Mastering Your Music (In 6 Simple Steps)

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Mastering is crucial to getting a professional sounding song - but - it's also pretty misunderstood. Today we're going to cover the mastering process and show you the 6 steps you should be following.

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#Mastering #HomeStudio #HomeRecording

[junipertapes]

Drew here! Thanks for watching, here are some time stamps.

P.S. not every master needs ALL of these. Saturation and stereo expansion in particular won’t be needed for every track.

0:28 - Don’t master your own music (if you can avoid it)
0:47 - Step 1: Make sure the mix is completely done
2:56 - Step 2: Metering
4:27 - Step 3: EQ
6:32 - Step 4: Dynamics
10:17 - Step 5: Tone Shaping
13:15 - Step 6: Limiting
15:40 - Bonus Tip: MidSide Processing
16:54 - Bonus Tip: Stereo Expansion

[FriendOfTheNight]

For those interested the song is called Daffodils & Love by The Dreaded Laramie. And the song is rad.

[NatanCaetano]

I love the song you used here!
If anyone is curious for the final master, that's "Daffodils & Love", by The Dreaded Laramie.

[alexgoroshko]

Thanks for the great video! Enjoy your channel and your style of explaining things. Another little mastering tip that I am using (and heard from others) is to use linear eq on master, just to avoid any phasing issues. Probably it’s hard to tell the difference, but it could be sweet bonus for your final result)

[SmileALittle]

There are literally no transients on that track at all. No dynamic range, think you need to go back my friend

[austinz]

Across the whole video I really think you’re killing your transients with all these fast attack times. I think you’ll be a lot more successful in preserving transient impact with slower attack times. Especially with the limiter you will get a lot more mileage out of it with a really slow and attack and a much faster release time.

[x-dancehallworldentertainm]

You forgot the most important thing(Step: 1) Make sure the mix you are mastering has enough headroom.

[redlightclinicdrummer]

Hey you guys, I remember in a video I watched by you recently the guy talked about how you can use mouth sounds as an audio engineer to determine where your sound sits in a mix. I believe he said something like you can use a BA sound to look for boxiness etc. Could you guys make a video on that and using it?

[NewportScorpio]

Just had a few questions:

The correlation made sense as you had explained what it did. But I was still. confused on what a "True Peak" and "Lufs" meter did. You mentioned that we should have em ready to use but I wasn't really sure for what purpose.

And the limiter had be a bit confused too. I understand that it limits signal so that the signal can't get any higher than whatever threshold you set. But what happens to those sounds that do go higher? Do they get pushed down to the level identified by the threshold?

Thanks for the vid

[itwontstopprods]

Hm. 6 steps as an idea are not a bad start. Voiceover recording is not so great though, and i doubt you would want to use Logic's Channel eq for mastering, at least use the Linear Phase EQ. Also the release set to 0 on Logic Comp would probably introduce low-end problems. And at the end you say that for a punchier sound you're gonna use a faster attack on the limiter and for more transparency a slow release? Ehm, that sounds kind of the opposite of what's true.

[jellyfishgeorge]

Will it make a difference if mastering the track before bouncing compared to after bouncing?

[Pietreszcz]

Great tutorial, but my question is - what's the song's title?

[LesVegasMusic]

I have noticed some people put their mastering chain plugins on the audio channel itself and keep the master channel for just their metering and reference plugins. But in this video, you put all the plugins on the master channel itself. Do you know if this matters at all?

[Chiefmonks]

You forgot the most important mastering ingredient: clipping. Its like limiting, but preserving the punchyness of the song. Use it before the limiter and make it do all the work (1-2db GR).

[lukeroberts]

For mastering engineer like Howie Weinberg he had to basically had to listen to the whole entire song 🎵 from 0:00 to 3:31 to see if there’s no pop or click or constantly with hissing noises or s sounds too.

[lucasturney]

Solid video overall, but I do have to say that I find it odd that you'd touch on dual Limiters as an option, but leave out that just as many people—arguably more—use a Clipper before their Limiter instead, especially in certain genres. Not a glaring oversight, but maybe something that should have been brought up.
I could also argue that Stereo Expansion at the Mastering stage is almost always a poor idea, but that would be working at least partially under the assumption that everyone is receiving mixes that have been pushed out as they can/should be, so I'll just say that it was a wise choice putting the disclaimer in there about not pushing Stereo Expansion to hard.
All in all though, solid video.

[BillGraper]

The problem I'm having is I'd mastering my rock song, and I can't get the release to work. In the verses, I have sustained electric guitar chords. The compressor won't let go of the signal, because it doesn't go below the threshold. I couldn't wait to use my Softube Bus Processor for the first time, and now I can't get it to work properly on this particular song.

I see yours is the same. It's not releasing. I don't like the thought of the compressor just clamping onto it indefinitely.

[portuguesewithtirso]

Great video. Where can i find the song you used?

[nichttuntun]

Hi. Good stuff explained well. Aren't you killing too much of the transients with short attack and longer release with Iron? While activating the TMT, it sounds more open at first but with a closer look, especially on the 2 bus or masterchannel it easily can pull your tightness off a bit. A mono maker up to 70-80hz might be a good idea, as well as a side chain to not trigger the compressor from the low end. You probably would be very happy trying out UNISUM, a real mastering compressor, sounding like legit hardware, makes the PA stuff look like very limited toys, considering their "mastering" abilities. 5-6 db gain reduction from one limiter is quite a lot. I didn't find one tool which is capable of leaving the stereo field and the low end in tact in a good way using such an amount of GR. Just some thoughts. Cheers

[housemachine]

What program did you use to show that analyzer effect?