mastering question

[rinseballs21]

ok guys, ive never mastered a tune before, nor have i ever had one of my own tunes mastered. but does mastering really effect the sound as much as i assume it does???

is mastering what gets your tune sounding "professional" or is it just mostly to clean things up????

basically what im getting at.....if you listen to an unmastered tune and then go in an get it mastered professionally and you play both the tunes back, will you be able to tell a huge difference? is the unmastered tune going to sound muddy?

[decklyn]

It's just clean things up a bit and turn the volume up.
If I gave you my tune today and a mastered copy tomorrow unless you put them side by side or listened to one next to another mastered piece you may not really notice a difference.

[rinseballs21]

ok so understanding what you've told me. what methods should i go about to getting my sound as clean as possible before mastering???? as of now i use maximizers, stereo enhancers/shapers, tubes, limiters, etc

but some of my sounds are still kinda off

[decklyn]

Don't put anything on your master channel!
Put years of hard work in instead.
Sorry - there is no simple answer.

[Sharmaji]

$50-- even less-- will answer your question. if you really want to know, i'd say hit up one of the extremely-capable mastering engineers.

think of it as $ towards education-- as you'll see here on DSF, most ME's who stay busy LOVE talking about how to make things better. If we're just talking about a single song, send something along and ask them what they did to make it better-- and what you could have done before.

to me, that seems like $50 well-spent. One of the best recent mastering projects i've had began by telling the label, after a particularly arduous session that left me with a master that I (as ME) wasn't happy with, that the original file was too loud, too present at 3k and didn't have enough just above or below that. The artist re-visited it, I got an excellent-sounding premaster that was a joy to work on, and we all left happy.

[gkmusic]

ok so understanding what you've told me. what methods should i go about to getting my sound as clean as possible before mastering???? as of now i use maximizers, stereo enhancers/shapers, tubes, limiters, etc

but some of my sounds are still kinda off

Hi dude, Sharmaji's advice is all well and good but here are some tips to apply to your Finalizing proccess so you can get a semi-decent sound all by yourself

Maximers, stereo enhancers and limiters are all good but these are the last thing you want to think about for the moment in terms of a getting a good sounding master

First get a good mix, if you get the mix sounding solid and how you want it the "mastering" is going to be a piece of piss. Try downloading (or buying) two plugins called "Izotope Ozone 3" and "PSP Vintage Warmer". Izotope is a digital mastering plugin that has a lot of good features to better your sound like midside eq, harmonic exciter, mastering reverb, multiband compressor, stereo imager etc

After you finish a mix, apply bus compression or light compression to gel your track together "5:,1 with slow attack release and threshold" this makes the track feelas if it is one piece and less scattered. After this open Ozone and tweak your mix with midside EQ, (for all these look up tutorials on youtube), mideside EQ will allow you to scuplt indepth and add character to certain dimensions of the your mix which can give it more clarity and deffiinition.

Mastering is mainly the art of using your ears to see what you need and fill up the gaps (or take away), if the mix is sounding good, deffined, alive, then you can got the next step, if not keep working to get it sounding good. After the mix is sounding good use the vintage warmer (using your ear adjust how much and what to frequency bands you wants to add to) The vintage warmer adds tape like saturation to your mix which gives it that slightly driven effect and warm sound that will make your mix sound more appealing, after that add bit of compression to gel all the things you've done before and then add your limiter to keep everything at one level.

This is one way of doing it, there's a million other ways and this just one scenario but I hope you can get something out of this. Other tools you use can use are Multiband compressors, harmonic distortion plugins and techniqes such as parralell compression and it's all about using your ears to buff out the mix

EDIT

Keywords to look up:

1. Parallel compression (look this up so you can apply it to your drums, synths, bass' etc, however not ur sub!)
2. Stereo Imaging (look at how you shape your sound)
3. Midside EQ (this is a really important tool)
4. Saturation
5. Compression and multiband compressio
6. Limiting

Do individual research on all these and hopefully you should have a good enough knowledge to apply, all the best mayte!

[macc]

^ I notice 'listening' doesn't get much of a mention

@ the OP - ideally mastering will change the sound of a mix as little as possible.

Never mind the midsidemultitubemultienhancerwhatevers - get your mix right.

Simple rule: bar levelling, if you think there's ANYTHING for the mastering engineer to do then you haven't finished mixing.

Get it right in the mix and the master takes care of itself. If you are hearing gaps in your own tune when trying to master it, why didn't you do it in the mix? And on the same point, if you didn't hear them in the 2309457429075 times you listened to the track while making/mixing it, what makes you think you'll spot them when it comes to time to master it?

[Basic A]

ok so understanding what you've told me. what methods should i go about to getting my sound as clean as possible before mastering???? as of now i use maximizers, stereo enhancers/shapers, tubes, limiters, etc

but some of my sounds are still kinda off

Hi dude, Sharmaji's advice is all well and good but here are some tips to apply to your Finalizing proccess so you can get a semi-decent sound all by yourself

Maximers, stereo enhancers and limiters are all good but these are the last thing you want to think about for the moment in terms of a getting a good sounding master

First get a good mix, if you get the mix sounding solid and how you want it the "mastering" is going to be a piece of piss. Try downloading (or buying) two plugins called "Izotope Ozone 3" and "PSP Vintage Warmer". Izotope is a digital mastering plugin that has a lot of good features to better your sound like midside eq, harmonic exciter, mastering reverb, multiband compressor, stereo imager etc

After you finish a mix, apply bus compression or light compression to gel your track together "5:,1 with slow attack release and threshold" this makes the track feelas if it is one piece and less scattered. After this open Ozone and tweak your mix with midside EQ, (for all these look up tutorials on youtube), mideside EQ will allow you to scuplt indepth and add character to certain dimensions of the your mix which can give it more clarity and deffiinition.

Mastering is mainly the art of using your ears to see what you need and fill up the gaps (or take away), if the mix is sounding good, deffined, alive, then you can got the next step, if not keep working to get it sounding good. After the mix is sounding good use the vintage warmer (using your ear adjust how much and what to frequency bands you wants to add to) The vintage warmer adds tape like saturation to your mix which gives it that slightly driven effect and warm sound that will make your mix sound more appealing, after that add bit of compression to gel all the things you've done before and then add your limiter to keep everything at one level.

This is one way of doing it, there's a million other ways and this just one scenario but I hope you can get something out of this. Other tools you use can use are Multiband compressors, harmonic distortion plugins and techniqes such as parralell compression and it's all about using your ears to buff out the mix

EDIT

Keywords to look up:

1. Parallel compression (look this up so you can apply it to your drums, synths, bass' etc, however not ur sub!)
2. Stereo Imaging (look at how you shape your sound)
3. Midside EQ (this is a really important tool)
4. Saturation
5. Compression and multiband compressio
6. Limiting

Do individual research on all these and hopefully you should have a good enough knowledge to apply, all the best mayte!

Im sorry but your putting way to much thought into this. Good mix, and you could have left it at that.

[koro inu]

it makes one hell of a difference if you get it played in the club.

for £15 you can send it to a good mastering engineer. a lot of it has to do with kit as well, if you don't have the level of monitoring equipment, or the hardware (as it's better than software imho) to do it then you won't get the same results.

but, as people have said, concentrate on getting your mix right. any engineer i've ever sent stuff to has asked for headroom of -3db in the mix, so they can do their thing.

it can smooth out hard edges, clear up some room etc. it cna be done at home, but unless you've got your acoustics sorted out, the right kit etc you'll take years tweaking the set up.

[Littlefoot]

Macc, always beats me to nailing it on the head

Improve the sound? possibly. Mastering is all about knowing the format, where and how it's going to be listened to and making sure the mix-down works subjectively and objectively in this regard. It could be anything from making your well balanced mix-down "loud enough" in a transparent way, to a complete overall of the tonal balance of an old track you don't have any way of re-mixing. Sometimes it's just getting all the tracks on and balancing the levels between them and burning it to a CD.

This said mastering CAN be a creative process, but that's something you build up over time, people might come to you for "your sound" on a certain genre of music, simply because how the engineer interprets certain musical styles and motifs. I have a client who sometimes wants me to "just balance it if you feel the need or just leave it be, as I feel it's a bit off as it is" and sometimes wants me to "overcompress it on purpose".

Horses for courses really, each jobs different!

[gkmusic]

^ I notice 'listening' doesn't get much of a mention

@ the OP - ideally mastering will change the sound of a mix as little as possible.

Never mind the midsidemultitubemultienhancerwhatevers - get your mix right.

Im sorry but your putting way to much thought into this. Good mix, and you could have left it at that.

I can see how I probably over thought this post,

but really though I was just trying to give him something instead of the "sorry mate but blah blah" and all that pompous sounding advice you normally get on this forum.

I was more answering his second question where as you're answering the OP, either way I did clearly state the first step is to get a good mix and regarding the 'listening' I also said mastering is the art of using your ears. I was just trying to answer this dudes question and giving him some food for thought. At least he can look some of that stuff up and get a bit more knowledge etc.

[macc]

Fair do's sir.

I don't think anyone's pompous around here, though if anyone is it'd be me. It's just very easy to direct people to techniques, when the principles are more important. Knowing techniques is one thing, understanding principles is something else

God that sounds pompous. I'm such a wanker

[aeser]

mastering makes a huge huge difference and anyone who says differently has either never had anything mastered (correctly anyway) or needs to have their ears cleaned. it's one (not the only, but one) of the main factors in a tune sounding professional vs. sounding like every other crap internet track.

mastering reduces the dynamic range of your track which in effect to the ears makes everything louder and clearer. a lot of more modern mastering "techniques" basically push everything into the red and make a square wave that is loud as shit. this is especially true with stuff like dubstep which is digital in it's creation and aims to be as loud as humanly possible to make subwoofers freak the fuck out.

the thing is good mastering is pretty hard to do yourself (not impossible, but takes a lot of education and practice and patience, as well as VERY good ears to pick out minute differences in the audio that most people just cannot detect), and good/professional mastering costs a lot of money, so people tend to do it only for the best of the best of their tracks and or stuff that's getting released/going to be high profile and have a lot of people listen to it.

[Basic A]

mastering makes a huge huge difference and anyone who says differently has either never had anything mastered (correctly anyway) or needs to have their ears cleaned. it's one (not the only, but one) of the main factors in a tune sounding professional vs. sounding like every other crap internet track.

mastering reduces the dynamic range of your track which in effect to the ears makes everything louder and clearer. a lot of more modern mastering "techniques" basically push everything into the red and make a square wave that is loud as shit. this is especially true with stuff like dubstep which is digital in it's creation and aims to be as loud as humanly possible to make subwoofers freak the fuck out.

You know, amongst the people saying differently up there, are some pretty well established mastering engineers... and seriously... clipping into the red??? Square waves to hit your sub???

[aeser]

mastering makes a huge huge difference and anyone who says differently has either never had anything mastered (correctly anyway) or needs to have their ears cleaned. it's one (not the only, but one) of the main factors in a tune sounding professional vs. sounding like every other crap internet track.

mastering reduces the dynamic range of your track which in effect to the ears makes everything louder and clearer. a lot of more modern mastering "techniques" basically push everything into the red and make a square wave that is loud as shit. this is especially true with stuff like dubstep which is digital in it's creation and aims to be as loud as humanly possible to make subwoofers freak the fuck out.

You know, amongst the people saying differently up there, are some pretty well established mastering engineers... and seriously... clipping into the red??? Square waves to hit your sub???

mastering engineers who say mastering makes "no difference" would either be lying to you, or bad at their job. and yes i would agree that clipping into the red is bad but it is what a lot of people have been doing the last 5-10 years in mastering, where if you look at the waveforms it's completely peaked out (see green day's american idiot as a prime example, just a symptom of the ongoing loudness wars in audio) and no i wasn't specifically saying square waves hit your sub (although they do play through the sub, they are not perceived as much as sine waves as it is pushing the lowest of your frequencies), i was just saying mastering makes a big difference in types of music like dubstep where everybody's trying to outdo the last guy in loudness/deepness/clarity of bass (as well as other frequencies but obviously bass is more important to dubstep than other genres).

[macc]

mastering engineers who say mastering makes "no difference" would either be lying to you, or bad at their job.

With all due respect, you're talking out of your aeserhole.

It might make a huge difference, it might not.

Sometimes - and it does happen - you get a mix where you don't need to do anything at all. You don't HAVE to mess with stuff. Knowing when to leave things alone is THE hardest part of the job. That's the level people like myself aspire to, to be able to hear when you need to do nothing at all.

I suppose I have no idea though *mails CV to jobsite.co.uk*



{edited for clarity}

[-[2]DAY_-]

Simple rule: bar levelling

Just wondering, if you could clear that up for me... Typically, should a pre-mastered mix not make use of any leveling amps/plugins on the master? Or maybe that's pretty much up to the artist/mix engineers preferences?

[serox]

Sometimes - and it does happen - you get a mix where you don't need to do anything at all. You don't HAVE to mess with stuff. Knowing when to leave things alone is THE hardest part of the job. That's the level people like myself aspire to, to be able to hear when you need to do nothing at all.

That does not apply to ME's alone neither:)

[macc]

@ 2-day:

If you mix into a compressor for vibe/tone and all that then it's as well to leave it on - though peeeeersonally I much prefer working without one. Sending a version with and a version without is a good way to go.

Limiting and/or clipping is a big no-no.

That's not to say you shouldn't make use of the above in a mix-checking capacity - do whatever the hell you want - but master bus dynamics processing can tie the ME's hands a lot unless the overall eq is on the money (or close).

[-[2]DAY_-]

Now it seems like common sense, the way you put it. many thanks