The Problem With Online Mastering Tutorials

your song needs great mastering if it's gonna sound professional appropriately loud and ready to be released out into the world there's loads of good tips techniques and long format videos all over the Internet to help you with this but what I realized was missing was a simple framework or repeatable system that you can use to pull all of these tips together and get consistent results so what I've done here is broken down the mastering process into a five-step system or less depending on the genre each step only takes a few minutes should take around 20 to 30 minutes to have your mixes sounding excellent and you can apply any tips or techniques that you may have picked up from other videos or your favorite Engineers as this system is quite flexible in the middle but as always with mastering the most important thing is your listening environment so that you can hear the changes you're making your attention to detail and your mindset if you're willing to learn adapt and also have a bit of fun through this process then you'll have no trouble getting great sounding Masters ideally you can save this video and watch it alongside your mastering process that's probably the best way to get the most out of it so let's get right into it all the tools I'm using are linked in the description and I want to clarify this is not a sponsored video it's best to work from a stereo WAV file of your mix so if you've got a big session bounce that down and pull it into a clean session for your mastering it gives you the least possible issues in later stages you are going to need to use a loudness meter such as this free one from Uline usually a mix that's ready for mastering is averaging around -15 lufs integrated with the true Peaks hitting somewhere between -6 and -1 the next bit's really simple we just sit back relax and listen to the full mix if there's any unwanted clicks pops or issues with volumes changing too dramatically then it's probably best to go back to the mix and sort those out don't beat yourself up or stress if you're only hearing these for the first time as you start the mastering process as you get out of the production and mixing mindset and just see the bigger picture of everything sometimes issues crop up and you you can't believe you hadn't heard them before and this is why people are on you know Final Mix version 17A that's normal it's just a good thing that you're picking up the issues now now 99 of the time this is not going to cause an issue but if you look at your waveform and you see that there's visibly significantly more energy above or below the center line during the loudest parts of the song This is called waveform asymmetry I might apply some polarity rotation to either the mix or an individual track or potentially the whole Master now there's nothing inherently wrong with an asymmetrical waveform it's not something you should be at all scared or worried about but if we're going for maximum loudness you can see that these Peaks are going to cause a limit or a compressor to trigger unnecessarily you can see the gain reduction on those loud Peaks after correction with no audible change you can see that there's a few DB less gain reduction during those parts so this gives us both more loudness and less compression which is usually a win-win I would rather fix any phase issues within the mix but I know many mastering Engineers who happily apply face correction to the full song even adaptive phase correction if there's any sort of audible difference to the transience or stereo image then something is going totally wrong and you should go address it in the mix when we're done here just load the song up in your DAW and work at the same sample rate and bit depth as the mix just add around 200 milliseconds of Silence before and after your track and add appropriate Fades to the start and end of the mix so this is where things start to get really fun so the first bit is some corrective EQ a little bit of subtractive EQ can clear up some Sonic congestion and also tame harshness in the mix myself and others like to use Dynamic EQ here where a narrow filter is triggered when the energy in that band exceeds a threshold but any eqs with mid side and left right filters are going to work because we want to be as selective as possible so some tips to help you with this I like cutting and sweeping I think it's an excellent technique with EQ if you sweep around and the mix sounds better when you remove some frequencies then you're probably onto something quite good now there are no rules but in general small amounts of processing really add up so even a 0.5 or 1 DB cut is likely all your mix needs if you're consistently cutting two three or more DB then it's probably an issue that needs to be addressed in the mix or maybe there isn't an issue at all and you're just over processing because different is starting to sound good next tip is that it's not essential to use linear phase EQ people really go crazy about linear phase EQ most of the time it's just going to introduce unwanted pre-ringing to your sound but if you're using a lot of mid-side processing then linear phase EQ is probably a good one to reach for as it can help the signals sum back up and with a little bit more cohesion next tip automatic resonance suppression might seem like a great idea but honestly it can be quite disastrous during the mastering process if you use tools like this remember they have no way to determine what's good and bad so you have to tell it what to do confine it to a certain band of frequencies that you think are a problem and then just make sure that you dial it in finally a high pass filter can be used to remove unwanted inaudible sub bass but never do anything without a reason or a purpose it will introduce some phase rotation but the benefits of increase Headroom might outweigh the drawbacks you could use a low shelf to minimize those phase issues sometimes plug-ins just misbehave and having the high pass there or the low shelf can be a good safety net to make sure nothing's getting through to the master that you don't want to be there now we're on to the second part of this processing which is the tone shaping EQ compression and any additional effects and tips and techniques that you've picked up often Engineers reach for analog style EQ here there's so many different flavors and types of EQ you could choose we can't see the curve that's being generated so we know that the adjustments we're making are only based on what we're hearing and that is really critical you don't want to be adjusting an EQ and saying all that looks about right you just want to be listening in if you've got a bunch of other songs in in your genre you can listen to those and then go back to your mix and notice if yours sounds like darker like there's less treble or maybe yours has too much bass we can subtly nudge the mix in One Direction or another maybe we want to brighten the sides of the mix or we want to adjust the vocals just in the middle of the mix so using the mid side left right we can be more selective and less destructive to the whole mix compression is also used here to create what many Engineers call glue which is a bit of an odd term it sort of means cohesion so we're pulling up a little bit of the low material holding the peaks in check just creating something that sounds a little bit more cohesive a little bit more glued the biggest compression mistakes during mastering are not using a sidechain filter and having the attack set way too fast full mixes typically have a lot more energy in the bass using a side chain filter means that the compressor is going to listen to the mids and treble a bit more it tends to give you a better Rhythm to the compression so generally a slightly slower attack medium fast release Times Sound quite natural without squashing anything to too much you only need a few DB of compression at this point this is also the time to apply any other techniques or tips you've picked up along the way maybe you're trying out a new plugin you want to address something with saturation stereo image whatever you think sounds good just go with that and if at this point you feel like you're just going around in circles you don't know what to adjust there are some tools such as tonal balance control reference and other visualizers to help you check the balance of your music I think your own taste should always guide you but these tools can make sure that you're not missing anything or just that you're not completely off because of your listening environment this next step is where you have to make a big decision so based on your genre your taste and your commercial goals for your music you have to decide how loud you want your master to be it can either be dynamic and open super loud and squashed or somewhere in the middle now if loudness doesn't concern you at all you can actually just skip to step five and only apply a few DB of limiting at the end however if we look at some chart hopping songs and I've run these through my loudness analyzer it's clear that the loudness Wars are over and Loud has won most songs regardless of genre are objectively ludicrously loud often reaching -5 or minus six luffs short term and often exceeding 0 DB true Peak literally no one at the top of the industry cares at all about the standards that Spotify Apple music or others are putting out and I'm not necessarily saying that's a good thing it's just that Spotify is terrible at loudness normalization it's 2023 and it's an absolute shambles to be honest and I'm not negative about almost anything these standards have been set for years and they're just not working but I don't want to be overly negative to Spotify if I go to Apple music here you can see this is with volume normalization active you've got short term and even average laughs going way above -8 minus seven whether you're on computer phone web app TV they all seem to behave a little bit differently rant over instead of complaining about that what I suggest you do and what I see a lot of professionals doing is simply choosing the loudness where the song sounds the best which is usually somewhere in the middle between very Dynamic and completely squashed so to achieve that sort of loudness we need to reduce the dynamic range step by step we can't leave it all to One processor or it'll be overloaded so we'll first use some compression gentle Peak reduction which means we want faster attack and release times cut down at least one or two DB during the loudest parts of the song now after that we're going to use clipping this Clips the peaks of the audio introduces saturation and helps us increase the average loudness hard clipping introduces a large amount of distortion which is why soft clipping with less Distortion is generally favorable set the ceiling at -1 DB and push the gain into the Clipper until you're getting one or two DB of gain reduction at most I'll then use a transient shaper to selectively bring some of the transients back this might be helping a snare drum cut through or giving the bass some more shape and punch the final step here is about getting your mix up to an appropriate final loudness we're going to use a limiter to do this unlike a Clipper a limiter is trying to reduce the dynamic range with as little Distortion as possible so if we look here a quick comparison that's some gain reduction with a Clipper lots of saturation added whereas the same amount of gain reduction with a limiter you can see very little audible saturation so some settings to apply I like to keep the true Peak ceiling below -1 DB this gives the exported WAV file some space and some Headroom when it's inevitably encoded into a lossy format your final limiter should have lots of controls it's important to be able to select different algorithms set the attack and release adjust the look ahead this is all crucial to make sure that you don't have any audible issues with the limiting most limiters work by pushing the gain into them until gain reduction is applied and this is how you get the average level up now most people should be easily able to get a mix up to minus eight or minus 10 Lofts without causing really any audible issues if you want to go beyond there you know to minus six minus five short term laughs that's when you have to start making some sacrifices maybe over compressing the bass or just impression in general basically you have to make a trade-off between things sounding as good and open as possible or sounding as loud as possible this is why I prefer not pushing those last few DB unless a client or a mix really does require it finally we've got to export all the different file types we need set your dithering at the end to 24-bit and Export at a 24-bit 44.1 k or 48k WAV file just depending on what your original mix was this master will be ideal for digital distribution but if you need other formats MP3 or 16-bit then you can simply render out those depending on your needs so that's the processing done but it's this next step that really stimulates growth and makes sure that you're getting consistent great sounding Masters so take that final file drag it back into the session mute the effects turn the volume of the master down and compare it to the original mix so if you can compare them and I identify any things in the master that you don't like or that you do like this is how you start learning and getting better maybe you've over brightened the mix or it sounds too Bassy compared to the original mix as long as you can be honest with yourself that's how you know you're going to keep getting better I personally never assume that anything sounds better just because it's run through my computer and my speakers I think it's an important step for all of us to do whether this is your first week or your 20th year doing mastering I just think it's a fantastic process make sure we're still learning and always getting the best results so that's the five-step system I'm pretty sure you won't be able to go wrong if you follow the the basics of those steps but there's loads of room to apply your own tips and techniques too so let me know if that was helpful and also what you'd like to see more of in the future too bye for now [Music] thank you

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 96,059

Keywords: Music Production, Mixing, Mastering, In The Mix, Mastering chain, how to master your music, How to master, mastering tutorial, how to master a song, step by step, easy, loud master, master compression, mastering in FL Studio, logic pro mastering, FL Studio Mastering

Id: -wxD_w8ZdOU

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023