Izotope Ozone 10: Mastering Complete Tracks With Ozone

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to mastering music with ozone ten. Ozone is an industry standard mastering plug in tool. If you're interested in doing any mastering whatsoever, you should really be learning ozone. One of the things I love about ozone is that it's not as complicated as most mastering tools. There are a few tricky things to get used to, but it's designed to be quite user friendly. I think with this one short class, we'll be able to get you all up and running and mastering your tracks using ozone. In this class, I'll be mastering two tracks as we go along through the class. The first track, more hip hop, electronic thing, and I'll be showing us all the modules that are in ozone and how absolutely all of ozone works by using that track. Then at the end, I'm going to switch over to a more rock track. And we'll master that by applying all the concepts that we've talked about throughout the class. While this class is primarily about how to use the ozone software, we will go into some elements of just mastering theory and how to master tracks. With that being said, let's dive in, this is where things get a little weird. This is going to do when I press it, is it's going to ask me to start to play some of the traps. As you can guess, low end focus. The design of this is to clear up muddiness in the low end. This is a tool that's designed to do exactly that, so it can be really handy. Right now, I'm going to go to our maximizer, okay? My ceiling is set to zero. I'm going to give myself a little bit of head room here. There's a few things it took me a few minutes to get used to with this compressor that I want to point out. First, this is a very good compressor. I really like it to take one of these, a really small, I'm going to boost it way up. And then I'm just going to roll the frequency around and listen closely for any problematic frequencies. Anything that's really jumping out at me. 2. What is Ozone and what is it for?: All right. Hey everyone. Isotopes, ozone. Let's talk about what this program is and what it does first. This is a mastering tool. This is a tool we use for mastering. Now if you've taken some of my other classes where we've talked about mastering, or if you've done any mastering on your own, you might know that you can do mastering without isotope ozone. You totally can. To do mastering, you need an EQ, you need a compressor, you need a limiter, you can use some other stuff. Ozone has all of those things built in plus a bunch more stuff that can give you an even better master. The newer versions of ozone give you some AI like tools. I don't know if I'd call them exactly AI, but let's call them smart tools. Some ways to listen to what you're mastering and actually give you a little bit of context about what it thinks you should be doing to it. It's a very powerful tool. It's an industry standard tool. A lot of people are using it for professional level mastering for what it is. It's actually not that intimidating. A lot of the times with older mastering software, what you see is just 1 million different meters and levels and numbers just flying by. Ozone is relatively user friendly. You see a lot of stuff here on the screen, but it's not as ugly as other things have been. This is actually pretty welcoming. It's got some good presets for us to work with and play around with. We want to use this for mastering. That means our track is all done, we've mixed it, we're happy with the mix, and we're moving on to the mastering process. So I have a track here that we're going to master. This is a student track that was submitted. Sounds like this. A happy light bouncy thing. We're going to do a quick master of it in this class only using ozone. Now, one last thing I'll say before we move on. Yes, I am going to be using Ableton Live to host ozone because it's a plug in. We need a to be running it. But whatever you're comfortable using. Logic Pro Tools, FL Studio, Studio One, whatever, literally any of them. Isotope is its own program. Once you open it within your do, it's all going to work the same Mac or PC or anything. Cool. Let's dive in. 3. Getting the program (Where and how to buy it): Okay, In order to get ozone, you're going to go to the isotope website. That's isotope with a Z. Go to products. Now you've got a lot of options here. You can just buy ozone and we're on ozone ten right now. But before you do that, think about anything else you might want. You've got ozone ten here. There's also a light version of ozone. If I go down here to see all apps and plug ins, I'm going to click on ozone. Down here on the left here, we have ozone ten advanced, 500 bucks. Ozone ten elements, well there's ozone ten standard and ozone ten elements 249.1 29. Those are lighter versions of it. They're not going to have all the tools. I'm going to be using ozone ten advanced in this class. But you might have some other options. If you look at one of these suits that has more stuff in it like this one mix and master bundle advanced. This is 500 buck, this is 700 bucks and gets you a bunch more programs. It totally might be worth considering getting one of these bundles that they have, or starting with the elements version and working your way up to the advanced version. I believe if you get the elements version, it's cheaper than to upgrade to standard or to advanced. You can buy it here on the ozone website and then it'll give you a link to download. That download link is actually going to download you, isotope installer program, then the installation can get a little weird. Let's go to a new video and walk through the installation real quick. 4. Installation: Okay. After you purchase, check your E mail for your authorization code and then follow that link. And that'll prompt you to download the isotope product portal, install and launch that. That is going to open this little program. This basically just handles all your isotope products. A lot of companies are doing this these days. It handles the serial numbers and upgrades and all that stuff. So the first thing you're going to have to do is log in. It's going to look like this. You're when ozone, you're going to have created a username and password. You're going to enter that here so that you can get into the product portal. Once you get in, click on my products and you should see in your list of stuff, whichever version you bought, ozone ten advanced. You might see a whole bunch of things here and you might see like I do, or you might see just ozone. I have a whole bunch of isotope products, so I see a bunch of things. You can see these are all installed. These things are not installed. But I did in preparing for this class upgrade to isotope ten advance that is already installed, All you have to do is click on the install button that will show up next to ozone ten in whatever version you're on, then it'll start running the installer. You can also check this install authorized button to see if you have to show just the things that need to be installed yet. Look at updates and add ons and stuff like that. As it's installing it's going to look like this. You'll see the software. And then it, taking its sweet time to download, it's a big program. Once it's done installing, then it's going to look like this. It's going to run through this. Once it's done downloading, it's going to run through an installation package that looks like this. It might prompt you for your username and password once, maybe even twice, but it'll all install in the background and then you'll be. Good to go is a few more steps than your average installation, but not too difficult. 5. Launching Ozone: Okay, now that we're all installed, what you're going to do is launch your favorite audio application, whatever you're using. Then you're going to go into plug ins. You can do this a few different ways, but I'm going to go into VST three. If you see that folder go there. You should have a folder called isotope. And go down to isotope ten. You'll see that I have a whole bunch of ozone tens here. You'll see that isotope refers to this as the mother ship and the components. Okay. What that means is this one, the one that's called ozone ten, that's the mother ship plug in that has everything built into it. But if you just want to use individual parts like let's say you just want to use the compressor of ozone and you don't want to deal with all of the other things built into ozone. You could load just the ozone ten compressor with this ozone ten dynamics, okay? You could put that on and then you'd have just that component. Okay, That's not what I want to do. In fact, I've never done that with ozone. I figure it's just as easy to load the whole thing for me. I'm going to load the mother ship, plug in ozone ten with nothing after it. I'm going to drag that right onto my track. Now you can put this on the master track if you want, or you can put it on your stereo out if your track is all done and you're actually in the mastering process. But typically how we would do it in a mastering session is we'd have one track in our session and it would be a stereo audio track. And we put it, we put our mastering tools right on that track. And then we leave nothing on the master, the Mothership plug in and the component plug ins. When in doubt if this is confusing, just use the mothership plug in the one that's just called ozone ten. 6. Using Presets: Okay, throughout this course we're going to go into a lot of detail on how to use ozone and what every bell and whistle does in it. We're not going to go over every single thing that it can do, but we'll go over a lot of the setting. But if you just want to skip past all of that and say, I've got ozone, I've got a track, make it sound good. Here's how we can do it. Take these presets, if you go up here, we have some presets. We can go in here and we can say, okay, All Purpose Mastering. We've got a Balance Master, CD Master. We've got a whole bunch of options here, and these are just dumb settings. Let's say you've got a nice acoustic track, it's like acoustic guitar or something. Maybe you want to add something here like enhanced depth, maybe, balanced master, or maybe you've got this electronic thing like we have that I might go to genre specific mastering. And here's another acoustic one. I might probably not EDM in this case, but I might go to electronic and see what it thinks that is. Okay. I clicked on it, it loaded it up. Now I'm going to close this window now we can see what it added was an equalizer. And it gave it that settings like it boosted our base a little bit, gave a little more presence on the highs. This is our compression setting. So we've set up a multiband compressor, we'll talk more about that later. Doing some stereo imaging here. And then maximizing the volume to get it nice and loud. Let's hear what it did. Got that kick, nice and punchy. Cool. So it sounds pretty good. If you want to just cut to the trace and get something cued up, just load in one of those presets. Okay, They're right here and you can adjust them, you're not stuck with whatever they do. I could say this is great, but I want my width to be a little wider. Maybe I'm going to play with what it did. See if I can tweak that preset to get it where I want. There's no shame in using these presets. Just do it, you'll get some great sounding stuff. All of these presets are one way that you can just load up ozone and get something sounding mastered really fast. There's another way that's in ten, called the master assistant. This is where, like the weird AI stuff comes into play. But let's take a look at it. It's freaky. 7. Master Assistant Setup: Okay, this button right here is called the master assistant. This is where things get a little weird. What this is going to do when I press it is it's going to ask me to start to play some of the track and it's going to listen to it, it's going to analyze it. And then it's going to set up my whole mastering chain. For me, it's pretty good, it works pretty well. Think of it as a great starting point. All of this whole AI smart assistant thing is really good at getting you in the ballpark for a good master. It's not quite great at really understanding the nuance of a track, but it's not bad. Let's try it. I'm going to click on this tool, it says waiting for audio. So I'm going to go somewhere in my track that's like one of the louder points, That's this whole section here. So I'm just going to hit play this thing, we just wait, It's hard enough Then it's thinking, all right, now it's mastered. What we're seeing here is a little bit different interface. This is giving us this tone, match with match and dynamics match. It's showing us a really simplified version of what it's doing. If we want to get back into the guts of the modules, we can click this button up here and we can see how it's applied stuff. You can see it thinks we want it way bright. It's definitely making it a lot brighter. Our kick is a little distorted. We're going to want to pull that back, what it's decided to do there. But we can adjust these things. We can adjust the width of it. The dynamics, if we want to pull that back a little bit, tone match, we give it a better idea of what it's listening to. By adjusting here it thinks we're listening to EDM, which it's not totally off from. If we wanted to do more, we could say re learn. We can tell it to go backwards and try it again. Maybe give it a different section of audio to listen to. We can go back to our actual modules here and turn anything off with a little blue button or get rid of it with the X and adjust things however we want. It's a great starting point to do that. We can really get in the ballpark and then adjust things as we need to. Now we're going to talk more about these modules. I realize you're like, wait, what are we doing with all these modules? We're going to talk more about them in just a minute. I just wanted to give you those two things using presets and this master assistant as ways to just get things happening really fast. So there are great ways to just dive in and make your track sound mastered by using those two tools. With that other way, let's get a little deeper into the settings and start to understand the workflow of this program. 8. Global Header: Hello. Hi. I have a cold but I think I sound worse than I feel. I'm pretty much over my cold, but my voice hasn't caught up yet. We press on. In this section, we're going to talk about the navigation of ozone and how the things laid out. There are four main sections of ozone. The header, which has some important stuff in it. There's the signal chain or device chain, The module interface, each of these is a module in the chain. The interface for them changes depending on what we've clicked on right then. The fourth thing is the O panel over here that just shows us our ins and outs and gives us some good options for soloing and referencing, and bypassing and stuff. Let's look at the stuff in our header really quick here. First, we have this instance name. Now this is a little deceptive, it looks like maybe you can change the name here, I think Per is the name of this track. Save it as the preset. Save it as a preset that you're working on. But that's not actually what this does. This is naming your instance of ozone for maybe recalling, for automation or something like that. It's not going to save what you're doing as a preset that you would do over here. These are our presets. And you would go to new. I haven't found a very useful thing for naming this instance of ozone yet. You can do it if you want. If anyone finds a good use for that, let me know. Here we have our mastering assistant that we've already looked at. We can toggle here between our two main views, the mastering assistant, which is this, and our main detailed view. These are two main ways that we can look at ozone. Since we've already looked at the mastering assistant for pretty much the rest of this class, we're going to be in the detailed view. We're not going to spend much more time in the mastering assistant because it's designed to be really simple and easy and we've already looked at it, we're going to be in the weeds for the rest of it. In the detailed view, you already know the presets that's here. Then over here is a couple handy things. Step backwards, this undue history is really great. You can click here and see all the things you've done and walk backwards. You could just say, oh, I want to walk all the way back to here and click there, and then it's going to undo you back all the way to that. It's really handy. I love programs that have a big undue history like that, and some preferences, you cand walk through these preferences if you want. I'm going to tell you that probably the default settings for everything is about what you want. You are welcome to adjust the milliseconds of the peak cold time if you want, but unless you have very specific needs, you probably don't need to really anything here. I wouldn't worry about it. But know that there's a whole bunch of things here that you can get at if you really want to dive in deep and have some very specific needs. This is the question mark will open some help documents. That'll walk you through some of the settings if you like. That's it for the top header part. Cool, so let's go next into our device chain. 9. Device Chain: Okay, next is our device chain. Maybe you've worked with a device chain before. This is something that we encounter all the time, lately, all the time. I get asked when it comes to mixing, especially I get asked about device chains because it's really common to talk about someone's tone, especially with guitar tone and vocal effects in terms of their, their effect chain. You might think of someone's guitar tone as like what series of effects are they running through? The order matters, so and so's guitar tone is this effect. This effect, this specific distortion. One other specific distortion. All of those run through and then into a certain amp that is like the chain of effects. Similarly, you might say, to get Lady Gaga vocal sound, you run through these processes. That's what she does to her voice to get it to sound the way it does on a recording. We're doing the same concept here. We have a chain of effects. We can hit a little X and get rid of them, now we have none. We can hit this little plus to add one, these are the different ones. I could add an Q and then add a low end focus, and then add a match Q for example. Now my signal is going to start over here and it's going to go through this one and then this one, and then this one. And then to my outputs, the order matters. Let's find a situation where the order will really matter. Let's go to, let's do this just for example, okay, as a very simple principle here is it's going to do a lot of things, but at its most simplest level, it's going to add a bunch of high end frequencies. Well, it's going to add a whole bunch of high end frequencies to give it an extra sparkle and things. So that's cool. We're going to add a whole bunch of high end stuff. This EQ, the way I have it set up here is going to take out a bunch of high end stuff, okay? So if I have it this way, where we take out a whole bunch of high end stuff and then we add in a whole bunch of high end stuff. The exciters first going to try to enhance the high end stuff that's there, and right now there's nothing for it to latch onto. Let's hear what that sounds like. Okay? If I switch the order now there's an exc, adding a bunch of stuff and then this is pulling those things away. It's going to have a different sound, because now there's going to be really no high stuff. So it's not dramatically different in this case. But it is different. The order does matter, especially as you get into more complicated chains. We'll talk more about that later. And we are going to go through, in the next part of our class, how each of these individual devices work. Hold on to that for now, because I want to continue on with our overview of the programs. Next, let's go to the detailed view and the IO section. 10. Module Interface: Okay, next let's look at the main device view now. Obviously this is going to change for everything that, for every individual device that we're using. I just want to talk about some of the global things for now. One in particular, it's this one right in the middle, we can interface with just about any object as stereo midside or left, right? Okay, here's what that means. Stereo is what you're used to. We're looking at this as a single stereo signal, meaning it's got a left and a right to it, but we're interfacing with it as the mix is already set up. I have any Q I can use, I'm affecting both the left and the right signal together. I can change that to separate the stereo signals. If I go to left, right now they are separate. I can click on left and say, okay, this big cut there. Now that cut is only on the left side. If I click on right, there's no EQ there yet. I say, okay, I want this big boost here or something. Now the right side has this big boost, on the left side has this big cut. You can Q the two sides differently. This works on just about everything. Everything will let you do all three options. In this case, I'm qing, left and right independently. Mid side is another way that we can process things that's popular in mixing and mastering. Mid side basically means middle and side. Middle also sometimes called mano. We can the stuff that's right in the middle of the mix, we can stuff that's on the sides of the mix differently. If I say in the middle, I click over here, I say in the middle, I want this on the sides, I want this. That's how you would do that. Now, doing mid side work can make the track feel wider if you do it right. Also note that when you do this, you can solo it. Here's just the mids and here's just the sides. That's interesting. This is a very peculiar mix to have that little amount going in the sides that this is a very mono heavy mix. Interesting we'll encounter, we'll deal more with that later. We might want to send more stuff out to the sides, but that's for another day. Okay. Just know that you've got some options here that you can deal with everything in. You've also got here a big reset button. This looks like an undue button, but it's not. This is going to reset you to the defaults. If I do something this and I do some complicated EQ, and I'm like, okay, that's cool, but it's not what I want. I just want to go back to starting point. Hit this and it's just going to reset everything. So don't hit that on accident. And if you do hit that on accident, go up to your undue history and just undo it and then you'll get back what you had. Cool. All right, let's look at the IO. 11. I/O Settings and Monitoring: Okay. Last, let's talk about the O panel. Here we have 2 meters that you can see moving around here. This one is our incoming signal before all of our processing. This is our outgoing output signal. The signal basically is coming in here from Ableton, in my case, then going through all our processing and then coming to here. Okay, we're not doing really anything that's affecting the signal a whole lot yet They look almost identical, but after you do a lot of processing, they won't look very identical. A couple of things I want to point out here. One is that yours might look a little different. If it does, it's probably because I'm looking at mid side and not stereo. Mid size means that big one in the middle is my middle and then the smaller ones are my sides, right? If you want to change your view to be stereo or midside, click up here on the O and change source. Source can be stereo. Now I'm looking at a stereo signal. It just depends on how you want to monitor things. A couple other handy tools we have down here. This little button is going to switch us over to mono. It's going to sum all of our tracks, which can be useful for testing. This is going to swap our left and right channel, which again, can be useful for testing. This reference window is actually really cool. This is going to open a little reference interface. What we can do here is load in a track that we're going to use to reference. We can toggle between the reference and we can, we can open a whole her mastered track that we like the mastering. And we can leave it here and then just go back and forth. This is really useful, especially when you're dealing with things like volume and trying to get something good and loud. You can test it against like a commercially released track and say like it is as loud, it feels as loud as this other track. This reference interface is really cool. Then down here, you can adjust your codec settings like the bit rate and things that we're processing at. If you're not comfortable with that stuff, just leave it where it is, trust me, on it. And the dither settings will deal with a little bit more when we go to export our track. So just remember that's where your dither is and we'll deal with that later. Both of these codecs and dither, we turn them on by hitting this little button and then we've got some control over it changing it, but I'm going to leave those off for now. Okay, some handy tools there. Okay. Now I think it's time to get into our devices and walk through each one of our mastering tools that we have here in Ozon. 12. Dynamic EQ: Okay, let's go through the modules in Ozone Now I'm going to go through every module that we have here. I'm not going to go through every little button in every module that would be tedious and boring to you probably, but I'm going to go through how to use them and the main principles of all of them. I'm going to assume that you already know the basic principles of how to use something like a compressor and an EQ and things like that. And I'll be focusing here on how to do those things in ozone. The things that make ozone unique. First thing I need to do, I don't have to do this, but for the purposes of explaining this, I'm going to clear out my effect chain here to get rid of anything in your effect chain. We're going to hit this little x while we're here. Let me point out that you can also solo a process here, turn off a process here, and get presets about your process here. But I want to get rid of this. We have totally blank slate now. We have no modules queued up. I get this big plus sign here and it says, start polishing your track. I'm going to hit that. I'm going to start at the beginning with dynamic EQ. Okay, with dynamic EQ, first thing to note, we have the three options at the top. We can deal with this as stereo, mid side or left, right? One thing that I find a weird about this EQ is that we actually have six nodes available to us. Here we see four, each one of these being a node. We have by default a high pass at the bottom, then some band pass and band boosts here. You'll notice though that the numbers here, this is 1346. I don't really know why they did that. You're thinking where's 2.5 You can make them if I go on the white line. Where the white line here is our composite Q, that's just showing what all of the EQ's together are doing. Like if I do this, you can see the white line is the composite. If I click on the white line, I can make a module and I can have up to six after that, I can't make anymore. That's how you make more and you can get a total of six. Remember that you've always got this little reset button up here. If we want to just go back to the four, you can do that. You can also manually delete one by just clicking on this little x that pops up here while we're here. Let's talk about this little contextual menu that comes up whenever you click on one of your modules, or modules, your nodes or bands. However you want to call in the Q, you get this what they call a Hud, like a heads up display like from scifi stuff. It's cheap, but we'll call it a little detail view of what's going on with that module. You can the shape, you can, you can see the frequency gain and you can adjust them here by clicking and dragging on the numbers, you can see your frequency you gain. Had actually, for a reason that I'll come back to in just 1 second. But let me finish telling you more about what's here. We can solo just this band, which is really handy for mastering. We can turn off just this band, mute that band if you will, and we can get rid of it with this X. We also have a threshold and a few more options way out here that give us an attack release. What the threshold and attack and release is, this is what they call dynamic mode direction. It has to do with a combination of threshold, attack, release and these little arrows you see here. This means that this is pretty unique to this EQ. It means that it's going to function a little bit like a compressor. So we can say when the signal goes above the threshold we set here, it can do something different depending on which direction you've clicked here, for example. Most of them have to do with pulling it back towards the center line, if I say down. Here. Then as we exceed the threshold, this is going to pull back towards the center, which is no adjustment, right? If I go up, it's going to move away from the center. And then the opposite is true if I'm cutting. So we're going to move up towards the center and away from the center. If we go down here, you don't have to use that. But it might be something good to explore by looking at some of the presets and see how they affect your sound. But that's what these little arrows are doing. And this threshold and the attack and release will be the amount of time it takes for the threshold to kick on. Okay, Jumping back to the thing that I was talking about a second ago about how adjusting with just these numbers can be handy. Here's why. Let's get rid of that for a minute. I can get rid of that little box. Let me do that again. By clicking out of it, I can just click anywhere and that box goes away. Let's say I'm like, I'm trying to do like a ring out thing where I'm listening for any ringing sounds. By doing this, right, Maybe I've decided that the amount of boost I want to track the ringing sounds is five, okay? 4.9 whatever. Let's say we landed on 4.9 that's what we want to do now. I want to move the frequency, but if I grab this and just click and drag, it's really hard to maintain that exact 4.9 over here because our mouse moves in two dimensions. I can just click on frequency here and just click and drag. Then I'm going to be only affecting the horizontal axis, just like gain here. I'm going to be affecting the vertical axis, Axis axes Q. I can adjust here. You can also adjust Q, that's the width of our filter here. Now there's a couple other ways you can interact with this EQ without using the little pop up menu here. If I hold shift while I click and drag, I can only adjust it left and right. That's a little bit quicker way to do the same thing if you want to move with a little bit more detail. You can move these nodes with the arrow keys by just clicking one to select it. And then moving left and right and up and down. If you want to do big movements, hold the shift key and then I'll jump you around. I believe you can do command key to do very small movements. I'm holding down command and I get movements like that. I hold down nothing and I get movements like that and I hold down shift and I get movements like that. Another way to interface with this plug in, that's the basic principle of it. If you understand how to use an EQ, then this will be fairly familiar. We have low frequencies over here, high frequencies over here. We're going to boost or cut by the points, this line, okay? So this would be adding more base, this would be boosting this particular frequency of 887 Hertz et cetera. Cool. All right, so that's the dynamic EQ. The thing that makes it dynamic is that ability for it to have this up down direction and the threshold, otherwise it's just a regular old EQ. Nothing too crazy about it. All right, let's move on to the next one. 13. Dynamics: Okay, next up, moving alphabetically because why not? Let's go to dynamics now. Don't get dynamic EQ and dynamics confused. I'm going to get rid of dynamic EQ and add dynamics where dynamic EQ as is an EQ with some dynamic properties, meaning that they will change depending on the music that's going through it. Dynamics dynamics is a compressor. This is our main traditional Ish compressor. Okay, If you're using ozone for mastering, which you probably are, this is our probably most well known and frequently used tool for mastering. There's a few things it took me a few minutes to get used to with this compressor that I want to point out. First, this is a very good compressor. I really like it. By default, this can be a multiband compressor. If you took my master in class, you know that I like those and those are popular to use. Let's start by going over here. We see band one and all. Okay, we're on a single band compressor now, but if we go all we can see that we have four bands set up, but we're only using one. The tricky thing to understand here is this is our frequency spectrum up here. Okay? So this is our lowest stuff. This is our highest stuff. This little plus sign that I can move around just by putting my mouse over it is what band we're looking at right now. This band is the whole thing, but if I click somewhere, now I've made a second band. Now I've got compressor one and compressor two. Okay, this compress, the pink compressor is the pink area. I can adjust where it splits cool, but we can go further. Here's the third one and here's the fourth one. I think that's my max. Yes, now I have four bands of compressors that I've created. If you're thinking we shot, where do I put these? Did this trick in my mastering class where we talk about the snare drum, we're going to slow with this little S, this low one, and we say, listen to the track, let's make sure we're getting a good amount of low end. But not that snare drum. In this case, we don't really have a snare drum happening. This isn't a great example of that. But in the high end stuff, we want to hear the crack of the snare drum. But we want to hear the majority of the snare drum right in the middle. But there's an easy way easier way. Yet in ozone. In this module it has this learned function. This is what that learned function does, is going to place these where it thinks it's appropriate. Let's try it. I'm going to press learn. Start playing some music it's Listen for a while. And it's going to decide where it thinks is the best spots. When it's done, it's going to turn itself off. Once this learned mode is off, it has decided where its best points are. That's pretty slick actually. Okay. I'm still soluing my low end now. I have different compression settings from my low end, mid my highs and my really highs. Those are my four areas. Okay, getting into the details. We can adjust all of our compression settings here, but if we want to look at things differently, we can go into a more detailed view. Let's look at our mids. Let's stop soloing, maybe solo mids. Here's our mids. Click on this band, so it's highlighted up here. And then I click over here, band two. Now I'm just looking at this compressor. I can say, cool, I want to compress this card now. We've turned it down. We want to turn makeup gain on again. If you took my mastering class, you know that we can adjust the makeup gain by the amount we reduce, so we can push it back up. And that's a thing that we do. But ozone has this little a right here. And that is going to automatically adjust our make up gain to get us back to the volume of which we reduced it at, if that makes sense. Turning this on is going to basically do an automatic makeup gain. There's our signal back, but fully compressed. Okay? We can adjust all our things here. Remember to note how you're looking at your meters. We have three different ways of looking here. I like to mostly be looking at RMS. Okay, so let's go through here and do a little bit of adjustments. I just switched over to band three. I'm going to really compress these. I've got my automatic make up gain on. I can just boost the gain if I want to and I don't really need to. Okay, And let's make sure our base is pumping. Let's see that, Okay, so let's stop. So living in the middle, all right? You don't really like what we're doing to the low end here. All right, so we're going to pull that back quite a bit. Cool, so those are our main controls in the dynamics processors. 14. EQ1 & EQ2: Okay, Next is equalizer, and now we have two of these, equalizer 1.2 They are the same. We can use two of them. And there are some reasons why we might want to use two of them. They give us two, but they are identical. This is just like our dynamic EQ, but without those dynamic functions, right? This is just a plain old Q. If you've used an EQ before, you know how this works. Low stuff over here. High stuff over here. Here's our setting, the width of our filter. We can adjust it. All of the key commands I talked about before are still going to work. Or we can move things up and down with the arrow. Keys hold shift to lock in the horizontal access. Our heads up display here, our little contextual menu. This little arrow on the left doesn't give us any information. It's got our traditional functions in here. Filter types, we can solo a band, we can get rid of a band with this x. We can add up to two more bands, up to three more band. Four more bands can add up to eight bands. Here we can have an eight band Q. Our little contextual menu here shows us less information than before, really just our frequency gain and it's an insane. We can also get access to a more detailed view of everything we're doing in this EQ by going here to the global view. This is going to show us all our points on the, basically everything in that little heads up display, but for everything all at once. Frequency gain and cue for all of our points here, we can solo stuff and really hear what we're doing. If we listen. Here's just this. Q So that this is good for that ringing out process that we do for weird frequencies. Anything that really sticks out, nothing is jumping out to my ear. But there we go, relatively simple, traditional Q, we can have two of them. May be worth pointing out here that everything in this list we can only use once. We can't have like ten compressors in something. If I use dynamics here and I go back to add it again, it's great out I can't use it. That's why they've given us two Q's because this program is designed just to use the modules that we need to use and get the maximum out of each instance of them. You wouldn't create multiple EQ is the one exception, so they give us two of them. All right, let's move on to the exciter. 15. Exciter: All right, next is the exit. The Exc is a saturator. If you're not familiar with a saturator, we use them on occasion in mastering fairly often exit or a saturator, everything from when used gently, it can add some upper overtones, a little bit of color to some of the frequencies that we're working with. When used in more extreme settings, it can be just straight up distortion, both can be fun to use and everything in between. What we'll see here is a fairly familiar interface to us. At this point. We have four different bands available to us that we can apply saturation in. We can create different segments by clicking here and deciding where our lows are, separated from our mids, from our highs. Or we can use this learn interface and ask ozone to figure it out. I'm going to create three brands I'm going to hit, I'm going to play some music. Have it to figure out where the best spot. As soon as that turns off it thinks this area gets its own. Which is in that might be telling us it really only thinks we need three bands. But it doesn't matter for each band. Let's solo, just this middle one. Because it's small. Here it is. Maybe that's what it latched onto, is just that Loki high hat stuff. We can adjust the mix. How much of it is in there, We can adjust the amount of the saturation. Let's just hear it here it is, full blast here with. All right, so it's cool here in this range. And I can scale it back with the amount with the mix so I can be just as aggressive with it here. But then adjust the mix. Now let's go to a middle band where it's a little more obvious. Let's turn this one off and just solo this one. There's that distortion. Let's look at our different modes. You see here where it says triode. Here we have a list of different types of saturation that we can use. You can think of these as different little distortion petals. If you want the default triode, a tube circuit like an old tube amp double triode is modeling a different tube circuit. The way I've read about this is that the triode is a tube, but half of the tube circuit and the dual triode is the full tube circuit. If you're familiar with like old tube amps or something like that, They tend to have a nice warm sound and can sound really good, but we have some other stuff here too. Analog is a nice distortion modeled after a transistor. It's a bit more gritty, that's cool. Retro different, a digital following to it, which is interesting. Analog aggressive tape as you can imagine. Tape to real harsh. But remember they don't have to be so harsh. We're using them at their extreme, I mean, if we did something like this, I don't like what this is doing to that base in this particular case. But maybe up here on these high hats, let's go to tube. Right? That's a cool sound. I like that we don't have to use them in their extreme ways and on everything. Then we have warm, which is I think an even harmonics saturator, let's put that one over here. Distortion that's more of a nice cleaner saturation as we've seen in some other modules that I don't think I pointed it out. We can link some of these things together with buttons like this. We've seen these in other ones and I think I didn't point them out, but if I do something like this, maybe get this set up how I like something like that, that then link these bands, they're all linked together. If I adjust one of them, I'm going to adjust them all. It can be handy sometimes if you don't want a multi band, but you already have one set up, you can just do that and then everything you do is going to affect the whole thing. Awesome. Let's move on. 16. Imager: All right, up next is our imager. Imager refers to the stereo image, the width of our sound. Now I think earlier we talked about this particular track being very centered, right? Look, there's not a lot happening on the sides. That might be something we want to look at and this is how we would do it. Let's try again. This familiar interface of finding the different bands. If we want to use different bands, right now, we're only using one band for the whole frequency spectrum. And that's okay. We can decide if we want to do the stereo imaging to certain sections of the frequency or to the whole thing. I'm going to do it to the whole thing right now. And I'm not going to create separate bands yet. What I'm looking at here is over here I have stereo width. We see four of these, but each one of these is for our bands. Right now, only one I can use, these other ones are grade out, I can't use them. If I go up, it's going to increase the stereo width of the track. If I go down, it's going to decrease, it's going to make it more narrow. Okay, we can see the effects of that over here in this vectorscope. Okay, let me take this back on to nothing. Okay, let's just see what this little vectorscope shows us. You can think left and right on the sides here. This is the center, right? And we can see most of that signal is in the center. All right, let's turn this up a little bit and see if we can get a little bit more spread. Now you see that's a little bit messier. It's not a straight line very much anymore. We've got messier and we can see this little ball at the bottom bouncing around a lot more. That's great, We want that. Now. If I push this too hard, it's going to really start moving us out to the sides, which sounds nice from it. That actually sounds quite nice. I'm going to leave it there for a minute. I also have a couple more options here I can turn on the stereo wise. This is a little bit different. This is going to give us a little bit more width by using some delays, millisecond delays, and optical, there's two modes here. This one is a has effect, If you know what that is, it doesn't really matter to us right now. The second one is the decoloration. If I turn it over into the has effect and then push up this milliseconds, it's fading out because I'm at the end of the track. There we go. Now we can see we're really wide. We're going all over the place here, but we've get some of these red dots here. That means we're clipping, I need to pull some of my width back or insert a limiter in my chain or something to make sure that I'm not actually going to end up with a clip mix. This recovered side mode basically you would do if you want to reduce the width but you don't want to lose information that's in the sides. This is going to save it. It's not going to apply to us now because we're trying to expand the width. But if we wanted to reduce it, we could turn this, recover sides mode on and get back some of the signal that we might be losing. You can see now our signals just really straight up right in the middle of even more, if I turn the stereo wise off, now there's not much in the sides. If I solo it, we don't really hear hardly anything. But if I did have information on the sides, this would help us. Sure, we didn't lose it if we were reducing the stereo width, but that is not what we want to do. You can see when I go up to a positive here to widen the stereo with this turns off I can't do anything. We've got a few other ways we can look at our vector scope here. Same information, just a different view. Some people looking at things differently. I'm much more used to this one. There you go, stereo imaging. 17. Impact: All right, up next is impact. Now impact is a dynamic processor, a lot like the other compressors that we looked at like dynamics. However, this one is really tuned in to what ozone likes to call microdynamics. And the way I would think about that is as an attack. Okay, so if you want to make your attacks a little bit punchier, this is something worthwhile to add to your track. A really good place to hear it is in like a kick, okay? You can have a kick that goes stump, or you can have a kick that goes dump, right? That one's got a much sharper attack. That's what impact is going to give you. Some of the onset of a new note. To make it a little more punchy, let's hear it just about everything else we've looked at so far. It'll run in multiband mode. And this one by default, is set up for four bands. You can adjust the bands with this learned mode or you can just drag them around like that. But this one really does work best in multiband mode. I'm going to focus in on our kicks. Let's solo our low stuff, but not our super low stuff. Let's see down here. Okay, you can hear that kick down in this register is womp. Let's try to give it a little more attack by turning up the impact on this first band here. Okay, so I'm clipping it a little bit, so I'm going to want to, I can dial back the amount up here, okay? I need a limiter or something in here to help my dynamic standard control. But you can see that that's giving us a little more pop to it. Let's go to our next range. Same thing, we don't really need it as much here, but that's what this does. Each of these four settings correspond to our four range settings. That's really the only control we have is more or less of this dynamic punch, this impact to it. We have this envelope setting as our only other control. This is essentially our speed that we've seen in other compressors where we have a certain amount of time it takes for it to turn on and off. Because this is really designed for attacks, we want a very sharp and fast attack. It doesn't really give us control over that because that's its whole thing. The attack is very fast and this is basically giving us the release. It's calling it envelope here. One cool thing about this envelope is that we can set it to a division of the beat. Because we're inside Ableton here. Ozone knows what our tempo is. If I slide this up, it's giving us 16th notes, eighth note dotted, eighth note, quarter note, triplet, et cetera. It's setting those to the division of the beat, which is good. That's going to sound the best to do it that way. If you don't know where to set that, leave it on 16th. 16th for these attacks is pretty good. If you want to be even a little bit punchier, take it back to 32nd. That would be this way there. Make sure you don't have that dot after it, do 32nd notes, going to create a mess. It might not even be audible here, but maybe cool. That's impact. 18. Low End Focus: All right, low end focus is next on our list. And this is a combination between a few things that we've already looked at in a simplified way. This is a little bit of an EQ, it's a little bit of a compressor, it's a little bit of that impact also all boil down to two *****. It's pretty sweet, as you can guess, low end focus. The design of this is to clear up muddiness in the low end. This is a tool that's designed to do exactly that. It can be really handy. Now, I should mention that once we're all done going through these modules, I'm going to do a full master of another track. That track does have a low end problem, I'm going to queue up that track and do a full master of it. And I'll be sure to use this on it, but here's how it works. By default, we've got a low end and a high end. We can adjust where our split is here, but we really want to focus only the low end is what we're going to do here. It's not going to give us the option for more bands. Just wants us to focus in on the low end. Okay. Your two options here, instead of thinking about these as what you want, think about these as what you have. Tell ozone what it's listening to. Is it listening to a punchy low end sound Or smooth low end sound? In our case, it's in punchy low end, has a lot of punch to it. That means rhythmic pops, right? I'm going to put it on punchy. Now you can think of contrast. Literally contrast. If you do anything about like a graphics design program, it's like the white and dark balance between an image. Right? What we're doing here is we're trying to find a sweet spot that's going to separate low stuff from high stuff, okay? It's different than this because this is a frequency, this is a little more flexible. Has to do with the motion, has to do with a lot of different factors. If we had a low end problem here, this would start to come into focus as something that is, it's going to sound better as we do this. Now, in adjusting the contrast, if we lose some gain, which can happen, this is basically a makeup gain built in. We can give it an extra little boost. Or if we end up adding a bunch of gain, we can cut back here so we can listen to things that way. Last button we have here is this delta button. This can help you find that sweet spot. The delta is going to be the minus, the, the positive, negative. That's going to give you a more clearer picture of where the sweet spot is. If you hit that, it's going to sound very different. Okay? We can just hear some low, low base stuff. Let's walk around and see if we can find that sweet spot. It should get a little bit louder. There's something on go right about there. So basically what we're listening to here is the result of what we're doing. Now I'm going to turn delta off. We got a nice punchy kick that with not much mud to it at all. That delta is there just to help you find that sweet spot. All right, let's move on. 19. Master Rebalance: Okay, all right, Master, rebalance, This is like uncooking the cake in a way. So this is going to let us do some things in the master that we shouldn't be able to do. Basically what I mean there is adjust some of the mix. It gives us three things. We can control vocals, bass, and drums. We can say vocals, turn those up a little bit. Bass, turn those down a little bit. Drums, turn those up a little bit. It's going to let us basically rebalance the mix. Now, Ozone Nose is the vocals. This is all like a big computer algorithm that's going to have it try to figure out what the vocals is. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Bass and drums, Same way, if you've ever used one of those sites that lets you take an audio file and then pull the vocals out, or pull the guitar part out or something like that. It's the same math that's happening, so we don't have any vocals here, but let's try to turn our drums up pretty good. Pull our bass down, put our base out. I can't pull it out, but I can pull it pretty low. Okay, so it's handy. This is kind of a one time thing, if you think like, oh, I wish those vocals were just a little louder in the mix, this can help you out there. 20. Match EQ: All right, match Q. This is actually a really cool one. This tool has been around for a little while now. I remember first encountering this built into logic I think a long time ago. But it's great for mastering. What we're going to do here basically, is we're going to take a reference track and we're going to analyze the Q, look at the frequency spectrum, and figure out where that has the most prominent frequencies. And then we're going to apply that to our track easy enough. In order to do this, I need another track. Let's take a track that I really like. The sound of, okay, I found another track. This is another student track. Here's just what it sounds like. Let's say I really love just the feel of this, the way that it, So the mix, the mix isn't what we're going to grab, but we can interpret it as the mix. It's the overall way the frequencies are boosted and cut throughout the track. We really like this other track and we wished ours sounded like it. Okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to hit this Capture button on the reference side Capture. And I'm going to start playing now. It's analyzing. It's figuring out what the essence of this track is when it comes to the fix. Okay, now I'm going to hit Stop. And it's going to say, cool, I got that. Now I'm going to go back to my track. Okay, I'm going to go to this loud section of this track and I'm going to do it on the other side. Apply to capture. Now what I'm doing here is this isn't so simple as to say this is what the other one sounds like. Apply this to my track. I can't really do that. That's not going to do what we want it to do. What we need to do is figure out what we need to do to our track to get it to sound like the other track. It needs to analyze our track also. So we're going to hit Capture and then listen to our track. Okay, I'm going to hit Stop. All right, now we see two different spectrum here. Actually we see three different things. We see the yellow gold line, that's our reference track. We see the blue track, that's our track. And then we see the gray line, which is what we need to do to our track to get it to sound like the reference track. Okay, we go over to fine tune, we can smooth this out, which is literally going to smooth it out. You see there's some bumpy stuff here. We can do this and make it a little smoother. But why bother? I've never really used that, the amount we can make it a little more extreme or a little less extreme. Okay, now let's hear our track. It's basically like instant EQ based off another track. Think about using this as a way to, if you're working in a genre, to make sure that you have that feel for that genre and treating it as a starting point to do any EQ work in your track. I could do this and then add an EQ after it to fine tune it, but it's a really handy tool. 21. Maximizer: All right, next is the maximizer. This one is a little more complicated. This is another compressor, this is designed for maximum loudness. It has a limiter built into it also. Let's walk through it. First of all, unlike most of our modules in ozone, this is not a multi band effect. This applies to the whole mix only we can't create more bands here. Okay. The first thing we're going to want to do is set our threshold. This is what's going to get us our optimum volume out. Now, I've had good experiences and bad experience with this learned threshold. Let's try it. It's probably going to be right at the top of this track. Yeah, it doesn't do us a whole lot of good here. We can just dial in the maximum threshold that we want. This is done in luff, LUFS, which is a measure of volume. Lufs is used here because this is what you're going to find in any of your streaming platforms. They're going to tell you what they want your maximum LUFS to be. You can dial that in here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of those are in the presets. Let's see, here we go. I would expect to see like a Spotify Master or something like that, but they don't have one. That's okay. Okay, so the first thing we'll look at is these modes over here. These are all we have basically five different modes. They are all really creepy and unlabeled. Other than saying IRC and then some characters after it, IRC is intelligent release control. This is ozone thing. They're algorithms for maximizing the volume. I don't want to say in minimizing compression, but I think that's their pitch is that they're going to keep as much dynamic range as possible and maximize volume. This is something proprietary to them, you'll never see this outside of ozone as far as I'm aware. You can look up the details of all of these different settings. But a faster way to get a short version of what they're doing is just to mouse over them and then pause and you'll get a little thing. This first one IRC LL smooth and thick, limiting with a rich sound, low latency, IRC. One, smooth and thick limiting with a rich sound to clear and sharp limiting to preserve peaks. Surgical limiting tailored to your audio spectral shaping for reduced pumping and distortion. Several options to play with there. Here we have our compressor, we're familiar with this now. It's where we set our threshold, where we want our actual peak to be. This character is weirdly named, it's basically our attack and release time. Do we want this to kick on real fast or slow? Is it a fast or slow compressor limiter, That's what character is doing here. Soft clip is something we find in a lot of limits. And remember maybe I didn't explain a limit, but a limit basically is it lets us set a ceiling and then say nothing's going to go above that ceiling. So when we hit that ceiling, this soft clip is going to give us a little bit of distortion. But kind nice distortion. Sometimes it can be fun to turn this on and get in there a little bit. See if we get it real hard, our ugly. But say it a bit, it can be a nice sound. It's not for every situation, but it can work out pretty well. These are light, medium, and heavy. How hard you want to hit that transient emphasis. Transients are attacks of sound, not unlike what we're looking at a little bit ago where we're focusing on dialing in our attacks a little bit. This is here because sometimes with limiting and compression, we can lose some of those transients. If we turn this on, give it a little bit, this can help us get some of that back. The stereo independence control. Remember our transience, our attacks, our sustained sounds. We can control a little bit how these are going to hit the limiter that can be linked and unlinked. These are moving sometimes, especially if you're looking for more clarity in drums and rhythmic things or longer sounds, drony stuff, anything like that. But remember that a boost of either of these is going to increase the way that they're hitting the limitter. Leaving them at zero, leaves them how they naturally are. If you're comfortable with them, leave these at zero, that's totally okay to do. In fact, that's what I usually do. All right, there's our maximizer, a little bit of a compressor and a lot of limitter. 22. Spectral Shaper: Okay, Up next is the spectral shaper. You can think of the spectral shaper as the opposite of the low end focus. This is going to be essentially a compressor that's tuned into our upper frequencies and really focusing those and adjusting the tamber of those as well. You can see by default it's dialed in at two K to eight K. I can't get outside of that. It's only going to let me focus on that. I can't adjust that if I use the learn algorithm. It's going to want me to focus in on just these high hats. Let's do it there. That's what it's really designed to look at, is those upper range things. What do we have here? The aggressiveness of this compressor. We have this threshold and our standard compression tools. There's not much we need to do here. Let's get right down in there and get a little bit of compression happening again. We have our delta controls, so we can remember the delta controls are going to let you hear just what's happening, basically what the compression is doing. It's a good way to see and hear what's actually what you're taking out. This is our compression. Okay, that's great. All right, and then over here we have three controls, two of them. You already know our attack and release times, Typical things for a compressor. How fast are we going to attack? We want that really fast for mastering, usually our release time. You can play with those as you want. We do have a tone **** here, this is where that tamber stuff comes in. With this particular particular module, you can think of this as real easy. If you go right in the middle, we're at zero. So if you go, you're going to make it brighter. And if you go down, we're going to make it darker. So let's hear it okay. Really quite hard to hear in this case. Let's get more aggressive here. Yeah, we can just focus your ear on those ticks of that high hat brighter. Oh, that's so subtle. Let's see if we can hear it. If we just go to the delta O, in this case extremely subtle, but in the right situation, that's going to give you some adjustment of the tone with the frequencies that we're working on with this particular tool. Think of this as going hand in hand with the low end focus. 23. Stabilizer: All right, up next, in the last of our modules, before we get into the vintage modules is the stabilizer. This is automatic ring out tool. If you looked at when we did ringing out in my mastering class, we talked a little bit about it earlier. When we looked at Q, what we're basically doing is listening for problematic frequencies and then pulling them out using an EQ. This is designed to automatically look for those problematic frequencies and pull them out. This is an EQ. Let's look at what we've got. It looks a little bit different. We can't just click and make bands or nodes like we can in a normal EQ. First thing we're going to do is what we're doing here. We can say all purpose or we can tell the general style. This is going to help it tune in on what the problematic frequencies might be. I'm going to say hip hop because this is a hip hop beat, a weird one, but it's not quite EDM, I'm going to go hip hop then we want to tell it or this mode setting here, the mode here, shape or cut cut is going to pull out problematic frequencies. End of story shape is going to pull out problematic frequencies and then to keep our volume at its top level. If you're not concerned with maximizing the volume, go with cut. But if you want to keep your volume all the way at the top like we usually do in mastering, go with shape. The amount is the amount of the effect we're going to do here. We want to dial this in to where we want based on hearing it once it gets going. The speed is how fast it's going to kick in and then let go when it hears a problematic frequency. If we push it all the way to the top, that'll be as fast as it can go. But that can also introduce some artifacts, some things we don't like glitches. It's good to keep this around 50 and then push it up a little bit if you want to try to get it even smoother. The same thing goes with the smoothing. We can make it smoother and smoother, but at some point it could start introducing some artifacts. I would keep it at 50. And then once it's dialed in, push it up a little higher if you want to. Okay. Then turning on tame transience is like an automatic correction that it's going to try to do to transients. It's worth trying. Okay, so let's hear it. So you can see it kind of like jerking around. It's because it's listening and adapting. So we can hear what it's doing by going to the delta. Okay. We can also bypass it. Let's compare, here's no with the effect of here it is with the N not much. Let's crank it up. Let's go all the way bypass. We're fading now. Okay, there we go. Okay, so it's not doing a lot in this case, but it can be a really good tool if you're looking to automatically your tracks. Now if you're using a normal EQ, you've got a little bit more precision to what you're doing than this. I would recommend that over this. This is a built in tool designed for our mastering assistant thing. But it can be fun place to get a start and see what it thinks that the track needs. 24. Vintage Compressor: Okay, next let's go on to the vintage modules in Ozone. We have four vintage modules here, the compressor EQ, limit, and these are all modeled after vintage circuits. Generally speaking, going to have a little bit more of a live sound to them. To me, I guess that's a weird way to put it, but an analog sound, although it's simulated, let's just say a vintage sound. A lot of them work the same way. You already know slight tweaks. Let's look at the compressor. They say this one is modeled after a whole bunch of different compressors are not going to say which vintage compressor they actually modeled the circuit for. Say they took a lot of the most popular vintage compressors and modeled them and built them into this. I think that's primarily where we get this mode dial. We get balanced sharp and smooth. I doesn't want to go to balanced smooth. There we go. We can select these three modes which will do obviously what they say. The sharp one is going to give us a little more crisper, transience, little more punch on those attacks. Smooth is going to soften those transience a little bit. Balance is going to be in the middle. Sharp punchier attacks, smooth if you want softer attacks, and balanced if you want it somewhere in the middle. Okay, Then we have our threshold, our ratio, attack, release, and gain. Nothing crazy here. Really familiar stuff. This little auto button here is a Smarts makeup gain button. With that on, it's going to apply makeup gain automatically so that you're compressing and boosting at the same time to keep your level at the maximum. We do not have a multiband compressor here. It's worth noting that this isn't giving us multiple bands. If I click on them, I can't shift areas or anything like that. I just have an EQ up here, right? So what this is going to do is actually feed our compressor a little bit by telling it which areas we wanted to especially focus on. If we want the compressor to be a little more focused on the mids, we might boost them a little bit here so that the detection circuit in the compressor gets a little bit more of the mids. Okay, we can take our highs down it, I would use this very subtly. This is not something you really want to go bananas with. But it's a good way to tune your compressor a little bit to make sure it's hitting the stuff that you really wanted to hit, okay? Otherwise, nothing too crazy. Let's hear it, all right, let's get that threshold work in. Let's turn off auto game, all right? So we can feel we're compressing a lot, we're losing volume. Pretty punchy. Let's check me when we're smooth. Still pretty punchy. That's a little too punchy. Kind of smooth here. That's surprising. All right, let's go back to auto game boost us back up. Nothing dramatically sounding different than our other compressor here, but in the right circumstance, this would be a great one to use. I would try the two do that B them, compare the two of them together on your track to see what you like. 25. Vintage EQ: Okay, let's look at the vintage Q. This is going to look like a lot different interface. And you're going to think who a lot of dials here. You're right. But you know what all this stuff does already. I'd like to read this this way. Low, mid, high, mid, high cut. Then this is the odd ball, high boost. Okay, what we're doing here is manually dialing in what we could click and drag and do before. This is very familiar interface. If you've used any older vintage analog rack Qs, this is what they looked like. This is how we did them before. Again, this is not just different for looks. This is modeling an analog circuit, it is going to have a little bit different sound. Try this on your live recordings, your acoustic recordings. I don't love this vintage sound on these electronic things. But if you've got an acoustic recording, like just acoustic guitar, or guitar in voice or something like that, try these vintage cues on them. That can be really nice. Okay, So what we're basically doing is setting a cutoff frequency with the dial, okay? And then boosting or cut with the fader. We can say where this is our low one, we're at 20 hertz to 100 hertz. Just low stuff, okay? We set it to, let's say 45. And then if we want to boost it, we push up that. If we want to cut it, we push up that. Okay. Now the good thing is this, while we can't click and drag just to make points, we can see what we're doing there, right? If I go up to 100 and I say boost, we can see that that center point is right about there. And it's quite wide because it's just a low boost. Okay, if I want to cut it looks like that. Let's turn that down. I don't want to do anything to the low ends. We can leave both those down. Here's my low mid. There's where that bump gets. I can move it around that Ok mid. I've got a wide range for my mid, right? Put it wherever I want and there's where it is I can. It's not going to let me boost my mids, which I mean, there's a way to boost your mids. You would just do it with the low mid or the high mid. We cut with this one because you'll notice that these can overlap quite a lot. Like this is 1.5 K. And the low side of a high mid is 1.5 K. We can only cut with a mid, but we can everything else. So high mid can be right there, High cut. This is just going to roll off our top end. If we want to do that, then the high boost we want to boost the tip top. This would be like some resonance if you wanted. And we can tighten up that cue to make it a little narrower. Move that around where we want this interface. Really, it's the same as the other interface. It's just a more cumbersome looking. But remember, this does also come with a different sound. It's, it's going to be subtle, very subtle. It's probably won't even be audible here. And it's different. But it does have, you know, it is that classic vintage model to 7 minutes. Yeah. Hard to tell, but it's a good EQ. 26. Vintage Limiter: All right. Vintage Limit. This is a classic Limit. The only thing, not real standard about this is this dial here. We have three settings like what we saw before, analog tube and modern. I would think about this as this analog. This is great for EDM stuff. It's going to really sharpen bass in general. Bass music is really good for this analog setting. This modern setting is aimed at transient preservation and sharpening up transience a little bit. And tube is somewhere in between. It's going to model a tube amp, a tube circuit, I should say. It's going to have a little bit of warmth to it from that. Okay, then we have our threshold and our ceiling. If we go above the threshold, we start reducing and we do not let it go past our ceiling. The character is again, our attack and release times be super fast, super slow. But generally we want this to be pretty fast. You can play with it a little bit if you want. Here's our limiter, we're not really hitting it. You remember that we were flipping a little bit before. Now we're just saying ceiling is negative 0.1 We're leaving eight bit amount head room. Let's leave a little bit more head room here. There we go. Let's smash right up on that ceiling. This is all our reduction. And we are hitting the ceiling really hard. Let's adjust that character. You feel quite a big difference. We slow down. Okay, Generally, I don't want to hit a limit that hard, so we're going to lighten that up. But just dial in our head room here and leave it, and it's going to sound great. 27. Vintage Tape: All right, Last but not least, let's look at vintage tape. All right. You can think of this as a light distortion. What we're going to do here is simulate running this through a tape machine, or try to simulate that it was recorded on tape. The way we do that is basically introducing small amounts of distortion. Okay, first thing we have here is speed. We're not adjusting the speed of our track. This is emulating how on an old tape deck the tape went across the play and the record head, it spun like this. The faster it spun, the more accurate it was, especially in high frequency content. The slower it spun, the more background noise was introduced and artifacts were introduced. You want it to be more accurate, and especially in the high end, you want it to be going faster. If you want more artifacts and grittiness tape Sound, you want to be going slower. Input drive is just how much signal we're going to send into this tape circuit. At zero, you're really not going to hear anything, but if we juice it up, you will hear something. We've got to go pretty slow here. Let's just pass it. Yeah, it's getting it a little dirty. The bias is going to be the shape of the distortion. You can think of bias in the setting as distortion color. Harmonics are going to give it yet more color. We're going to introduce higher frequencies that can emulate some of the noise from the old tape machines. Then low and high emphasis are just going to tweak the response that we're getting out of the low and the high end respectively. Let's see if we can get something more out of this. Yeah, we really feel that. Let's get some of that earliest and then add. Yeah. Do you feel that the snare, the clap subtle, but it's there. It is harder that a little bit. So I wouldn't use this on this track, but it can be cool if you want to do that. Give it a little bit of a tape effect. Remember that we're in the mastering phase here. We're not in the production phase here. If you want to do something where it's like for 4 bars, we're going to turn on a tape effect and then turn it off. This is not really the way to do it, there's more dramatic ways you can do that with other plug ins. This is more of a subtle tool to give it that vintage tape. Sound. This doesn't work awesome as like a production effect. This is more of a mastering process in my opinion. 28. A Big Rock Track: Okay, so now that we've gone through all the modules, let's start from scratch and master a track just using ozone. I'm going to switch to a new track. This is a cool track in all, but let's do something a little more rock just to switch things up. Let's move ozone out of the way. I'm just going to delete this track and load in this other one. Now if you took my mastering, this is going to be the same that we used in that class. This is another student track. I'm going to make sure that ozone is totally bypassed. Let me turn that off. Let's hear the first part of this track. This is a pretty repetitive track. Let's just hear the intro and then the main rock groove. Here we go. Oops, I got to remember in Ableton to turn off warping so that it plays it at the right tempo. And then we don't need that track. That was our old reference track. Here we go, That's the right tempo. Okay, you get the idea of it. We have a rock track here. We have acoustic drums, big distorted guitars, an active bassline. There's a little bit of muddiness in the low end, and I think once we boost up the volume, we're going to find more muddiness. That'll be a good chance for us to try to use that low end focus module. What we want to get out of this for mastering is first we want to make it louder. We can see that it's a bit quiet just by looking at the wave form. We can go over to Abletons meters here and look at it there. Let's go to the loud part. Let's just loop this part, okay? We can see our peaks are hovering around negative six, which is fine. Our RMS is hovering around negative 18. The RMS is like our average volume. And that's what we're using really to gauge where our volume is sitting, it's pretty widespread. We want to tighten that spread up and then boost it. That's something that compression will do quite well. Okay, so we want to get this Er, we want to get any frequencies that are jumping out under control. I don't hear any right now. I think this is a really well mixed track, other than a little bit of muddiness in the low end, it's very cleanly recorded. We don't really have a lot of extraneous noise. It should be fairly simple. All right, let's dive in and set up an effect chain in ozone. Maybe we'll start with using the smart system. The smart mastering assistant here. Let's see what it comes up with. 29. Using the Smart Assistant: Okay. So in order to do the smart assistant, I'm going to clear out anything in my effects chain. I don't know if we have to do that or not that. Remember how I bypassed this a minute ago. We have to un bypass that, make sure that that's like audio is actually flowing into ozone. Otherwise, this isn't going to work. Then I'm going to go here and hit play. I'm going to play a loud section of the track. Okay, That's all it needed. And now it's thinking, it says it's done. Here's what it came up with. All right, let's look at the chain. Wow, EQ gave us a high end boost, a little mid range boost, and low cut stabilizer impact. Looks like we're boosting a little bit in this range. Adding a little stereo width, pulling out some problematic frequencies, and pushing us all the way up to negative one D B. Let's hear it well. That's pretty good impressive. You can look over here and see our output and versus our input and how much louder it is. And it's obviously louder. You can just hear that it's louder. Let's look at each module and see what it's doing in the equalizer. Yeah, we're boosting that upper end a little in there. I like what it's doing here. It's cutting the base, which is helping a little bit with that problem. Let's go module by module and solo each one and really listen to what's happening. Let's start with just the equalizer and hear what we're doing on that. This is turning all other modules off. Okay, I'm going to turn all of these off. We're going to turn them on one by one. Okay, let's go to a new video. Let's walk through turning these on one by one so we can hear what they're doing. 30. Mastering Assistant Modules: Okay. So here here is doing nothing to the track. Here is our equalizer one on. Okay. Pretty subtle, not much difference here. Okay? That's, here's the stabilizer. Everything else is often just going to turn on the stabilizer. He is off is okay. Again, very, very subtle impact. He is on very subtle imager, very subtle dynamic. You, very subtle. And maximizer, okay. So maximize, obviously doing the heavy lifting here. All these other modules are very subtle, but they are contributing to a nice balance that I really like. So I'm going to turn them all back on. To be totally honest, if I was just doing a quick master and wasn't sweating the details too much, I'd call this done. I'm pretty happy with this. This sounds pretty great. It's almost embarrassing how good it sounds, so let's call this the easy way. But because we are educating here and we want to show how things are actually done, let's do it the hard way. So let's do it one by one without the fancy assistant, and we'll do it kind of the way I normally approach these things. 31. EQ Settings: All right, so let's do this the slightly harder way and not use the AI thing built into here. I'm going to clear this out. Okay, I'm going to start with my standard chain that I use for mastering. Now I'm not going to go through the gory details of what I'm listening for and what I'm mastering here. We're really talking about how to use ozone in this class. If you want to get really into mastering, check out my other mastering class where we talk in more detail about the process itself. I'm going to start with an EQ, then I'm going to do a compressor, and then I'm going to do a limitterk. I'm going to turn both of these off with this equalizer. I'm just going to wring it out. I'm going to listen for any problematic frequencies. In order to do that, we take one of these. I'm going to make the cue really small. I'm going to boost it way up. Then I'm just going to roll the frequency around and listen for problematic frequencies. Anything that's really jumping out at me. And in fact, I'm going to solo this band, so I'm just hearing stuff here. What I'm really looking for is when something, when we're hovering over a frequency and it really spikes up here, it might mean that there's a problem there. So just any frequency that really jumps out. Okay, I really don't hear anything coming out here, which is interesting because when I master the same track using Ableton tools, I did find some stuff, but I don't really don't hear anything here. The next thing I'm going to do with the EQ is just listen and see if I need to boost or cut any particular frequencies in something that's really distorted like this. I might consider boosting the high end. If I want to get a little bit more of that distortion, you hear that presence there. If I really go nuts, I don't like that sound. That might give us a little bit more up there. I like that moving bass line, but it's really hard to get that. Okay. So what I'm hearing is there's this moving bass line in there that I really like, but there's a lot going on in the bass. I wonder if we use that low end focus, if it's going to help us bring that out. Let's try to use that and see if we can use that to bring out that bass guitar a little bit more. 32. LowEndFocus: All right. I don't know if we're going to be able to get it because that bass guitar is really buried in the mix. But going to add a low end focus and I'm going to put it right over by my EQ so I can. So I know that any dynamics processing we're doing is going to happen after it. Because remember, things flow across the chain here. Okay, So let's see if we can find it so low. That low end, there it is. Yeah, that helps. That's bringing it out a little bit more. Let's try switching over to the punchy setting. I like the punchy a little bit better. It's bringing out those attacks of that baseline a little bit more. Again, this is something that's buried in the mix, and if we really want this to come out, we should probably go back to the mix and improve it there. But with this tool, we're able to focus it a little bit more, draw our attention to it a little bit better. All right, now let's do our dynamics processing. 33. Compression Settings: All right, let's turn on our compressor here. So remember, we've got a multiband compressor here. We're defaulting to just one band. Let's use the Learn module to have it figure out what's going to be best for us here. Oops, do I need to create new sections first? Okay, now I hit Learn. There we go. Okay, that's what it likes. I'm going to go to the louder part of the tune. I'm going to hit Learn one more time, okay? All right, so first I'm going to start with my low end. I don't typically like to do a ton of compression on the low end, but let's give it a little bit, okay, and remember I'm going to hit this automatic makeup gain button up here just so that we're pushing it back up high after we Smh it down. All right, let's go to our middle band. This doesn't need a whole lot. This might already even be compressed. We can kind of see in the wave form, it's pretty tight. It doesn't need a lot of compression. It needs boosting more than it needs compression. But we've still got a little bit of compression we can do. Let's go to our highs. Give it just a little bit. Okay, that's pretty good. It doesn't need more than that. This particular track is pretty smooth. We can see here that when I said it's already pretty tight, what I meant was there's not a lot of stuff that jumps out or is really thin or thick in the wave form. It's solid all the way through, which means we don't need a lot of compression, but we do need a lot of boosting. We'll do that with our limiter in the maximizer next. 34. Limiter Settings: All right, now I'm going to go to our maximizer, okay? My ceiling is set to zero. I'm going to give myself a little bit of head room here. Maybe 0.5, maybe 456 on a track like this. And then I'm just going to put you down to really hit that. I want to be sure we're hitting the ceiling just a little bit. Okay, we're going to go to the soft clip. Let's try a little bit of that. Turn it on, We don't need that soft clip, but like it in this context since it's distorted, transient emphasis going to give us a little more clarity on our rhythms. I don't think that's really doing anything for us here, but this is sounding pretty good. I'm going to leave those right there because I'm pretty happy with how this is sounding. I think we got it. So you don't need much more than that to do a nice simple master. 35. Last Tips: Two more quick things that I didn't mention along the way that I just want to remind you of. Number one, don't forget these presets. There's a great presets here. Let's go there like a rock. One rock. Let's see what they have here. Stabilizer, exciter, impact, and maximizer. Sure. Let's hear the pretty similar, but don't forget about those presets. Those are a great place to start and you can tweak from there if you want. Another thing, Don't forget that you don't have to do all your mastering in ozone. In the mastering class that I did, I did all of my mastering in Ableton. And then at the end I used ozone for some extra stuff. You can totally do that. You could use ozone for just a couple things and then Ableton for something else and a different EQ plug in for something else if you wanted. You don't have to do everything in ozone, but you can if you want. That's the point here. I'm doing everything in ozone here just to show that it can be done and how you would do it. 36. Trims and Fades: Okay, for these last few videos, we're going to get outside of ozone a little bit. It just feels weird to not finish this whole thing up. We're going to finish the mastering process and render it down to our final track. I still have ozone sitting on this track, but I'm going to get rid of it for a minute and just do the little mastering housekeeping things that I should do, such as trims and fades. I want to look at the beginning of my tune and make sure that I've just maybe 100 milliseconds or so at the beginning of it. This is just good practice for streaming services. I'm going to bump this out a little bit and then I might just take this, hook them together. Welcome. Then I'm just going to make sure that when I render this, I'm rendering this dead space so that there's some sound here. I could also just insert some silence here or join this with the silence. You don't need to do any of that, but if you want to, you can. Okay. So now I've got an inaudible amount of silence there. That's such a small amount of time. Here it is, right? It's like so fast. I'm going to do the same thing at the end. I'm going to make sure that our end has a fine fade to it. Okay? Ableton is already putting these little fade outs for me and a little fade in at the beginning, which is the next thing I wanted to point out is that we want a teeny tiny fade in, just to make sure that the music actually starts at zero. Okay, So an inaudible fade in. I'm going to do the same thing at the end. Now this track fades out with this distortion. Okay, so I could ride that a little harder. Let's hear that. Okay, so I'm going to want to adjust this. Normally I would just like a millisecond long fade out at the end of this to make sure that it ends at a zero crossing actual zero. But because this is a fade out, I'm going to craft the end a little bit more liked what we just had there. It was just a nice gradual mimicked what the guitar was doing. I'm going to leave that just like that here. I'd also want to trim up. If there's some dead space at the end, just get rid of anything there that lingers on. There's nothing here. That's just fine. Okay, so that's pretty good there. Just want to do a little nip Tuk procedure at the beginning and the end. All right, next let's go to our export settings and we'll look at our dither settings first. 37. Dithering: Okay, Next I'm going to go to export again. I'm in live here. I'm going to go to export audio video. Now when you go to your export settings, depending on what software you're using as the host for ozone, what do you're working in? This might work differently, but for me it's called. Some programs call it share some call it renders some call it print. I think that's all of them. Okay, most of these settings are going to be good. First, I want to actually go down and just look at this dither setting. You might have some dither options. A dither is a really complicated thing, but basically what it is is it's like a little bit of error correction. What dithering does is it adds a small Inaudible amount of noise that keeps the track from hitting actual zero. The signal goes down all the way to zero. 0-1 is where it actually creates little glitches sometimes. This is also where sample rate glitches can happen. Any converting that the software has to do by keeping an titmot of noise there, we keep it above 1 decibel, That prevents a whole bunch of little glitches. Now, it's much more complicated than that what a dither actually does, but that's the small solution. I don't typically use dithering when I'm exporting a mix or anything like that. I do when I'm exporting a master though, I'm going to go down to my PCM settings, that Pro quality audio file, go dither options. You've got a few things here. These are all the different algorithms for how this is going to work. I wish I could tell you the details of how each one of these is different than the other, but I just don't know that. But here's what I'm going to tell you. Pow R one, that's what I use use that maybe someone in the comments can tell us more about different dithering settings if they're familiar but for your master turn on dithering and said it's Pow R one. 38. Exporting: All right, and then last but not least, let's export this sucker. We want to make sure that we're rendering the whole bloody thing. I am actually not starting at one here. Let's change that so that we get all the way back to this 111, that's the beginning of our track render length. Let's make sure we're getting all the way out to the end. This has been a problem I've had lately. It wants me to go to 5093. I'm going to cancel this for a second. Just go all the way out here and see. Yeah, I'm actually going to 60. Okay. It's still putting me at 5910 when I know I want 6020. Just double check you're rendering length to make sure that you're getting the full track in here. All right, let's get ozone out of the way. Let's get this up here. All right, well we're going to look at our settings here. I don't need to include return and master effects renders a loop convert to mano normalize. I don't want to do here because that's going to mess up my dynamics processing a little bit. It's probably fine actually, but I like to leave that off. Analysis file. I don't need sample rate. It's important to have your sample rate be the same as your initial file or double my file here is 48. I'm going to make sure this is at 48. Pcm is going to be our final audio file. This is what we're going to send to Spotify. We got to make sure that we've got everything right here. Code PCM. Yes, we want to waive, 16 bits is good. And we've already dealt with dither options, MP three. We can turn this on to also make an MP three. What we really want is the wave file. But if you want to have an MP three that you can send to your buddies, that's cool too. But don't send that one to Spotify Video. We don't have an option for video here because there's no video in this file. If there was video, we could turn it on and render out as a video. Okay, no going to hit Export and we're done. We're going to give it a good name and send it to the streaming services. 39. What comes next?: All right, that gets us to the end of this quick whirlwind tour of ozone. What would be good things to do next if you're really into this stuff? First I would consider taking my full mastering class. It goes into a lot more detail on the processes of this, Not so much on the software, but on the process and what to listen for and the art of mastering. I also have some classes on mixing that you might consider and then a whole bunch of stuff on music production. But definitely mixing and mastering classes that I have would be really great for you to continue down this road that you're already on with this class. Please consider checking those out. Stick around. I have just a few more things for you to wrap everything up. 40. Bonus Lecture: Hey everyone, want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here. If you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. Please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.