Hello my name is Ian Shepherd, I'm a mastering
engineer and I run the production advice website where my goal is to help you get the best
results recording mixing and mastering your music and Rob has asked me to do an introductory
video for you, this is a demonstration that I do, I go around the country talking to
people at colleges, to students doing a tour called mastering essentials, where I try and
introduce them to the basic concepts of mastering and afterwards, I do a workshop where I take
songs that students have recorded and mixed and I show them how you can master them using
only EQ and limiting. Now that might
sound strange to you, you might have heard that mastering is compression and stereo width
enhancement and saturation and tape emulation and all kinds of other stuff but I believe
that at its core, mastering is simple. It's not easy but it's simple. Back when I was originally taught as a mastering
engineer 20 years ago, I started out using just EQ and limiting, those two fundamental
processes with some helpful concepts I think are really going to help you get a grip on
the benefits of mastering what you can and can't achieve and maybe get you started or
help you if you've already tried mastering your
own material and you want to take it to the next level. So I've got three songs that were submitted
by you guys, let's take a look. So here, they are in WAV lab, we've got three
songs, we have a track called hide by Nicholas Pangas, greatest healing by Patrick Jakubowski
and new wave by Peter McDonough and you can immediately
see just from looking at the waveforms that we're going to have to even out the levels. So that's where I'm going to start, I'm working
here in WAV lab but the strategies I'm going to teach you here are going to work in any
digital audio workstation that we slight differences in the way that you are pulling
out of the plugins and the effects but let me start by quickly playing a bit of each
song so you can hear how they sound as they've been supplied. I'll try to make a quick sale. So really varied selection of tracks, as you
can hear already third in terms of genre and also in terms
of sound, in terms of level and EQ and that's what I'm going to show you how to improve
and how much benefit there is to that process. So the first thing to show you is that I have
a limiter on the output on the master output section, I'm using the fabfilter Pro and I
think does a really good job. I'm going to put it on the punchy preset as
a starting point, other details to tell you how that I have four times over sampling enabled
and I've set the output ceiling to minus one DB with inter sample peak detection enabled
that is to improve compatibility with mastered for iTunes and streaming in general and
I've also got a DB of gain they're going into the limiter. I don't tend to apply gain at the limiter,
I'm going to show you that in a minute but any high quality digital limiter that you
have is going to do a good job the other plug-in I'm using straight away that I need to show
you is the VU meter the VUMT, it's not really time to go and do it a huge amount of detail
in this video but I still really like using a VU meter to judge my loudness and I have
it calibrated here to minus eleven dbfs and I'll show you how that works as we move on. So let's start by playing a bit of the first
song, we're just kind of jump in somewhere and of course
the level needs to come up. Now WAV lab gives me 60 bees of gain on the
clip but that's not going to be enough. So I'm actually going to add a specific gain
plug-in to the clip, there's one in Pro Tools called trim, there's a utility in logic most
di WS have the ability to use, if you don't have enough gain actually on the
clip and I'm going to use this plug-in to lift the gain up so the vu meters calibrated
at minus 11 are hovering around zero. So that's step one now I'm going to do the
same for the other two songs, the reason that I do this first is that loudness affects the
way we hear sound. So in fact, if I just bypass that game plug-in
and play you that song again, listen to the way
that it sounds at the lower level and the higher level and see what you think the differences
are. I don't know about you but the first thing
I notice is that I'm hearing a lot of really high top in the song when it's louder, that
I hadn't immediately noticed when it was quieter and that's
exactly what I'm talking about. As we turn music up, our ears or our brains
make us feel like we're hearing more bass and treble you know, there's no EQ on the
song nothing has changed except that it's getting louder. If I turn to the volume control of my speakers
down, it would sound the way it originally had. We
haven't changed anything in the music but just increasing the level makes it feel brighter
and bass, yeah, I haven't noticed that so much with this song but typically you hear
more bass and more treble this is an effect that was described first by Fletcher and Munson
way back that you might have heard of the Fletcher Munson
curves also known as the smile curves these days, they're called equal loudness curse
it's a fact, it's a thing that drives the loudness, Wars nobody knows why quite it could
be that the saber-tooth Tiger breathing down your neck is more important to pay attention
to than the one way over there in the distance stalking a
herd of gazelles. So our brain makes sounds that are louder
and probably closer more important and interesting to us but it's a factor. So when we're judging EQ, before we make any
decisions about EQ, we need to get the loudness right? First if you think about it the other way
around, if we set the EQ up and then turn the loudness up the process of turning
the level up changes the way that we hear the EQ and we'd immediately have to tweak
the EQ again. So stage one, get the levels similar. You don't have to use a VU meter for this,
you could and you can just use your ears obviously but you could also use a loudness meter
like this one over here and the most important thing is that the songs are all of a similar
level, exactly how loud you master your music is going to be a matter of taste and will
depend on the final goal you have in mind, what your reference tracks are another useful
tactic that I don't really have time to go into this video
is bringing in your reference tracks and adjusting them to your chosen loudness level when you
start balancing EQ but that's why I like the simplicity of just recommending a vu meter
-11. This plug-in is super affordable, it's made
by a company called Clang Helm, it's the VUT, the clang helm bumped, how could
you not love again called the clang helm bumped and there are plenty of other view emulating
plugins out there you do need one that you can calibrate though. So let's do the same thing for the other two
songs, when only time for the time being, I'd say that song is about right, you can
see the needles are pushing right up at some points, that's because there's
so much bass in the signal, I'm comfortable with that for the time being track 3. So now let's just listen again and compare
those three songs, now the levels are better balanced. Now there's an immediate interesting fact,
track 3 sounds a lot louder than the other two because
it has a lot more upper mid-range energy in it, again I'm going to leave that for the
time being because the EQ that I'm going to use is going to help address that but I'm
predicting we're going to turn that song down a bit compared to where it is currently but
we'll stick with the meters of the time being I'm going to increase
the level of track 1 a little bit more so that it sits better with the other two songs. And already you can hear that those songs
balance each other better, just by having evened out the levels, let's just remind ourselves
how they sounded originally. You get another watch, before we go any further,
let's just check in and see what that limiter is doing on the output. Try to make a quick page, out of his Roble
don't get mad. So we got less than a DB of gain reduction
on any one of those tracks. I'm very comfortable with that as a starting
point. So now we can start to think about EQ, I'm
actually going to that the song that I'm hearing the biggest
need for EQ straight off the bat is this kind of punky Rocky one at the end. So let's start there, again I'm going to use
a fabfilter plug-in pro-q, has a really nice interface and is very popular and I think
the first thing I'm going to do is lift up the base of this track. Get a job, I'd go too far with that it's meant
to have a tight aggressive sound to it that may already
be a bit too much but the next thing I'm going to do is soften that upper mid-range because
although it wants that aggressive punky sound to it, for me it's a little bit too harsh. I'm also noticing on the meters up here and
hearing the left hand channel seems a little bit louder to me than the right. So I'm actually going to tweak that. So add an extra plugin in here, I mean there
are all kinds of ways of balancing left/right image, I'm just going to use a stereo tools
plug-in that comes with wave Larry's going to knock the left channel down by a
DB, see how that sounds. You probably noticed there that I was also
using one of the nice little features of the VUMT, this is the deluxe version. We can mono the signal, we can listen to the
side, signal the difference signal, if you are familiar with mid/side encoding, we can
listen to just the left, just the right and one feature I really like is the ability to
immediately invert the right and the left and I was doing that a couple of times just
to see whether the correction I had made to the left/right balance was making the image
shift I'm comfortable with, that as I have it. So let's move on, I'm
going to leave the base and the mid-range on that song for the time being fact, let
me do a comparison with the other songs, we can see how it fits and now the song that's sounding the most
like the odd one out to me is the song of hair, hide. So I'm going to do some EQ there, I'm thinking,
I really need to fill out the texture, there's a lot of very low sub bass I want to fill
out the low mids, I want to tame that really aggressive high frequency, although possibly
if I boost the low mids first, that won't be so necessary, let's see what happens and
I'm actually going to go for a high-end cut first, that's
the thing that really is leaping out to me about the song at the moment is just that
there's lots of energy up in that top end I'm going to try a high shelf filter. One nice thing about fabfilter is that you
can solo the bands just by clicking this here and then you can sweep to
change the frequency, which is a nice feature especially when you're training your ear to
hear EQ, and actually now, I listen to it, there's not a huge amount of sub-base, is
it kind of quite a lot of kind of that hundred Hertz kind of frequencies. I'm going to go in a bit lower and see how
that affects things. That's sending the VU meters crazy and you
can also see on right dynamic to plug in over here, which measures or gives you a way of
getting an idea of the micro dynamics of the music, the difference between the peak and
the loudness that's getting a bit hot now. So I'm going to start tweaking the level of
that in a minute and probably all the songs, let's keep going for the time being. I brought a little bit of presence back in
there with this boost here at what that's 3.3 K and you can hear the general strategy
I'm using here, which I'm sure you've come across before, which
is basically to start boosting the EQ and sweeping around until it feels right, then
adjusting the cue and the gain so that it starts to work for you. So now let's think again about the level because
this is the way that my mastering process works, set the level, set the EQ and then
think about the level again because just like changing the loudness changes the way we hear
the EQ changing, the EQ changes the way we feel about the loudness. So let's try adjusting this gain again. So the VU meters are still kind of pulsing
away there because they're very sensitive to the base, I find that a really interesting,
useful property of VO meters, incidentally which is you can balance the
way that things sound with the way that things read on the meters, in this case it's telling
me that this song is pretty bass heavy because it doesn't sound hugely loud in comparison
to the others but the needles are going higher whereas if you think back to the way that
the more punky song sounded, when we first listened
to it, without that bass in there, it sounded pretty loud even though the meters weren't
going nearly as high as this. So it's one of the kind of quirky things about
VU images that you have to learn if you want to use them loudness meters like this one
here are less sensitive to this kind of effect. I find it quite helpful, I'm not too concerned
about the fact that the meters are pushing high because of that bass, particularly since
Dinah meter over here which uses loudness units to make its calculations is giving me
a minimum PSR reading of 8. I don't recommend you go below that. So
I'm pretty comfortable that song now, let's listen to that as compared to the other two. Now I'm going to use a little top tip, I'm
going to listen to this at a dimmed level, one of the first things I teach on home mastering
masterclass, which is the online course I do, helping people get better results mastering
their own music is how to choose your monitor gain and how to
connect monitor gain with the loudness that you're aiming for. There's no time to go into all of that in
this video here but I usually use the dim button on my mixer to drop the level by 12
Db, in this case, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to add another one of those
gain plugins. I'm just going to dial in a drop of 12 dB
there and I'm going to be able to bypass that in and out when I want to listen to the gain
at a reduced level. So now I'm going to do the same thing, compare
these three songs but listening with the gain at lower level, I find that's a very effective
way for deciding whether the loudness changes you've made are correct. Break through, you get another widescreen
Technicolor ease, this is not a new comfortable with that, I'm hearing that I would like more
meat in the guitars on this final song here. So I'm going to go back to the EQ for this. Now I'm going to listen to that at the original
gain, if you turn your monitors up, watch out the levels about to go back up. Okay that still because it won't stop, who
you get another widescreen, Technicolor issue, this is not a new way, this is just a quick
bag they'll try to make. So you can hear that I've decided to reduce
that change slightly when I listened to it at the
dimmed level it seemed right, I brought the level up and my opinion about the EQ changed
which is exactly the effect I'm talking about. Its why level is so crucial for these things,
our ear is quite sensitive in this mid-range that's going to make the track sound louder. So now I want to think about the loudness
of this song again sounding a bit loud to me. So I'm going to pull the game back slightly. So I'm feeling happy with that at both the
dimmed and the full levels, the one song we haven't looked at yet is healing by Patrick. I've got to say I'm really liking the way
this song sounds, there's a big deep sub bass thing that happens
but it feels musically appropriate, I like it in comparison to the other two, maybe it's
now starting to sound a little bit soft. I quite like that softness, I think these
three songs are now kind of close enough or balanced enough that they could sit together
or in a playlist or on a compilation album or you know, a film soundtrack
whatever because they're obviously pretty diverse selection but I'm just going to experiment
with the EQ on this song and seeing how it fits in with the others, see whether balancing
even more has an effect I like or not, the song is still sounding really choppy to me,
I'm going to come back to it. I'm quite happy with that change, this is
another important concept in mastering is context sandwiched between these two songs,
I think that song benefits from that presence lifts that, I gave it and it's not making
it sound harsh or aggressive, it's not taking away from that nice mellow soft feel
that the song has. So I'm going to go with that for the time
being now in comparison to these two, this song here I think needs a little bit more
EQ work. Let's try that. I'm starting to be really happy with those
songs now if this was a real mastering job at this point, I would be thinking about dynamic
processing for each one maybe to try and pull the mixes together
a little bit but I think you'll agree that's been a really successful process you know,
we've got three very different EQ curves for each song and that's a fundamental point of
mastering. Incidentally is a global setting over a whole
bunch of songs, it's not going to help anybody, you need customized settings for every song. It's something I've talked about in one of
my favorite, I have a blog post, which I call the heart and soul of mastering, it's the
different approach, the different EQ curve that we have for each of these songs that
is really bringing them together. There are some similarities
between them fact there's some quite interesting, some parities between this first and this
last song but completely different EQ for the middle one here. Overall the meters are showing the levels
as being a little bit hot, I think I'm going to go back into the pro l and remove that
one DB gain, boost that I have in there, I quite often like to start with a small boost
to start with so that it's nice and easy to pull back at a later point. I can reduce the level of all of these songs
individually but that made guess where we need to go, let's try to keep it quiet. I'm pretty happy with that, I think you know
that last song got down to PSR7 difference between the peak and the loudness of only
seven DBS, that's at the loudest possible point of the song. There's that repeating guitar riff kind of
drone sound in there, the rest of the song is more dynamic. I'm comfortable with that, we have an overall
integrated loudness reading of between minus eleven and minus
fourteen for each of the three songs, which is bang-on for an optimal setting for online
streaming, these days that's another thing we don't have enough time to go into in great
detail in this video but if you head over to my blog productionadvicecode@uk, there's
a ton of information there on that topic and how you
can choose the optimal loudness for your music. So let's just remind ourselves one more time
about how the sound of these three songs compares before this process and after. We open on a breakthrough, you get another
widescreen Technicolor ease, this is not a new way to do it okay. See hopefully that shows you what I'm talking
about, how much power there is just in manipulating level and EQ, there's so much more consistency
so much better balance between those three songs just from those simple changes in real
life mastering, this I would probably use some dynamic processing. I might get in
there and do a little bit of stereo image tweaking on some of the songs but nine times
out of ten, all you need is EQ compression and limiting to get a fantastic sound mastering,
the widest possible range of material. So like I say, mastering is simple, it's not
easy, it takes a lot of practice but it's simple and the
simplest tools can give us a huge amount of control and ability to improve the sound of
our music. So there you go, I hope that was helpful or
interesting or useful in some way, there's a load more information about mastering in
general and also about mastering your own music on my website productionadvice.co.uk. Please do head over there and take a look,
make contact on social media, you might like to listen to the podcast which is at the mastering
show.com yeah and good luck mastering your own music, thanks for listening.
