The FIRST Step to Mastering a Song: Fixing Phase Rotation | Mastering Masterclass Ep. 4

Ever wonder what the FIRST step is to mastering a song? It's not compression, it's not stereo imaging, and it's not EQ. The first step John Mayfield takes when mastering is fixing the PHASE rotation of a song, making sure that the file is symmetrical in its waveform values. John explains why this is important.

More to come so stay tuned as we will deep dive into mastering a song from start to finish, and other tips, tricks and insights from renowned mastering engineer, John Mayfield.

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ADAM Audio was founded in March 1999 in Berlin. Since then the company has been developing, manufacturing and distributing loudspeakers in the field of Professional Audio.

The development of the X-ART (eXtended Accelerating Ribbon Technology) tweeter based on the 1960’s invention of the Air Motion Transformer by Oskar Heil was largely responsible for the company’s founding. Producing sound not with a piston-like diaphragm as is done in most of the loudspeakers that are on the market, but using a pleated diaphragm that is capable of moving the air 4 times faster than the folds themselves are moving was the appealing idea behind it all. The achieved results were intriguing and gave ample reason for moving forward.

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[haidar]

Wow. This has completely opened my eyes to something I've never known about or thought of before. It's so rare to find completely new information in this engineering world 6+ years in. Gem of a video guys. one love

[AndrewMcMillenium]

With all my respect I have to say that in the video, where the beginning of the track was analyzed for phase rotation - the whole track was selected, that's why it showed +34 degree several times.

Some sounds, mostly acoustic ones, are asymmetrical by nature. Imagine hitting a drum membrane with a stick. The first half-wave is the biggest in amplitude, because it's caused by the stick (or hand) directly being in contact with the membrane and moving it much deeper/further than what comes next. Every movement coming next is smaller and smaller in amplitude and if you analyze the whole drum hit sound - it will have a skew from the center line.
Regarding the difference - many people say you don't hear a difference, BUT. People who work for example with car audio know that there is a difference. If you wire all the speakers in a given car in a wrong polarity - you'll have less punch, because the first movement of speaker membrane goes inside instead of outside. And all this phase correction thing (which I was using in the past too) is a wrong thing to do, because it messes with the original natural sound. It won't change RMS, frequency response, but it will sound differently. If you say "pumpkin" into a mic - it will be asymmetrical, because of how much the mic membrane is being moved by the air bursts. But it should be that way! And after using RX adaptive phase rotation for years on podcasts I finally stopped doing that and it sounds much better and natural.


So, the only good thing about phase correction is that you can squeeze more volume out of it.

[DerperyPooslinger]

In 2013-2014 I got a chance to work with John in studio A. I couldn't believe the atmosphere that room has, and John's enthusiasm when it comes to explaining the science behind his craft. Quality guy and quality work.

[davidasher]

Wow! It’s been a while since I actually learned something new from an audio engineering video on youtube. Faith restored..

[beatchildproductions]

Mix With The Masters... TAKE NOTES! This is how you make educational content.

[sqcaraudio]

My take is that it's using an FIR algorithm to shift phase tilted from the highest frequencies to the lowest. So the 20kHz is delayed by say 30 degrees and then less at 10kHz down to no shift at 10Hz. You can do this with Meldamedia "free phase".
The reason you can't do adaptive on main mixes is that it may introduce pitch artefacts due to the delay changes.
The key term here phase is meaning delay but they don't say FIR time domain manipulation. So less delay at lower frequencies. Hope that helps. You could run two files against each other in Rational Acoustics Smaart and see what phase plot x y tilt they are using.

[externity]

Just when I think I'm starting to get over the first hurdles of learning to mix..
I find this mind blowing technical wizardry.

[Barncore]

Wow i've been doing audio for 8 years and i've never heard of this. Really grateful to have been exposed to this nugget! Thanks

[ADAMAudioBerlin]

Did you know about the importance of phase rotation already? Let us know 👇

[intoalter]

This is going to be a GOLDEN series!!! I would love to see a course regarding Audio Engineering through some subscription, It would be a absolute game changer, because the quality you guys give us is absolutely amazing.

[davelordy]

The reason the phase keeps showing you +34° is because you keep analysing the same audio - the whole track - when you think you are selecting a specific part, you are only zooming in on that part, not selecting it . . . . keep up : )

[footsandersen]

John is amazing. I went to him for mastering and got a mixing mentor!!!

[iamsyntact]

this is incredible. I can't tell you how many times I have a sample or instrument that's way out of balance and before now I had no idea how to fix it. so many times I've heard "you can fix this with a highpass filter" but this is absolutely not always the case. thank you sir

[TomWa]

Wow! I wish I had known about this sooner. I'm working on a project where, from a stereo mix, I'm removing vocals, correcting them, and then replacing them back into the vocal-less stereo instrument stem. The RX8 music rebalance algorithm works WAY better once the rotation (which was off by quite a bit) is corrected. Thank you!

[chopsoe]

The fact that it gives more headroom for volume optimisation afterwards is so logical and I don't know why I never really thought about it before... Good stuff!!

[audiokemestry]

Great info!! I have bumped into this problem many times...and addressed in different ways....but I never knew what it was called and never knew RX could fix it! Lol. Thanx much

[derekrushe]

45 years old, in the industry years, never even heard about this until today. Thanks

[JoelWard]

Wowza. I had absolutely zero clue that this was a thing. Geez, I'll be having trouble going to sleep this night knowing how many masters I could've saved just by having the feintest clue about this....

[RobertCow]

John gives me the impression of a great and interesting person!

[feinklangmastering]

This is gold content! Thanks for this in depth specific look at this difficult topic.