak it in usually to seven or eight DBI fine Works quite well it just warms up the low end beautifully so this is off [Music] and if we open the span this is with the bark of dog off you watch this area [Music] it's just bringing up a little bit which is what we wanted in terms of comparing it to our reference track anyway so these could be considered one element this is the coloring section of our Master chain the next thing I want to do is reductive EQ or correct VQ because you might do some additive here as well but this fabfilter Pro Q3 is a fantastic plugin and you can click the link checking up now for my in-depth review of this plugin and why people love it so much but what I'm gonna do is take out firstly the low end underneath about 30 or 40 Hertz and this is because most systems don't go below 30 or 40 Hertz yes some big Festival Stacks will but as I said most systems don't so by cutting out these larger low end frequencies you're actually giving yourself more headrooms so your final track can actually be louder so let's just take a curve up at about 30 Hertz it should be inaudibly different so you can't hear the difference [Music] next thing I like to do is take out the base and the side channels underneath about 120 hertz now that's because bass frequencies can quite often cause phase cancellation if they're in Stereo so I find this just cleans up the mud in the low end usually so I'm going to create another low cut except I'm going to switch it to mid side mode or side mode rather and I'm going to take out the low end underneath about 130. the other thing I'm going to do on the side channels which I like to do is just add a little bit of a high shelf just to boost the side channels it makes it sound a bit wider [Music] so that's my go-to move but now what we want to do is check the frequency spread of our reference track again against our track because we've made some EQ changes we're probably going to want a couple more so let's open them up side by side and see what's going on okay I can see that we could do with a little bit more high end here so I'll create a stereo rather than a Thai beast and let's take up the central Channel too [Music] big crisper foreign [Music] sounding good okay so that is the corrective EQ stage now let's go on to compression now there are a couple of types of compression that you can use when it comes to mastering the most common would be a glue compressor or an SSL bus compressor which is based on the SSL Hardware desks I find that the Ableton glue compressor is okay you don't quite get As Nice a sound as the Waves SSL comp but it's a barely audible difference so I'm just going to use the Ableton compressor in this instance and what we're looking for is about 2 DB of gain reduction now remember this is gonna differ for each track that you master you should try these things and then determine whether your track sounds better with them on or with them off but it's always worth trying because it might sound better so for house music in particular or for any electronic dance music I like to set the attack to 30 milliseconds because that allows the kick to maintain its Dynamic energy and pop through the mix of it I set the release to automatic and I leave the ratio on four and I'm looking for about two decibels of gain reduction and that should just glue everything together nicely [Music] okay two and a half and then I'm gonna boost the makeup game by the amounts that we've just reduced again and I put a soft clip on although there's no clipping so it really doesn't make any difference in this instance but let's try a B test did that so [Music] it's just gelling everything together and now it's starting to sound like a master track now the other option when it comes to compression is multi-band compression now this is a bit more complicated and actually this is a great way to ruin your mix or your master if you don't know what you're doing and the one I like to use is the ozone 9 multi-band compressor I just like the interface and what this allows you to do is compress each different frequency band of your track differently I usually find that it's the base where you need to do most of the compression work because the bass has got larger waveforms so you need to make sure that's locked in and controlled and you can do this by ear first so again I just looked for a few DBS of gain reduction that's just look for a couple of DBS gain reduction there and we want this blue to be going right back up to zero each time if the compressor isn't completely releasing then it just means you're reducing the volume so there's no point doing it okay and now we're going to boost that gain by the amount we are compressing it by so this is a great way to get a lovely thick deep bass line so now let's have a listen doesn't sound better will work [Music] it's a bit hard to tell but when we do our frequency referencing in a couple of minutes we will be able to turn these things on and off and then determine whether it's an improvement or it's to its detriment so let's put these compressors together as they are both part of the same stage the compression stage and now we're on to the sweetening EQ and I call it the sweetening EQ because this is where we can just add a little bit of extra color if we want into our track and I always recommend using an analog modeled EQ at this point because it imparts some extra harmonics a little bit of saturation it warms the sound up a bit and the one I'm going to use today is by black rooster audio and it is a model of the famous Pull Tech EQ so before we do any moves on this let's open up our reference track frequency spread let's open up our track frequency spread after the work we've done so far and make sure that they are on the right path so there's this minus 42 on the base houses minus 42 on the base ours might be a little bit High on the high end so I might attenuate the high end here using this sweetening synth that's about 10K so if we change this to 10K and just tone it down a tiny bit [Music] now there's the Pull Tech EQ trick low end EQ trick so we can boost it so it's a bit High [Music] you can see it's a bit high but then we can attenuate it as well [Music] and what that does is just warms up the low end a little bit because it's pushing it through the model of a circuitry so this is going to be subtle but see if you can hear the difference things so we're just warming up the entire sound basically now don't worry if you can't hear these differences yet they do come with practice [Music] okay so we are getting to the final part of the mastering chain which is the loudness and I've got plenty to say about the loudness especially when it comes to Spotify but before we do that we want to make sure that our stereo width is handled and dialed in this is the next part of the mastering chain so what I'm going to do for this is use the ozone Imager I'm gonna pop that on and we want to make sure that our stereo field is comparable or wider than our reference track now I say all wider because sometimes if it's an older track they might not have had this tool then and the stereo width can be a little bit less than you might want for a modern mix so we've got our track on the right the stereo field and we've got their track on the left now let's just have a look at this Vector scope here and see how they compare we can see our track is actually wider already [Music] so there's not really any work to do however I'm going to choose to do some I'm gonna put a band in at about 120. because this is a multi-band stereo imager fantastic tool this and then I'm going to spread some of these other bands a bit wider whilst locking in that lower band to be a bit more mono so we don't run into stereo phase cancellation issues but to be honest this is absolutely fine I can leave that alone [Music] so let's see if we can push these top ones [Music] that sounds a bit much so not much stereo work to be done there but let's just do an A B test and determine whether our sounds better or worse and we'll listen to it in mono as well using my mono switch don't forget about that on the master channel so let's have a listen so that's on and this is off [Music] just opens up that mix and now let's test in mono [Music] yeah this tool is fantastic because it doesn't really create a harsh effect which can create some strange slightly phasing sound so this is really good for stereo width and then we are on to the final stage of mastering which is of course the loudness and how loud should you actually master your music well you should Master it to two levels why two levels well one is for the maximum loudness for playing out on CD or download from a site like B port and the second loudness setting should be for the streaming platforms such as Spotify because what they will do is attenuate tracks that are mastered too loud and they will bring up tracks that are mastered too quiet and that's to give a nice even loudness when people are listening to multiple tracks on Spotify so let's dig into the loudness stage and how to get that well the tool that we're going to use is of course a limiter which many of you will already know now the one I like to use is a fabfilter pro L2 so we're gonna pop one there on ours and the first stage I would do is try and get this to match our reference track now remember our reference track is a download so this is a maximum volume this isn't streaming volume this is the maximum loudness volume so this is a good place to start because it's easier to make your track quieter than to push it louder so our reference track is hitting if we take off this attenuation I'm just going to turn down the monitoring so I don't deaf myself we should now be hitting at our maximum loudness for our reference track so it's about minus 7.5 integrated lufts which is the average volume and then wow we've got a true Peak Max of 3.7 okay that's pretty loud so what we're going to do is now go to our track we've got our mastering compressor here our mastering limiter sorry it's a type of compressor by the way and we want this to be getting our track to about minus 7.5 on the loudness as well so let's open up our loudness meter on our track and just bring up the input gain on our limiter [Music] I usually find that you don't want to have more than about seven six or seven gain reduction [Music] okay [Music] so if we turn off true Peak limiting our true Peak Max can actually get pushed up a bit so now we've got our maximum loudness that I would export for use on beatport or any other sharing for DJ so they can play it out at clubs but now we need to touch up on Spotify because let's be honest most of us are going to be releasing our music on Spotify now -14 lufts is what Spotify says on its website for mastering and a true Peak value of no more than -2 so once I've exported my maximum loudness Master this is how I would create a version for Spotify I'm going to open up the loudness meter and remember we want to get this to about -14 laps and about -2 maximum on that true Peak Max so we can take down the input gain on our limiter [Music] and that's already taking it down too far [Music] now I've actually found the Spotify that mastering to about -12 or -10 s to be fine and you can check this using a website called loudnesspenalties.com and I'm linking to that below this video and you can just drag and upload your track and see how much it's going to be penalized so we can see ours is hitting -12 on the left I'm going to take it down a bit until we are hitting -14 all right that sounds about right so I'm just going to export this really quickly let's drag our Loop onto the website and we can see here that we are going to be penalized very very slightly it's going to turn our volume down by 0.2 on Spotify which is to say it's not really going to penalize it at all and it's going to sound great now I promise I'm going to show you a little hack for Spotify and I actually got this from bass clef so Props to you bass clef Spotify measures the last value over the entire length of the track so if it's an average volume as you can imagine if your track is loud all the way throughout the average volume of -14 is most likely also going to be the average volume of your final chorus or drop as we've just looked at in our example but some of the older music from the 70s or the 80s because it's more Dynamic and has a lower average volume in general Spotify will actually bring that up in volume so the final chorus in one of these older tracks because the earlier parts of the song are really quiet the average volume overall has been logged as more quiet so Spotify is going to bring the whole thing up in volume which means those final choruses that really epic ones are actually louder than -14 laps so the way that you could take advantage of this little hack is to have more breaks in your tracks so there are more quiet Parts which means that overall the average volume is going to be lower which means when your final drop hits it's going to be massive now this is more of a theoretical hack I don't recommend that you start building your track specifically on how loud you can get them but do bear in mind dynamic range because the more dynamic range you have Spotify actually benefits you so if you've got a break perhaps take it really down in volume and energy and then have your drop hissing hard and any place that you can add some Dynamic variation is going to be better for your listener and Spotify is going to reward you by playing the track powder now something else we need to touch upon regarding Spotify that's really important is that regardless of your average volume AKA your luft's value Spotify won't raise the volume of your track past a true peak of -1 decibel so what does that mean it means that if your track has an average volume of -18 loves for example but a true Peak value of -3 then the most it can be raised by Spotify will be two decibels to minus one decibel true Peak from minus three but that means your minus 18 lufts is only going up to minus 16 laps average which means you're missing out on those two decibels of extra loudness so getting that balance between average volume and true Peak volume is important to get the most from your Spotify Master now I mentioned I was going to help you with having your mix or your master translate well across multiple systems now the way I've always done it especially before I was as good as I am now at Mastery I would have to master a track play it on multiple systems take it in the car play it on my iPod play it on my Hi-Fi system in the house as well as my monitors and my headphones I used to play it on the laptop speakers as well and then when I would listen to my track against my reference track on that system I would make notes about what needed changing perhaps I could hear the bass on my reference track but on my laptop speakers I couldn't hear my bass I'd have to go into the mix down and add some more upper harmonics on the bass line now that's a bit of a pain but it is still the best way to do it and this you've got a great studio with perhaps two or three sets of monitors you can quickly switch between and check your master across multiple systems however there is a plugin available now called mix checkup which allows you to emulate playing your track on different systems so you can check it out below but having your final track translate well across multiple systems is absolutely essential because someone could be listening to it on airpods they could be listening to it from their phone speaker or they could be listening to it in a massive nightclub so please don't cut corners and miss that part of the mastering process now I want to touch upon the biggest mistake that producers make when it comes to mastering and it's this most producers especially if they're in the beginning or intermediate stage think that the mastering is going to fix their song and make it sound good now whilst there is some truth for that and that is that a really good mastering engineer will of course make your mix sound better it will never and can never sound as good as it would if the entire composition and mix down was done really well in the first place what we're aiming for before we go into the mastering stage as producers is for the track to sound as good as we already want it so it should just be a case of increasing the loudness that's really the target when we're going through the composition and the mix down now I know that for some of you that might be a bit of a surprise and you think that mastering will actually fix it but if you think about this analogy if you gave a pretty standard cake to a world-renowned chef and asked him to ice it really beautifully yes it's going to look better but it's still not going to taste very good so we need everything from the ground up to be really good for the best possible Master now with that in mind I've created a video for you there which is going to show you how to get a really loud mix and therefore allow the master because a lot of that perceived loudness that we've already touched upon actually comes way before the mastering States but before you check it out if you enjoyed this video please like And subscribe to my channel and I'll catch you over there

Channel: EDM Tips

Views: 55,683

Keywords: Mastering, how to master a song, mastering a song, audio mastering, loud mastering, how to master, mastering tutorial, mastering mix, how to master music, mastering music, mastering plugins, mastering techniques, mastering tips, mastering with plugins, mastering plugin, music mastering, mastering process, mastering 101, mastering in Ableton, how to master in ableton, lufs mastering, loudness metering, master chain, mastering chain, mastering tips and tricks, EDM Tips

Id: hyLQx6mIbVg

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022