Home Mastering Q&A with Ian Shepherd

Update - the image quality improves after a couple of minutes !

Another great livestream Q&A covering compression, EQ, acoustic treatment, loudness, streaming requirements - you name it.

For more information on the Home Mastering Masterclass, click here:

[VintiqueSound]

I bought Sonarworks Reference 4. I no longer use it for the corrective plugin in my sessions but here's how and why it's been important for my current studio setup. I first measured my room frequency balance using Reference measurement tool to get a sense of what I was working with. Then I measured my room dimensions, calculated the best speaker and listening positions using rule of thirds (and moved my desk to its optimal position, along with the speakers and sub), then placed acoustic treatment at first reflections (side, cloud, behind speakers), placed a bookshelf full of books at rear wall (diffusion), and bass traps in all 4 corners. Then I ran the Reference measurements to see how balanced my listening position was, made some tweaks to the sub settings (volume & crossover) & speaker frequency settings (low/mid/high EQing), then redid the Reference measurements until the software was processing as little corrective EQ as possible (this took about 3 tries). This made a big difference!


I used to use the Reference plugin while working on projects, but I noticed the pre-ringing that occurs in linear phase mode was not worth the EQ correction, the balanced mode was not the greatest either, and the low latency was quite good, but all the extra steps of using the plugin and some unwanted phasing was not as easy to work with as I hoped. But having made all the changes mentioned above, I can hear that the bass peaks and nulls have greatly improved, the mids reflecting off of my desk are now tamed so I'm mixing more low mids into my mixes, and my highs are far more balanced from 5kHz & up.


I highly recommend people use the a frequency measurement tool/software such as Sonarworks Reference to tune their rooms. Having said that though, I've had mixed results with the corrective software during sessions. I still use it as a reference, by engaging it and bypassing it from time to time, at the very least it gives me some extra assurance that what I'm doing is helping the mix/master. But overall, I found it's just as easy to learn my room instead (including all the work put into measuring and tweaking of the acoustic treatment/listening position/speaker settings/etc.).

[darbinyan]

Hi Ian. Thanks for your great channel, your great videos and of course LoudnessPenalty.
Of course you are right about super loud masters. But for example biggest club music store Beatport doesn't normalize audio as Spotify and other services do. So my clients music will sound week against other crazy loud tracks there. And this will affect on their sales. Because when djs are searching music for their sets they will not pick the track that is not as loud as the other ones in his future set.

[MikeHeebz]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge Ian, very helpful & insightful as usual. Currently working on my mixing skills, some day I'll join the mastering masterclass! =)

[ianrushmore]

Hi Ian, been following a while, thanks for shedding light where once there was only shadows and whispers!
I have a question that you could probably answer easily in your next Q&A. It's to do with forcing the low frquencies to mono in a stereo mix. There are many plugins that purport to do this, but most are vague about how they do it. Some say they 'sum to mono' below the selected frequency crossover, others say nothing. I have tested a few myself with varying results.
There are many forum threads about these plugins. Invariably, in these threads, someone always replys "just use a M/S (sum/diff) EQ and remove the side (diff) from the lows". My initial thoughts were that I would lose anything not already summed to MID, but I tested the theory using a tone generator hard-panned LEFT on a stereo channel and to my surprise it moved the signal to both channels. The signal was exactly 6db quieter on each channel than when hard-panned LEFT.
So my question is this: is summing to mono exactly the same as removing the side (diff)? I know that MID(sum)=L+R and SIDE(diff)=L-R, but I don't really understand why EQing the SIDE out of a signal moves it to MID. I think I could use one of your wonderful (ahem) analogies!
(Apologies if this is already explained in one of your podcasts, I am still catching up, just point me to the episode and I'll fast-forward to that)
Thanks in advance.

[dayhill]

Hi Ian been watching some of your videos and you seem like the right guy to ask this, it's not a mastering question but i'm wondering what loudness level is best to use for the following... I'm always prefering a pure sine wave as my sub bass so what i have done is exported my preffered sub bass synth to separate wav samples across the keys of the sub range. I want to set the relative gain of the samples so that they all have an equal percieved loudness as eachother, I will then load them all back in my sampler in my daw as one instrument so to speak. My initial guess would be to set them all to peak at the same LUFS, would you say this would be the best level type to use and would it matter after this if i turned up or down the overall level if the individual samples kept their relative gain settings? David

[ST-flfy]

So master to the loudest area say chorus at short term -10 regardless of platform? Don’t worry about integrated? Even for CD?

[amirjubran]

Even after listening to a 48KHz lossless version of Xanny I still find the bass drops unpleasant to my ears. The distortion is slightly lower than hearing it over Spotify, but it's still there and I don't understand how anyone except someone listening with portable speakers or headphones could enjoy that. I think the people that don't find it offensive have very lean speakers (i.e. fast neutral bass without any peaks in the band). My speakers roll off sharply below 70Hz but still sound terrible with this song.