Mastering Music With Izotope Ozone 9

1. Ozone 9 course intro: Mastering that final process of getting your song. This sounds exactly as it should when people say it's hard. Let's change that. This course, we extensively break down each part of ozonide covering each individual plug-in and its uses. The aim is to demystify and help you understand dark are in that final process to getting your perfect track. I look forward to seeing you inside. 2. What is Mastering & Why Do We Do it: What is mastering? Loads of engineers and artists put on this mysterious voice around how mastering is a dark only really understood by the upper echelons of the music makers. It isn't really tell you what there is though. There is a difference in what mastering means depending on who you talk to. You see if we go back a step two where music was mostly being consumed either via the radio or via CD. What mastering was then was it was a standard that everyone could conform to be referred to as Red Book audio. Basically a checklist of things that you needed to hit to all be the same. It standards to ensure that everyone was using the same sample rate, the same bit depth. And what this meant was regardless of the type of music or how it was being made, everyone would end up with the same bit depth, the same sample rate. Now a little bit before this, we had to master to the medium again, it was gonna be vinyl and that was a different process entirely. So today it seems the main focus is loudness, getting the mix to be incredibly loud. You see the other thing mastering did and started to give with the opportunity to make a body of work feel as if it was all 11 cohesive album of work, if you will, people were being more creative and that they could adjust the final mix, the final balance and the final compression and loudness levels match throughout a whole album, making it feel far more cohesive, most stirrings conforming to the standards, but also about making a larger project feel cohesive as a whole. So the first thing I ever mastered was back in 2004. What I used to do was I volunteered at a radio station and what we used to do is we recorded interviews. So someone who would be in being interviewed by the host, those recordings will go onto mini does This PSC, yeah, mini disc. Remember those now, after a while, a series of these interviews was going to be pressed to CD. And you could listen to all of the interviews that had been on the radio job. My job was to get all of these in Adobe Audition, which at the time supporting a grand total of two audio tracks at 44.1 16-bit. I think there was probably better options around at the time. I think my reason to existed. So probably Cubase sx, but that's what they provided me with and I was skipped and doing it for free. What I had to do was get a master of all of these interviews are together. And essentially I use the same kind of things that we use now, EQ compression. And in this case, I used a little touch of reverb across all of them to give them a consistent room sound where things very slightly. And now you know why the ozone plug-in used to have a reverb module as well. Well, what about today though? What is mastering now? Well, with the resurgence of the niche vinyl cassette releases, we've actually gone back two steps and we now need to master for the platform again, but now we need to do it in multiple different ways. If you're putting a limited edition cassette, vinyl out that needs to be mastered completely differently to something going up for streaming or CD. With that said, though the majority of music goes to places now streaming platforms. In venues, mister DJ goes to play your track. Well, he can only see the peak levels and he doesn't look at the loves over time to try and match them. We're looking at peaks. We match that on the fader, hopefully with just maybe touching the yellow, not into the red guys. We dropped the truck that is minus 14 loss. And the previous chapter respond to my seven drops in the lungs that good, and suddenly it's considerably quiet. That is where this really comes in. We need to master for the platform it's going to what is mastering in today's environment. But it's basically somebody checking over your final work and making sure you've got everything right for the platform you're going to always mastering should do, is bring a cohesive element to multiple tracks to bring them into an album and check for any final issues in stage. I think Gavin loss and probably said it best when he said this by Britain. There, there's color, there's styled as vibe, There's attitude. But the most successful job that we can do is to make it sound like we were never there. So if that becomes a felt sense and not thought of, That's when we are at our most successful. 3. Ozone 9 Interface GUI Breakdown: Break down the interface of isotopes o zone nine. So when you first load up the plugin, this is what you're going to be met with, and this is the basic interface that everything does in fact work off to break it down really quickly across the top panel here. The first thing we've just got our ozone advanced the branding and next to it we've actually got a name. The reason we can name it is because in tonal balance and the visual mixer where you can see things via just their name rather than the plugin themselves. Perhaps we're gonna have multiple versions of ozone. This is automatically named ozone to say we were using just part of ozone on a bus. We could call it something like drum bus. And it's gonna show up as drum bus forest in tonal balance and the visual mixer moving just over to the right. From that we've got the master assistant. If we trigger the master assistant, we get a nice overlay going through our process of how we'll do that. If you wanted to know how to use the mastering assistant, there'll be a video on this channel for you. I've done that. We've got our preset menu. Couple of ways we can never get presets is open up the preset menu, as seen here. What we can tap the arrows and go back and forth throughout different presets. We don't need to do that in this case, there are lots of good presets that get you a quick baseline. And if you want to make your own, so you've just got Plug-ins Preset up to how you work, really good way to work. We've got some quick global controls here. We've got Undo, and we've got undo history. We've then got our settings inside our settings. Inside our settings we've got lots of different ways we can adjust how ozone works for us in terms of setting things like our default meters, how some of the crossovers work, multiple things in there. And then we've got a little help which obviously brings up, I'll help documentation and manual. Just below that we've got what is kind of like our plugin chain, if you will, because ozone sort of a host that then hosts the different plug-ins that work with it. As we can see, there's an equalizer and a maximizer. And whichever one is selected is always going to have this nice and blue line around it. If we select the maximizer, we can see that shifts over. And then we've got a dotted outline. And if we go over that, lights up the plus, this lets us add more plug-ins into that area. Obviously, only the plugins are built inside. It doesn't take third parties within this little preview here, we can do a couple of things. We can quickly take the plug-in out of the chain. If this little blue symbol is active, it's active and will be part of the chain. And the chain runs from left to right. So it's gonna run equalizer to maximizer at the moment. So late we'll mute everything else and solo just that plot if we try. And so the two, it will just pass them over and we can only ever saw they once we can't solo part of a chain, we wanted to do that. We would just meet octet the ones out of the chain that we don't want to hear. If you want to open presets just for that module before just below here we can click that and it'll give us presets it just for the equalizer module super-useful. We've also got a meter here. And when audio is playing, we can see that it's going to read what kind of processing is happening within that part of the plug-in. As you can see at the moment, the equalizer has nothing processing. But if we were to take something down on three and we see we've got some processing negatively. If we were to boost up on five, we can see we've now got some processing going up in the positive and we can kind of blank those out. So we're at a similar level we were before. Let us know if there's been a boost or reduction. Essentially as the process goes along, I last but not least, we have the cross and that takes the plugin away from the chain. If we unload everything, this is how we, when we load in extra plugins by clicking here, we get a nice drop-down list of whatever it is we wish to enter into our chain, the window below him, it always show whichever plugins selected and its parameters, many of them, for example, the image and the exciter will have this black section across the top. And this is a multi-band section. This will allow us to see what sections are being processed in multi-band and they are completely independent for each one. If you want a breakdown on each individual section, we'll be doing that as we go forward as well. Over to the far right-hand side is our metering section, or First Mesa here on the left-hand side is the signal coming into ozone as well with our respective level measurements that we've chosen. So for example, here we have peak and loves peak is shown here on the outer side. Loves me to is shown here in the middle. They're able to change these around by clicking on Io. And here where I currently have integrated laughs, I could change to something like RMS. We now have a different metering system that's going to show us peak and RMS integrated into the same level. Rms meetings in slightly darker gray or our peak reading is here. And the closer to white, we can adjust the input and output. Currently if we move one, we can adjust the input and output by just moving the sliders up or down. And we get a readout below by how much? So currently we have reduced our input by minus six. We could hear our output up by plus three. Below the readout is a little blue symbol. This is a link. We can unlink the left and right and balance them independently, which could be useful for certain situations and certain tracks, the plus and minus here, Let's just zoom in or out on the meter reading and the detail changes respectively. Below, we have some overall plugin parameters. Below we have some overall controls that are quite useful, such as bypass. We can bypass the whole plugging as a quick reference to see whether we're heading in the right direction. So it was nice to reference what you're doing. We can do that individually with the modules or as a whole also have gained match, which this idea of game Match means that when we do bypass the plugin, we're not going to have a sudden jump in level making the louder always seemed to be perceived as better. We should have a similar balance in level when we're bypassing and listening in AB below, on the left, we have these two interlinking circles. They represent a stereo balance. If we click on them, we're getting a nice summed some mono balance as well, really useful for checking. And when I mix and the arrow symbol here, flips are left and right channels. So we can just have them inverses just to check all mixed in that respect as well. Reference here when we click on it, changes are blogging and window and we're able to load in a reference track, enabling it here would allow playback of the reference codec does a similar thing except we're able to mimic different types of codec. We have to switch it on to choose our codec. We could go for a really low quality MP3 and we can even solace. We just hear the artifacts created by, this is a really good way to check how your mixture is going to translate on somebody like SoundCloud, which streams around a 128 K at BPS. And lastly, we've got dither, and it works in very much the same fashion to make any changes to it, we need to enable it and have it selected to change our plugin window. And here we have all our desire to do the settings. You'd like me to do a deep dive video on dealer or in the comments below. And we can absolutely dive into that very last thing to note is ozone is now fully re-sizable. And here we have a tiny little icon that we can just click on and we can drag and resize ozone out as we need skies. That is a breakdown of the ozone interface. I hope it was helpful for you if it was pleased by shrew-like on the video. And if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below, and I will see you guys on the next one. 4. What is Multiband: In this video, went to explain what multiband the processing is and how are we going to use that in the mastering process, many of the modules in isotopes ozone line have the ability to work in multi-band. What this means is it can split the frequency spectrum, which is the range that we can hear into separate individual bands where we introduce these bands, we can have up to four and ozone, they're presented with a crossover. If we select here, which is our crossover point, we can see that 23 cross this white line intersection and each then have a frequency crossover that occurs over that crossover point. This means if it's a solo, one area will some of what's going on in some of what's going on in one. This occurs because crossovers are needed to seamlessly blend the piece of audio together and operate in separate frequency areas without any loss by having the exact same sleep either side, a crossover point allows the audio to be exactly as it once was, as if it was to stop exactly dead on the point, it's almost impossible to actively do this with a filter inside this setting, each module that supports multi balance, we have a crossover tight, we have a choice of hybrid, digital or analog by default, this is on hybrid. The reason it's on the hybrid, this gives a perfect re-creation those crossover points. So even though we're working in multi-band, there will be absolutely no face discrepancy or loss in level. We can also work in digital, and digital is also transparent. Crossover will vote. Technically, this may not be perfect as working with the hybrid system and the log is an analog style crossover. You find that these types of crossovers in multi-band hardware units, as well as almost any monitor across over has to occur between a subwoofer and a tweeter. These can have slightly different curves and they can even be sometimes that point of frequency that low-level gets through in that crossover. This process can be emulated here if there's a desired effect or sound that you were after. Digital, we're able to adjust the crossover queue. We look to us slopes before using the Q adjustment here we can have a much harsher adjustment. So when we select our bands, we can see the cue adjusts depending on where we are. Look ahead type allows a small processing time for the CPU to work out the crossover and then return this back to hybrid. Multi-valued is really useful in the mastering process because it allows us to isolate small areas and process them individually. For example, we can narrow it down compression to be mainly around the vocal area that perhaps might need a lift. Here we're using the third band, multiband. We're going to try to isolate the main body of the vocal, which is going to likely be able to screen the one kilohertz and three. This way we can apply slight bit of compression, a lift to just the area of the truck. Only this small section is now being compressed and allows us to just lift the vocal up ever so slightly. If we make it a bit more extreme, you can hear the differences that can be made. Taking multiband into midside mode allows us to do this effect even more extreme by switching into midside wherever vocals are mainly located in the mid-section, we're able to just lift up the midst, effecting any effects on the side. Notice how much more focused the vocal now is. Introduction into how multiband works and why we can use it in mastering to help us improve our recording. 5. Limiters Explained: First off, what is a limiter to unlimited essentially is a compressor, but with a ratio of ten to one or more. Most modern digital limiters are gonna fall exceed this ten to one ratio. Nowadays you can get things cooled. A brick wall limiter, which means no matter what, the threshold will never be exceeded FDA. Why would you ever want to do this? Well, one of the big reasons initially was to make use of the full dynamic range of a recording. When you've mixed a truck, you usually going to have some headroom leftover. And even if a part of the truck got right up to 0 dB or the maximum peak that you could have, most of the track would be a lot lower in level. And if we use something like limited to reduce some of those extreme peaks exactly like a compressor does. We can then bring everything else up in level. When you mix down the track, you're likely going to have some transients and some other areas that get up near the zero-point. But for the most part, it truck's gonna be well below that by using limiting, taking some of these transients and other rogue sounds that get above down, we can then bring the whole truck backup, making a better use of that full dynamic range, giving us a better recording for less that especially as we reduce down in quality, having use of that full dynamic range, it gives us a better overall recording. Now, an effect of this means the overall track, it gets louder and limiters sort of came into play in the fact that we wanted to make music louder and louder. That's how the loudness war started, which is kind of alleviated now, which is really great. But we still using a limiter to get the best overall loudness and the overrule dynamic range used in a file. This is even more important nowadays that were regularly going to compressed format such as digital streaming. So by putting a limit on our master, we can have a lot more of the audio up near the upper maximum of a digital file, rather than just the odd few transients that might have exceeded 0 and thus cause clipping. Let me show you how that would work in practice and the benefit of it. 6. True Peak & Bitrate Explained: We've just touched on true peak limiting that this becomes really important when we go from nice high-quality WAV file, say we balance for C D at 16-bit 44.1 kilohertz. When we go down to streaming with growing as low as 128 kilobits per second. Like MP3 quality, this essentially means there's a lot less data in that file. And if we have a sudden very transient peak getting up near 0 in our 16-bit follow, There's lots of data there to tell you exactly where to stop and not pass that curvature so that it will sit at the threshold and it won't pass it. However, when we take some of that data away, my knuckle points here, for example, suddenly it's got the potential to just pop pass that threshold because there's not the data that telling it to stop. Those are just called overshoots. And true pizza limiting alleviates that by using true peak, we can go from our high-quality format, It's other formats and no safely that we're not going to have overshoots when we go to lower-quality. Limiters are obviously really useful at mastering stage where we just wanted to get the final mix up to the correct loudness, get the maximum performance out of it we can, but also really useful in a couple of situations in the mixing phase, especially on baselines, especially in the genres of dubstep and drum and bass. Let's dive in. I wanted to show you a couple of ways we can make use of a limiter in those situations. 7. Ozone 9 EQ: Okay, So let's break down how the EQ section works inside isotopes, ozone nine. Now I've got tonal balance up on the screen as well. And that's because they really work hand in hand with the EQ. So we're gonna look at that in a moment as well, but we're gonna be using it as our reference to get an idea of any EQ adjustments we might want to make this have a look at the EQ itself. Firstly, up in the top left-hand corner, we've got a quick way that we can change our overall view. This parametric reviews quite common now in DAWs, but we don't really get too much information. When we select a band, we get the information on in here. Whereas when we change this view, any bands that we've got active, we can actually see what's currently going on with them. Personally, I find this view to be the most useful. At a glance, I can see where each point is, what sort of frequency area it's at, what's going on with it, rather than having multiple points just died around like this. This is perfectly good if you want to have a large display and just a quick glance EQ, absolutely, the way to go, that way to change it is just here. We often know going to leave it on this particular view so we can look at how we can utilize that as well as the GUI interface. Just one along is the type of EQ. It determines the global properties of how the EQ works. There's a digital and analog version. Nothing really changes when we swap it over, but it changes the algorithm type of EQ and the type of curvatures that occur within it. Essentially the way that filter, which is absolutely what each byte of an EQ is, is an individual filter. It changes the algorithm for how those are process, whether it be digital or analog. We'll leave it on for the time being. And it would be best for you to test your music and your audio. What works best with it? You're getting the best results with the analog or digital EQ. The analog version is always minimum phase. The digital is linear phase. Linear phase means when you create an EQ filter, some kind of adjustment like this around the sleep points here and here, you'll have a phase adjustment in linear phase mode, this no longer occurs, however, it's only important if you have two very similar pieces of audio running in parallel. For example, if you're processing a kick drum and there's two different kick mix, you might want to use linear phase hair so you don't cause any phase discrepancies when you edit. This would only apply a mastering really if you EQ midside mode, or potentially you're going to EQ just the left or right channel. It causes a phase discrepancy with the alternate channels. It would be the best time to use digital, otherwise, analog is going to serve you perfectly well. Moving along, we can switch over our sites. Let me just discuss. We've got stereo midside, and when we switch into midside, we can switch between mid side versions as well. We can also turn them off or solo that band and we can switch here. And you see when they switch to side here actually changes the EQ case. We'd move the point there on the mid. Equally, we can do left and right. We can balance between the left and right channels. Like I said here, say we were to do just this on the left channel for some reason. And then on the right channel we were maybe going to do this. And chances are we would get a phasing issue occurring between the two channels. That would be when we switch from analog to digital to alleviate that face discrepancy that might be caused that to the far right, we've got an undo. So if we were to lift up, we can just undo anything. We've done that previously in the main section here of the great, We can sort of click around, but we can't really do anything. However, if we come to the line, it will snap the area to the line and we get a plus icon. What this does is it will activate one of the grayed-out bands we can see here. So currently 2468 are grayed out depending on where we click activate those particular bands. So if I click down here, it's going to switch to on. And if I click right up here, we can also manually go down here and switch them on. So next to the number we've got indicator switch that bad on or off as well. We could just activate all of them in the default position is like this. Well, we select a point and move it in this particular mode. All of our information is here and its corresponding to the same color. So we've selected by three, by three here gives us a readout that currently I've done a gain reduction of minus 2.4 dB, 530 hertz with a queue of seven. Looking over here at the three again, we've got these two handles out to the sides. These are a queue adjustment so we can pull something down and we could narrow the queue in just by clicking in the same point to save us having to move back and forth to adjust, we can adjust all three parameters from here, we've got our gain or frequency adjustment all in the same space. If we're in the view that just shows us our EQ bands and not our details at the bottom, whichever point we have selected will read out the same information before the points work exactly the same way. So we can move frequency wise, we can adjust our queue. Again. We just don't have the information for all the other bands. Much like in the global view, we can switch our filter type here as well. So we could go proportional, cute bell or Band Shelf. We've got our low shelf so we can have any bands be any of the filter types as well. Digital mode, we have an extra pedal available to us. We can drop that out here. That is our phase alignments. We discussed it being linear phase. We can actually shift the phase alignment if required as well in here in the EQ on the global view, we're actually not able to access that. It's important to note that in that view, with the digital linear phase, we've got our phase alignment tool just hidden away up here, a useful tool to note that it's not innocently visible. We can solo each individual band like so. Unless we changed the queue, it will change that solely for us. Today is we don't have to actively do that if you want to locate a particular area, just hold option. By housing upstream, we can just do that on the fly. That would allow us to solve any band we click on. In that same way. We can very quickly isolate areas we want to hear in specific ways without having to manually go back and forth, we can just do it on the fly just by holding Option and clicking on that bond there. What's honestly to solo selected bands, we can do that by clicking on here, though is if one soloed, the other solos will be stepped over. You can only see a single band at times we can't hear to split areas. And that is a rundown of the EQ section of isotopes, ozone night. 8. Ozone 9 Dynamics: Okay, So let us break down dynamics processor, which is our compressor in isotopes ozone nine slightly have been before. Let's start up in the top left with our view descriptor. So the very first one is our crossovers. Because this is a multi-band processor, we need to be able to see the crossovers in frequency areas we're working on. By default, there's no crossovers in place, so it just works as a single bad processor of across the top here, we get a plus and the white dotted line at a frequency point, it reads out in white the frequency area out. If we add this up, we now get a crossover point. We now have effectively two compressors operating. We introduce another, you have another crossover point. Let me move this. We can now physically see these crossovers represented with EQ style filter slopes can add up to four bands in total. The next view is our gain reduction of view. If we give this compressor some gain reduction that we play the audio back. See the orange line here is representing our gain reduction. We've got the metering over here on the side as to how much gain reduction is occurring, I bring the threshold right up. We can see it's far more subtle, but the last view is our detection filter. What are we going to dispute? We get some options below here. We've got none high-pass and tilt. And the detection filter allows us to ignore certain parts of the sound in the detection. If I put hypothesis, we get a roll-off here at the bottom. That means anything that doesn't pass the threshold down this low-end section here will be ignored by the compressive. This can be really useful if you've got a big kick drum and you don't want extra weight of the low-end to trigger compression. This switch that back to NAD. Go back to our course overview. Going along to the center section, we've got our stereo and midside modes. We don't have an independent left-right in this instance, switching to midside does give us the option of switching between the compressors midden site, compare them. Functionality we have here with the multi-valent system is learned as well. What this will do is try to find the best possible crossover points. So if we play the audio and Hitler, we should see our crossover points adjust to split into the most sensible bands available. The algorithm has chosen these to be, ah, split bands. Who done it? Their view of the main GUI got a couple of options. We can disable the band. It doesn't disable the audio, but it's simply the effect and compression that's happening. Solar on the other hand, isolate just that area of sounds we can really hear what we're working on and what the compression is doing in that particular area. We've got a band selected like this. We also get a cross in the bottom left corner that works with whichever bands we've got selected. That will, as you would expect, clothes away that band and join it to the next crossover but low arguably interface. Well, the first thing that we need to have a look at here is this metering section here, the multiband dynamics is also a limiter and the compressor for left-hand side reading here is limited. And the right-hand side reading here is your compression threshold, the meter here, the white levels coming up are dependent on the algorithm type at the bottom. So we can have peak envelope or ROS. Which type of algorithm we've got working the compressor and limited will function differently at different thresholds. Subsection here is our limited with a ratio attack release and then knee, unusual to see in the other limited it is available hip but the ratio as well, despite being a limiter, can actually be brought down into sort of the compression area. So we can have it as almost a two-stage compressor. If we were to bring it right down to something like 1.5 area, we could just have double compression. Strictly the only difference between the two is that the limited can never be brought below the compressor. If we bring the limiter lower, it's going to bring the compressors threshold down as well. Alternatively, if we'd been the compressor up, it will bring the top of the limits are up as well, slider up. It gives us the option for a dry and wet. This is pretty much the same as having a NY style compressor where you would put a compressor on a bus and then have a blend of the two things we can do, really quite harsh compression, but we can then have a blend of the original signal wherever compressed, because it's a blend between the two. The parallel compression section is a representation of the compression curve and we can actually adjust our Compressor by clicking on here, similar to the EQ, we've got our handles for our knee as well, but we can adjust our ratio. This is just a simple representation of how compression works. So a straight line like this would be a clean pass. The audio would be untouched. Let us how we can move the threshold, but it makes almost no adjustment to bring a control here does it's gonna be a ratio adjustment. We can see when it gets to this threshold, it starts to compress and reduces that dynamic range. If we bring our threshold del, that ratio gets more and more extreme and how it compresses particularly neat into account, it isn't represented in the graph, but it would simply be how quickly this compression ratio takes effect. Over here to the right, we can switch between our bands instead of having to individually click on them what we can do, or if we do all we get this here where we're able to adjust each individual band all in one go, rather than having the individual controls and graphics for each one, we can work like this. The metering works for us as well. Is operating independently. Adaptive release control hit. This means there's a calculation made to make an adjustment to the release time based on the audio passing through it, rather than being a hard and fast and sticking exactly to the release time programmed and who switched off, it will be exactly the release times that a set per bag auto will automatically introduced the gain based on how much reduction is taking place at the moment, if we were to compress the sound significantly will get a reduction in sound with Auto, and it will be much louder. Assertively about your own label gain control. You could simply adjust it by the most compressed area here, which would be around 4.4, so we could comfortably add so full point to back. That's a breakdown at the multiband dynamics section in isotopes ozone. 9. Ozone 9 Exciter: Okay, So let us break down the exciter module of isotopes ozone at night. Again, starting up in the top left, we've got two views. This first few shows us our frequency analyzer, as well as much like the multiband dynamics allows us to add in our crossovers. The second view here is our poster filter. And what this will do is highlight any frequencies of the harmonics that are being accentuated via the distortions and harmonic excitement being applied. It's actually in the middle here is almost identical to the other crossover sections in that we can turn modules off. It won't mute the sound but simply take the effect away. But we can solo them to really listened to a specific frequency area. We can close away any crossover just with the little cross here, because this is a multi-valent section, we also have the learned function. So if we play some audio and hit Learn, it's going to find the best crossover points that it can't. Just below the mean GUI we have over something, over something, we'll give a hit to CPE if the mastering stage Stone, you've just got a piece of audio up like I have here. It shouldn't really affect you too much unless you're going really, really overboard with the processing over something just gives you a slightly better quality in terms of adding the extra harmonics. Here we've got a link, the control, so we can effectively link certain bands together if necessary, and process everything all in one go for that instance. Now below here we've got four bands, we've got four independent ways of distorting the sound. And in here we have a list of different distortion types as well. For the processing, we're going to just solo this low-end so I can still talk. We've got two things we can do. We can increase the amount and as we increase the amount taken note of what's going on in the frequency analyzer. So as you can see as we increase that or if the harmonic style, It's really poke out and the frequency analyzer. So that tells us we're pushing it a little bit too hard if we were to switch the view here. We've also got a wet, dry mix like we had for the dynamics as well. So we can push this a little bit too far. It here, then we can dial it back, really get a blend so we can get that extreme push of the distortion. Let's take it almost out in the mix. For a particular sound. That is an overview of the controls that we'll use in isotope ozone is nine excited module. 10. Ozone 9 Imager: Let's get to grips with understanding the imager module of isotopes ozone nine. As before, we're going to start up in the top left. And as before, the first section we've got is our crossovers. We can apply them in the same way. This just means we can isolate specific areas within our spectrum to have certain stereo processing happened to it, that won't happen to some of the others. The other views a little bit more in depth and you may use them for certain things. This first one here is the image correlation meter. And what this actually does is it traces this meter down here that goes from plus one to minus one. The append plus one means we've got a really good mano compatible signal minus one means the left would cancel out. The right. Here is how art modern compatibilities occurring. And we can see where my kick drums, snares come in and we're really monitor compatible. And in-between them, we started to dip out a little bit, but never passing the zero-point where we're experiencing phase cancellation. If we were experiencing it in a particular area, this would be a good thing to look at and we could see that area occurring right here. We see only instance in all that section where we have the tiniest bit of phase correlation occur. As you can see, once that happens, it is marked red. The next view is the stereo spectrum view. This is essentially a frequency analyzer but independent for the left and right represented to us. Before with the other modulus, we have a Learn module. It's right there in play. It's going to find the most sensible crossovers for this type of effect. We can disable the effect without disabling the sound. And that's before we can solo for specific areas to be heard. With again, our cross icon to remove any crossover below the bottom is split into two sections. Really, we have a metering section and we have our Effects section. So let's have a look first at the effects section, how it works. We're going to solo the red band up here. Some of our highest. This is gonna be abandoned three. It was correlate to band three over here. Notice we've got stereo width as a control. For controls do the same thing. If we were to push this to the maximum, it gives us the maximum stereo width possible. We can see our correlation meter is jumping a lot more into the 0 territory. If we were to use our readout here, we can see there's lots of phase cancellation now occurring. We can dial it back to make the signal field wider, but also use a metering to check that we're not getting any adverse effects. Looked at the low end in this truck. We can see we've got really good monitor compatibility, but there are slight differences in the real low-end between hits, the kick drum. In this case, these are minor wouldn't affect the track overly. But what we can do is ensure that there are 108 ascent mother compatible and we could go to band one and drag this down. And that will give us a, a 100% money compatibility. If we bring it to absolute 0, it will be 100% mono in that area. Going back to the band three, what we push this up, we experienced a lot of phasing issues as we made this part of the track particularly wider. Here we have stereo ice. And what this does is effectively reduced the range between the phase and the phase cancellation so we can give the feeling of a wider sound, but balance it out so we don't incur so much of a penalty for the phase cancellation, we can balance this between 120 milliseconds. We also have two modes for how the widening effect works. You may find certain instances. One works better than the other. Short model can possibility and added width across the entire track. We can use stereo ice in either mode, and this should always remain biocompatible. Something useful to note with the imager is that within setting imager we have prevent anti phase is an option. We can enable prevent anti phase. And this will also help us be able to push ourselves without causing facing issues throughout the truck. Facing issues still occur. Much less frequent than we previously experienced. This case, stereoisomer exaggerates any face. Having looked at the monitoring, here we have a vector scope, anything within this triangle area here, It's gonna be more compatible. Anything over here is our sides. And if we think of midside processing, this is the myths and these are the sides keeping this around plus one will always be monitored and basketball getting down to minus one would be a complete opposite. Whereas 0 being the crossing point that we can see just here where it starts to turn red. We can switch the view to parallel levels as well. We can have the plot that graph as well. Principle here is up and down is more compatible. Left and right is a face. That is an overview of the imager and isotopes. Ozone night. 11. Vintage Tape: Let's explore the tape module of isotopes ozone line. The tape effect plugin is effectively a compression saturation tape emulation plugin, but it has only a few control, so we can use it very quickly to set up exactly what we're after. What was a very nice is this harmonics control, which works independently control wise. We're just going to be focusing on the bottom section here as the top section simply shows us the frequency analyzer of the tractor. On the left-hand side, we start with speed, and speed is an emulation of the tape reels and the speed at which they would've moved the faster is generally the more detailed and high-quality pristine recordings. Whereas moving all the way down to 7.5 was a slower tape reel that allowed for longer recording times over the same piece of tape. This resulted in a granular sounding effect. We've then got input drive, which is how much we need to push the signal into the tape if you're after that tape saturation element, we need to combine this with the harmonics to get exactly what we're after bias is effectively a swing between whether we favor the high-end or the low-end, can work a little bit like a tilt EQ, but with a harmonic saturation effect. Let's try out using the input drive, the bias of the speed. There are some changes in the hired and especially how we can really try for signal before it starts to negatively distort the tape. Let's look at adding the extra harmonics and adjusted the low and high emphasis. Really focus on the shakers in the track and you can listen and hear how the high-end changes. Lots of extra harmonics are being added, especially in the high-end because we've pushed this high emphasis so much if you felt that your truck was maybe lacking in this area and needed a lift, this could be a way to do it. Instead of just boosting everything with EQ, you can generate more harmonic and relevant content in that area. Have a, listen to the a and B here. Introduction to the vintage tape module in isotopes ozonide. 12. Vintage Compression: Let's break down the vintage compressor in isotopes ozone nine. Now this is really quite simple compared to the multiband log of the first view we've got here. We've got these sliders seem a little bit odd in terms of being in a compressor, what they effectively are the detection filter, it was available to us in the multiband so we can ignore some of the low-end. We've also got these two sort of EQ style filters so we can actually give a boost and adjustment in the high-end, say we don't want something around this area to trigger as soon. Having a slightly higher threshold, think of it like the multi-valued, but you're using an EQ system to adjust those thresholds and where things are going to be triggered. And we've got the gain reduction Traceview as well. It says before in the middle we've got stereo. We can also split this into mid side mode and compress our mitts and site independently, whether they've been stereo for now. Towards the bottom, we've got three different modes and how the compressor works, sharp, balanced and smooth. Sharp generally is going to leave the transient alone in a bit. You can think of this as like a slightly slower attack ballots. There's gonna be kind of like our SSL middle ground and smooth is gonna be a bit like an LA to a is going to grab just about everything, but do it really slowly and elegantly. We've got our threshold sit here same as before, and we can see our compression amount of occurring here in the meatus. We've got our ratio attack and release, very, very simple. There is no adaptive release here, but we do still have auto games. We can automatically have a makeup gain to match the levels, so we're not having to continuously adjust the gain manually. That is really all there is to the vintage. 13. Vintage Limiter: The vintage limiter in isotopes ozonide, like some of the other modules, we have two different views. Top of the vintage limited, we have the frequency spectrum view which is currently highlighted. We also have a gain reduction of view, much like the dynamics module. The bottom section we have our three types of vintage limiter, other look tube and modern analog vintage limited was based on the circuitry that's simply allowed a voltage they're not get beyond a certain limit. Tube was limited via a tube capacitor and gave a harmonic distortion upon limiting. A modern limited is effectively a digital circuit. Each one has its own character and tonality and there's no one size fits all. You simply using these for a character and you need to listen to which one best suits your source material. Whichever one is highlighted in blue is the current active version just over to the right, we have a meter control, much like our dynamic section, except this time we have a threshold, a ceiling, and a true peak on, off our threshold is the point at which limiting starts taking place. Ceiling is our maximum overall output when we're looking to go in digital format, it can be, it can be useful bringing the ceiling as low as minus one decibel, and this allows for no overshoot with the final process. However, built into the vintage limiter, we still have a very modern tree peak ability by switching on the true peak, this ensures that the final file will never peak beyond the threshold limit. However, if we don't wish to use tropic and we wish to go for the character elements and the processing elements associated with using a vintage delimiter. If we were going to something like Spotify, we're going to want a ceiling of around minus one dB. And we want the threshold to be wherever it is relevant to our source material. This means our final export has overshoot range for the moments that it may still pass the ceiling of minus one dB due to the digital calculation, this effectively means as the signal reaches It's minus one dB area. There can be a tiny fraction of space between digital algorithms that would cause it's overshoot if we left the ceiling at 0, this would cause digital clipping. If we left it at something like nought 0.3, it would give us usually enough space, but not always going as low as one dB will guarantee that our signal does not clip by using our threshold, we can still always maintain the loudness of the track as required. The slides it to the right-hand side is kind of a wet, dry mix for the amount of character coming from the vintage emulation we've got on the left-hand side at the analogue tube or modern, these add harmonics or other characteristics in different ways. This simply allows us to add more of that without necessarily clipping the signal. For example, the tube will generate more harmonics the harder it is pushed. However, we don't want to bring everything so low just to get that character effect so we can get the desired level that we're after and then add extra character using the slider. This obviously a big difference there in the jump. And remember from our GUI, we can use the Gain match here. So we'll switch game match on. And now we should be able to hear everything at the same level when we AMP. We can really hear the character effect, have an effect on the snare in this track, which is absolutely one of the characters being limited, That would be able to generate extra harmonics and nice and auditable for us. What are a and B this time really focusing on the snare and hear how it changes when the limiter is active. If this is an effect that you like and feel enhances the music, It's certainly we can use. There's quite an extreme example and not necessarily something we would use as a final result. Notice that we have experienced overshoot as well and we have actually clip even though we've got a minus one. And that's because we put the threshold down so far. We've got 1. There was still an overshoot causing a clip, even with that one decibel of headroom. These are instances where true peak would help us resolve that. There's an introduction to the vintage limited in isotopes, ozonide. 14. ReBalace Tool: Let's have a look at the master re-balance, which is availability isotopes, ozone. And this is a technology that has previously been seen in the X series of plug-ins for audio restoration. Well, it allows us to do is focus on a particular element of attract and adjust its balance post-process of the track already being produced. Here we have a section with vocals in this bottom control here is very simple. We've got vocal was based or jumps, and then we've got a gain adjustment on the vocals. We should find this hones in on the vocals in this track. We can see here that it gives a vocal representation of where it's detected. It's the whole track and we can see it's picking up the harmonics of the vocals and other areas are being ignored. So let's see if we can take the vocals down in the mix. That's sitting back just a little bit further in the mix than they were previously. Equality if they were ever so slightly too quiet, we could put them up a bit. Incredibly powerful thing to be able to do in mastering and with really minor adjustments can be almost seamless to cross, but other areas of the track we simply select. And it should now change this blue profile here that have been captured the vocals to capturing the base elements. Rebalance here we'd really be used if it's impossible to go back and adjust the mix, which is very subtle changes. Ideally, you would rebalance of vocal in the mix, but at the mastering stage, that may not always be possible if you delivering the best piece of work, you can't refer a client, you can do this and if the end result is exactly what they're after and that balance works, then they can potentially go back to the mix and do it there. Or if the end result is good enough, absolutely. Stick with it. Incredibly powerful tool. 15. Low End Focus: In other words, the ozone layer is ultra modern features is the low-end focus. This has a similar GUI to the spectral shape. However, it's really designed to focus just on the low-frequency areas despite the fact we can, despite the fact we can see the full frequency spectrum, we are limited. We can only really get up to 300 hertz if we narrow it that we can move around in that spectrum. But that's the only area we can work in. It has a similar principle in the way it works. There's two set areas, depending on the type of interface we've got punchy or smooth. Er this truck has a low subline that rose along the everything smooth with work. If we had something like a slap bass or perhaps even in a traditional picked base, punchy would definitely work for that kind of sound. That's the idea. So we have a list of the function which is going to always focus on what we're doing while everything's central, you can hear this no processing. However, if we were to push up, the contrast will now be able to hit just the processing of this taking effect. Switches to smooth. Most smoother, big difference. So let's bring that down. This is really helping the weight of our Kick come through rather than looking off to the sub, which is quite an interesting feature that we have it disabled. We'll run this part of the loop here. Listen when I enable it, how much more focused on weight to the kick fields with this extra bit of low-end focus processing. Now whether or not that's a good thing you'll have to decide in your mastering process and whether or not you felt the headroom to afford it equally. If you find that you've got too much low-end which this truck actually does have ever so slightly, we can go the other way and we can contrast it into the minus and bring it down ever so slightly. But we should be able to leave a lot of the original harmonics and things working with it because of side, side, side, side, side. Okay, so what we've done there is we've reduced the contrast a little bit, bought the game down by around two dB for, by doing that using the low-end focus rather than just an EQ, we've been able to keep a lot of the punch and fill in the low end while getting it closer to our overall goal in tonal balance. That's just a and B that, and have a look at the total balance and how it's sitting way more in our area that we know is going to work for our mix. It gives It's helped bring a little bit more focused to the low end and the kind of tone and shaped the kick a little bit. So it's actually got ironically, a bit more focus. This is really, really useful. I'll probably use this technique when we go to master the full track. That guys is the purpose of low-end focus. Very useful, very modern bit of kit, something we can really use to help correct and satisfy the low end of needs in non-perfect and mixes and very few mixes you ever get to work on will be perfect. I probably should. That's the end of the breakdown videos. What we're going to move on to now is I'm going to master this track and show you lots of techniques and things that we can do to use certain features. Now that you understand what each area does, how the GUI works, and how ozone works in general. Let's move on to that. Let's get into some practical mastering examples. 16. Spectral Shaper: In other words, the really modern features inside ozone line is the spectral shape. Now in the past, these kinds of plugins have existed in the form of sooth and deejay at two plug-ins that I haven't reviewed on my YouTube channel in the past. This takes it to a whole new level, especially with the integration side of things, which is just incredibly useful just to briefly explain what's going on here. This divides your audio up into hundreds of different bands, very, very small, narrow bands. So think of the multiband and what it is that we looked at before and imagine this plunger times over. This allows for very small compression, limiting and reduction in really specific areas of the truck. By doing all of these really clever splits, it can only really be done to this extent in the digital domain. What this allows us to do is very gently adjust areas and smooth them out, capturing a whole area. If we've just got a small frequency space that becomes a harsh just for a moment. We don't always want to cut that away. There's something like a dynamic EQ bands can even be too wide and treat that this is my spectral shaping comes in and it can allow us to reshape the whole mix on the field. By now, we should be familiar with how the GUIs work on here, but we do have two views. We've got our view with our spectrum analysis. Here we have two sliders add the area in-between the two sliders is going to be the focus of the spectrum shaping. Other view shows us the profile of this spectral shaping that's taking place. We're going to do here is focus on a bit of the vocal that is perhaps a little bit harsh. I mean, the pilots in this truck is okay, but we're going to try and find the most unpleasant area and reduce it down and just help it feel a little bit more than mitt. You can click in the center to move the split. Here, there's definitely some harshness to a degree. We're going to take this era, just try and reduce it down ever so slightly. The bottom section of the GUI, we have light, medium, and heavy, and this is the type of spectral processing. There is no one size fits all. You need to adjust it. I think we're gonna leave it on medium for the moment. We're going to bring the threshold down just to where it's peaking. One millisecond attacks probably gonna be a bit harsh, but we'll give it just something like four or five because it is quite fast percussion. The release of thirties probably okay up in this range, but I think we could maybe go as low as 15 as well. That's totally wise. We want to bring this down rather than up. However, by boosting it, we can really hear what's gonna happen. Hopefully, you can hear the harshness that was there before. Definitely subsided is maybe a bit extreme and we'd have to find a nice balance, but it does disappear. So let's listen to it at 0. Let's just listen to that with the threshold and the threshold down and loop it around the same section. Really hear how some harsh harmonics and the vocals, and they just subside enough that it's pleasant to listen to even this focused area. Really struggling to hear what's going on and focus on the C. And clear aspect really suits those out a little bit. But that guy is, is what spectral shape it can help us do if we're finding, we had to give a truck a big lift in certain places. And then we're getting these little harsh bits creeping through the a too narrow to dialogue with EQ or dynamic EQ isn't doing the job. This is where spectral shape or really comes in. 17. Tonal Balance Control: Now let's talk about Tonal Balance Control. We're gonna look at what it's used for and how we can set it up as well. Tonal Balance Control is a little like a frequency analyzer with a very, very slow attack and release time. What it does, it gives us a weighted profile of our music and it will allow us to see the overall profile of it over time. This is really useful for referencing your music and making sure that it's in the correct ballpark for what you're looking to achieve. There's a lot of other features built into Tonal Balance Control that makes mixing and getting your balance correct a lot easier. Let's just break down the plugin first across the top here we have a broad and fine. Now, I will usually have this on fine. And you'll see why I do that as we go through. But if I switch it to a broad, what it does is split into four multiband effectively. And it lets us see if our frequency balance is roughly in these areas based on a profile. And I'll show you how to make a profile in just a minute. So if I was to play a bit of the mix, you can see that my broad balance is roughly in the area and the load a little bit higher than we'd expect. These are a little bit lower than we'd expect. And the high-end is really quite up there. If we switch that over to fine, however, we can see that the balance is actually a lot more accurate than we were experiencing on broad. We've still got some slight dips in a high-end and a little bit more on the low end, but it's not as extreme. And that high-end we just need to really have a high shelf from fixed that extreme boost that we've got up here, up in the air frequency. Next along we've got our profiles and you'll see at the moment mindset 2001 and has this target symbol in 2001 is my own profile that I've created using the album Dre 2001. There are some other predefined ones in here to give you an idea of what you'd focus on. For example, we could choose hip hop and it's actually very, very similar to my 2001. The reason I have 2001 created this. I feel that is one of the best mixed albums that there's ever been. If you haven't got that hip hop could serve you just as well. If you're unable to create these profiles, I will also provide them in the next video for you so you can download and use the same ones as me. Another one created by me is this one called plastic. This is from using some specific drum and bass mixes as well. As you can see, it's got a slightly different low-end profile at different high-end profile, but the mids, the main focus of the track is pretty much the same. Let's switch this back to 2001. Note one other that I have is still, and that's one track still Dre, taken from the 2001 album. Look how narrow this is a really use this as just a quick reference to see how on-point I can actually get it. And the entire track is mixed within this spectrum and that track always sounds fantastic no matter where you play it. I know that if I'm following roughly this line, my mix is gonna be somewhere on point. There's areas in this mixed where I know it gets this bang on, areas where it drifts out and music changes over time. We're absolutely going to expect that for the mastering stage, we can just really tweak this and get it as good as possible at this final stage, to do it in the mixing stage with the ebbs and flows in music could be very, very difficult, but not impossible. We switch this back to 2001. Now, see as much broader for us to create your own profile. So I'll show you how to do that just on the menu next to it. We've been bringing that drop-down. We can click on here. We can do a Create Target from audio file or from a folder where I've done that from the folder, we're going to create another one. I've got all the WAV files from pendulums hold your color album, which is where the plastic profile came from. What I'll do is I'll use that folder to create a whole new profile based upon that entire album. Here I just select the album. Hold your color WAV files in there. It would taken from the disk that I originally bought back in about 2007. It's not even the deluxe version of the album, so it's the original masters, which for me I actually prefer the way that whole album sounds. So we're going to use that. And as you can see, it's now processing here and creating a custom profile for me. There it is That just labeled as costumer at the moment. And what we can then do is, and I didn't think I'd ever really need to use that. And it's got a very similar profile. We can see the faint white line in the middle that would really be our target to track anyway, if we were to go back to plastic, it's going to pretty much follow that anyway, but it's 2001 of the main GUI itself. We can actually, so they're out bands like this. Focus on the key area that we want to listen to. However, a quick tip is you can also hold down. However, a quick tip is you can also hold down Option and really dial in to a specific area like this. The other thing to note on the main GUI is the crest factor. What this is effectively letting us know is whether or not our low-end is maybe too compressed or two dynamic. And we're looking sort of keep it in this midrange between the two black bars here. So minus as it slightly to compress it the minute what maybe do is look to bring it down, but it was compressed overall in the mix. Not a huge amount we can do with that reference tool. It's really, really useful now where it becomes a little bit more powerful is when we have it partnered up with ozone, especially when we've got an EQ module available to us as well. So let's put equalize a one in ozone nine here at the bottom of the GUI we have select source, and as you can see now, we have Ozone equalizer one. There's a source in here. What we can do without actually having to have ozone open is we can now manipulate the EQ in ozone while just referencing on Tonal Balance. We can play a section of our track that way very quickly. We can dial in exactly what we were after on the EQ curve while referencing what's going on. Internal balance control, that becomes a super powerful tool. Now, we can take it a little bit further and while mixing, we can also have multiple instances of the EQ going. It also works with neutrons. So if I was to put an instance of neutron three in, for example, we can now switch the source to have the neutron EQ here as well. That's completely tweakable. We can do lots of EQ and adjustments per track, all from this one instance on our master, which is incredibly useful in a mixed situation. Obviously we're mainly looking at mastering here. But if you have neutron as well, absolutely utilize this tool as part of Tonal Balance Control. Okay guys, so this video is just a really quick one. You've got your download folder here included so you can actually download the profiles I use for mixing and mastering for Tonal Balance Control. 18. Ozone 9 Mastering Pt1 Top & Tail: Okay, so let's get down to mastering this track. One of the very first things that I'm going to do is just zoom in on the start and end of the track. Just introduced the tiniest fades. And we're just gonna make sure that the truck that we've got here is starting the correct point. It starts started the track. There's not a big book of silence on the thing has been cut away. Perfect. We're going to do the same thing with the ends now. Now I can see there's a bit of silence at the end. Let's switch this guy in on logic and we can see really that's gonna be the last bit of irrelevant noise there. It really fade into 0 by this point. So what we're gonna do is we're going to drag this back to here, where they give our fade here, tiniest little faith. That's just top entailed the track exactly as we want it with a switch that off swing that was zoomed in. The next thing I'm gonna do is listen through the truck in its entirety. And I like to just note things down with a pen and pad of any good or maybe needs to change and work on just so that I can come to them later on if I hear them. We're also going to make sure we look at things like this and we can see that particular spike here going to make sure we've not somehow got a clipping or anything like that. We'll just run over those points. I'm meets his haven't clicked like that. For example, we've still got 2.5 dB of headroom, even with Spark there and here it comes close, but we've still got some headroom. Even with these little spikes that have come to in certain places. We're not flipping and we know we've got a good piece of audio to work with. Next thing I'm gonna do is listen through the track. I'll take some notes down. There's no point me playing that for you, so we can just speed that process up. Alright, so during that, I've kept an eye on Tonal Balance, had that listen to what's going on. It's some things with we've seen before as we were going through the other videos, at the higher end gets out of control are a couple of points we need to look at EQ. I'm probably going to high-pass it to get rid of those extreme highs that occur a couple of times. The low-end gets off balance in a couple of times. So we're going to look at dynamic EQ or maybe multi-band compression just to control that in those extreme points. And one K through so about four K loses its impacts in a couple of points. So we're maybe going to use some upward expansion to bring that up in those situations that's needed. I didn't really hear any issues with imaging or the vocal losing focus or anything like that. But there's certainly some small improvements we can make. We learned with the spectral analysis that we can do a little bit of improvement around one case with definitely gonna look at that as well. So just for this section, one of the first things I'm going to do is actually do the top and tail EQ. So we're going to add a section in here and I'm going to use an equalizer too, because I'm gonna make use of EQ one. Now this will probably end up almost at the end of our chain just before the limiter or maximizer will keep bumping it alone. But the purpose of it is going to be to take the extreme lows out and bounce off some of those extreme highest. We're going to give ourselves a loop around here. We're gonna take number one here and we're gonna change that to be a high-pass there for flat that necessarily need the brick wall, we need quite steep slope, probably 24 dB for this, There's not really anything going on below 40, so we could actually maybe bring it up as much as say 38. We can probably actually do with losing all of that and maybe gain ourselves a little bit of headroom for balancing with the EQ again. But let's just have a little look at our loop and check that out, see how it balances out. That's actually working really well. It's given us the control we need over the extreme lows and a and b it, we're not really losing anything in the truck after all. Literally unlike a huge club system, there would be slightly less up, but there's so much weight in the kicker and sub bass around 40 anyway, it would still definitely get that weight. We're not losing any notes there. So that's worked really well for us. We can still see this extreme high peaking off here now my hearing, it's not going to affect too much, but someone who's a bit younger that's gonna sell horrendous. So we need to roll that off a bit as well. So we're going to bring you up here. We're gonna do a similar thing, except this time we're gonna low-pass it, we're going to flat as well. This time probably a 12 db slope and it'd be about right for right up near the upper limits, should curve that off about right. Hopefully, it doesn't matter if it trails off a bit here. This was like a CD most deferens, it still sounds correct and not too bright. It will be okay. Like high-end is great and there's no more and you don't lose a whole bunch of it from dynamics. It doesn't restrict you as long as I can turn the volume up and it doesn't destroy my ears. We're good here. Course it's 12 db slaves, not enough to grab that. Let's bring it into 2424 slope. Here gives a bit of bump as well. We can probably get away with that. So if we do it here, so it's gonna hit sort of around this frequency. We can probably have that bump and it'd be okay. But we only really want to take the extreme highs out in the end. For me that's doing the job pretty well, that I've really focused on the shaker, That's where you got the highest bit of air to it and nothing's really lost at the volume for you guys would be static, but I'm adjusting my levels up and down so I can hear a low-level of the high level and get a perception for how it changes. For the minute that that's working for me, it may adjust as we go along, but I think that's probably what we're going to end up staying with. Yeah, that's working. So let's move onto the next section. We're gonna look at some probably output expansion and take care of those upper ends of the vocal range around here. 19. Ozone 9 Mastering Pt 2 Upward Expansion: Okay, so we're going to make use of the dynamic EQ here. So let's add this module in the top module here, just dynamic EQ, I like I said, we're gonna rearrange those and keep having EQ to towards the end there. And it seems kind of odd, but that top and tail thing just really needed to be handled early on. Now, the vocals here, the main thing in this area, it would just be nice to just have them up a little bit more. It gives somebody brightness and fullness to the track. Now they're not always decked out like this. So we want our EQ to fluctuate and only work in those particular moments. Now, a dynamic EQ normally would subtract only. What we can do here though, is we can put it into an upward mode, so we can switch over like this and give a bit of a boost. And it will basically go up when there's audio there to try and help meet that. And it will move with the dynamics of the audio. This is gonna be right around three k. It's got quite a wide Q. I think we can probably get away with as much as three dB lift. This EQ is zoomed right in. So actually this looks like a huge lift, but it's actually only 1.4 dB. We're gonna go to to see what that gives us. That might be a bit much. And then we'll maybe look at adjusting the threshold and how it's going to operate as well. Because it's not giving as much of a lift. So we're going to drag this threshold down a bit so it triggers a little bit more often. Because of narrow the queue just a touch and then bring it up just a little bit in frequency, up to about 2.5 dB because of the AB test. Okay, Now we're just going to AB test it. And when I hover it off, let this loop and activate it and see if it improves. Often when I'm doing this, I'll have my eyes closed. I'm really critical listening. Yes, For me, that's pretty clear. I know you get the impression of Lauder is better. However, the vocal is just more balanced and actually the lift it gives with the percussion as well. It makes the song feared a little bit brighter and more solids. The best way I can describe it I'll do is just loop like four bars here and we'll do lots of AB's. You can skip over if you want to just close your eyes. Critical listen, really hear the difference because that is kind of a subtle changes in EQ boost. That doesn't always happen, but it can make a huge difference to the focus and attention of the track. So I'll have it in, take it away this time because you kind of miss things a lot more than you enjoy them when they appear. So to me, that's a really good move. It comes up really obviously. Without it, the track sounds fine, is absolutely, But with it there it sounds better, clearer, more on point. A better flatter profile, I guess it's just clearer, It's fine without it, but it's a little bit clear without it. And what we're looking to do here is make a 100 small changes so the truck can translate to as many systems as possible that he wanted to be testing on your speakers, on your headphones and making sure everything works. And in this instance, this is sounding much better for me from such a small adjustment that we could as well look to address the low-end here with dynamic EQ. However, we do have the kick in here quite a lot at that. I think a dynamic compressor is gonna work a little bit better for us than dynamic EQ in this instance, I think it's gonna be a little bit slow and flabby. So let's move on to that next section. We're going to look to address the subs just here. That will maybe be looking at some critical E queuing as well. 20. Ozone 9 Mastering Pt3 Imager: Just having a quick think about the sub will actually do is grab the image. And now I remember when we were doing the videos for this. In fact, there was the possibility that there's a little bit stereo imaging bearing on them. Maybe we can actually help reduce that down. We've done have to sit at the level Alpha. We could actually just moderate to some degree. So let's try that. Let's see how that goes for us. We've actually got a really good balance. Now, just by doing that, it's going to creep up a little bit here in this section. But we know, look at our overall balance, it really, really good now we can maybe even add a little bit more round that to k with the vocal, but where things are at the minute, the balance is sounding really, really good and we definitely not overshooting with our low-end. Now, this will really come into play when we go to bring the level of everything up. Because if there's too much low-end there, it would just fall apart. But we'll see that as we go. I'm really liking how that sounding. I think we need to add any stereo flare or stereo widening. It's a pretty EM stereo mix. I worked hard on the piano to give that stereo field. There's lots of vocal layers which gives us stereo field is panning on the percussion. I don't think we need a nice flat that we're just going to go for more of that, fixing, fixing it that way as worked really quite well for us. I think we all still going to jump onto the dynamics section now. 21. Ozoine 9 Mastering Pt4 Dynamics: I'm just going to add a couple more little bits of control. And this area here where we're still losing a little bit of clarity and punch. I'm actually going to compress it out because we've got that dynamic lift going on with the dynamic EQ. But it's such a dynamic area now in the track, the points, we're losing it ever so slightly. Reluctant to give it any more push because it's sort of hits its peak at points, but then dips too far below that, restrict that range a little bit as well. So at two sections in here, this one's gonna go to somewhere around 151. Way to do here is block this out like this. I'm not going to use this one. I'm not going to use this one. I'm going to be focusing on these areas here. And I don't really want that to come as high as six K is probably going to be somewhere around there. Probably as low as one K. We're going to focus on that for the minute and just restricting that ever so slightly. The snare and things are in here. So I'm gonna take for quite a fast attack when he's probably gonna be okay, I think the release can be somewhere around 80. I've been these probably gonna be okay as well. Let's reduce it by R1 to the bed. I'm going to manually gain it rather auto again it I'm going to play that section over again. By the way, the purpose of looping like this section that I tend to go for the loudest section, but it's also got the most dynamic areas. And this middle block has got this breakdown in the middle of a couple of pauses, but it's also like the, the biggest, most solid section of the track, kind of its fundamental, if you were going to bring this down even further, I think maybe three to 3.5 dB if compression is going to help. But that's doing the job that I was after. I'm going to bring this up to about 1.5 cakes. It's bringing up an area that's just not really needed in the crossover and really focus it in. Now. Bring it up a little bit too much. Here, we're going to really narrow this down. I might bring it down as far as three k hat thought is really locked in where we were losing the focus on the vocal is always there, always present. Yeah, I've had to restrict its dynamics by about three dB, but it moves plenty throughout the overflow of the track. We're going to do a similar thing with the low end, but only by about a decibel, just grabbing it and it's gonna be a lot slower than the lit. Quite a bit of it get through, maybe go something like 40 on the attack. And do you know what maybe 120 kind of region in the release. We could tweak those, but we'll see how everything performs. Why sometimes these get the BPM of the truck and workout exactly what's gonna work out in milliseconds. But I know those ballpark areas are gonna be quite good for what we're looking to do. What I've done there. I've taken as much as 1.5 in a couple of instances of the low-end doubt. On average it's about minus one. In fact, there it's frozen on exactly minus No.1. I've given it a half a dB box if restricted its overall movement, just pull it down a bit. But given that a little bit of its energy back as well, it might slow up the attack a little bit more, but for the most part That's about right, and it's giving us a more solid balance. It's only really gluing by a decibel also, but it's doing what we need at a point now where I've made for pretty substantial changes, what I would do now is I'm just going to have a listen to sections of those track. Switch ozone off entirely. So that I've got a real idea of where we are with the truck. I'm gonna start with it off, bring it on as long as it sounds of fields better. I know I'm in the right track. If something's off, we need to take a step back and see what we're gonna do next. It's doing the job. Let's perhaps a little bit much coming up in the terms of the shaker. Now, as the energy rises up, that can maybe be due to the compression here, it could maybe be stupid, this big dynamic EQ, I could maybe narrow the gain down or something else. We will maybe look at E queuing that in a bit. I wouldn't call it a problem that has a lot more focus and the truck sounds and feels brighter and we've got gain match on. We're not suddenly getting a big jump in level that makes it always has nicer. We've just got a more solid, more confined balance of the truck over all. So we're going good so far. 22. Ozone 9 Mastering Pt5 Limit and Loudness: So now is a really good time for us to start looking at getting the track to its overall loudness. So one of the first things we're gonna do is just switch on meters over two L UFS. We can do that by clicking on the IO up here. Under tight, we need to switch that to integrated by default, it's usually RMS and that's what I'll have it on a majority of the type in this process, we won't integrate it and that's going to switch it. So we've got peak, the UFS here, certainly right at the end of our chain, we're going to add either the vintage limiter or the maximizer completely depends on the end result you want. And it's really good to try between the two in this instance, whether you use the maximizer because it's the cleaner of the two. And this is a quite well produced, clean sounding track. Now this track is going to go onto streaming services. So we're gonna have a couple of things we need to really note. Firstly, our UFS target is going to be around minus 14 overall. So if we focus on a specific, the loud part of the track like here, we can comfortably target that around minus 13, knowing that the other sections of the track that a little bit lower and ebb and flow a bit more. We'll make up for the overall average of the integrated signal across the whole track. And we won't be penalized too much for that. The other thing we need to know is this will get converted to MP3. Apple Music streams at 256 k bps, whereas Spotify is variable bit rate from 128 up to 320. Places like SoundCloud, if you're on mobile, can go as low as 96. All of these can cause issues in conversion and a bit rate, especially with aloud song. And this is how you get that horrible digital distortion. The things to do on the ceiling, you can go to minus 0.3 if you're going to a WAV file and VCD, that is a perfectly safe region to be in, however, pure going to be converting to MP3, or it's going to be going to streaming services that sometimes have a lower quality if you only distribute into Spotify and Apple Music and you'll be fine around the minuss naught 0.5 region. You could probably get away with nought 0.3, but we'd like to play it safe if you go into the likes of SoundCloud and some other third-party sites, you might want to give it as much as one decibel extra on the ceiling. So you've got that overshoot range. When it converts, we're going to leave it around nought 0.5. We got the switch on tree peak as well. Tree peak limiting takes into account those situations are carrying and then we've got an extra safety net of half a decibel. This track is going to need about minus five dB in reduction. And it's a pretty fast track with lots of small percussion sounds. It's quite fast character as well. What do we look at the IRC? I personally like IRC three and sometimes four depending on the track. We're gonna have a listen to some of those as well. We shouldn't need any transient emphasis. We're not going to limit this track very hard. We're not going to completely crushed the transient away will only be catching some of the larger peaks here, most of the transient will get through. However, if we were having to limit quite a lot, we could use transient emphasis and bring that up a bit so that it still feels as if the transients are there. Remember we looked right at the start of a couple of little problem areas in this track where we've got this particular spike here, we need to play that. As you can see that our meters didn't overshoot the absolute maximum was No.5 as set by the limiter. Something really important for me to just emphasize, See you in ozone if you were to have an extra plugin added in here, for example, let's put the vintage limited in next, we can even mute it. The maximizer will buy bypass into the vintage limiter and will cause clipping. We just saw that knock clip. Watch this. We went to plus 1.8 and plus nought 0.2 left and right channels. So even though this is in here and it's disabled, it's gonna cause clipping. We can even see we got the red light, orange lights in logic here for nearly two dB of clipping. So that's really important thing to know about ozone. Even if it's disabled, you're feeding that signal into a bypass plug-in. Okay, so we need to make sure there's nothing in there. We see we won't get those clips. So it didn't click that time. Mr. Really important thing to notice, we are going to leave a chunk of the track. Just have a listen and look at what we need. Okay, so we've reduced the character down to a little bit quicker. I just felt that was a little bit nicer on the, some of the percussion elements. Minus 5.5 dB. So that's how much we've come up in level as well. Worksheet restricting to that nought 0.5 on the ceiling. Now ballot sounds okay, but I am with a switch between pumping. I usually quite like pumping. I want to try clipping as well and just see if anything stands out particularly well to me. Please. For me, IRC for transient is a nice sounding. I usually really like IRC three pumping. However, on this, really, I'm just going to play it to you. Listen to the low-end, listen to the kick, it becomes really the best description is like 40 to be honest. It just has an extra rumble that it didn't have before, that it just doesn't need. I'll switch between C3 pumping and balance. You can hear the difference. I won't switch between the algorithms because it causes a pause, just causing a knock cool rumble at the bottom. However, RC transient, which kind of makes sense because it's a really transient heavy truck just seems to work the nicest. Yes. Sounds nice and clean. I'm getting a really good balance of the track. The master for thing. It sounds like nothing's happening, which is really, really nice effect. I don't need to add any transient emphasis. I don't think it really needs to work independently at all. Not going to stress about the stereo independent side of things. I think that's pretty good for loudness. Now the other thing we could have done was used the vintage limiter. So let me just disable the maximizer for a moment. If we set up something similar, Let's go true peak, we have minus 5.5, and I think this limits a little hardest. We would have to go to Moses five, but still, we can switch between analog, cheap and modern moderns probably gonna be what I prefer a character wise, they respond similarly, so let's take that back down to one to five as well. Let's just see if we prefer one to the other here. You can hear straightaway that limits a lot harder than the maximizer. So we're going to dial that back by about a decibel. We can even see in our loft measurement It's so much louder. Good. Either log is the nicest sounding, both tube or modern affect the low end a little too much, especially the kick drum, it loses, its punch comes a bit flabby, and that's something to really note with limiting. It's always going to affect your low-end more than anything else. Because the low-end, as we can see here from total balance, is the loudest thing that's always going to be hitting it the most, the hardest. And first, I prefer what's going on with a maximizer, this instance, and we don't need the vintage limiter. Remember what I said about having anything at the end of the chain, it causes clippings. We don't want that. That's it. We've got our ballpark here in our loudness. We've made sure our ceiling doesn't peak. We've looked at the loudest point serum, made sure that those are okay with true peak. We've got the loudness or limiting algorithm that we like best with a truck. It's really a subjective choice, needs to listen through and decide what sounds best. Like. I have been focused on the low end. That's what's gonna take the most impact. And if you're losing the balance from that, then it's not the right algorithm or you're pushing it too hard. Well, we need to go back and adjust those dynamics and EQ in the mix. All right guys, hopefully that's really helped you move forward in your tracks. Let's move on to the next step. 23. Ozone Mastering Pt6 Spectral Shaping: I think it's really important to highlight that as we go through this process, I'm listening to parts of the truck and listened to the truck as a whole over and over. And I've been taking some breaks as well. It's really important to iterate that there's no point in me showing you me listening to the truck over and over and over. And certainly no point in me telling you when to take breaks, you need to think of that for yourself. But if you're making adjustments and then little bit hearing them or objective or just need a few minutes away? Absolutely. Have a break. Just come out of the studio space for a little bit about sort of thing. What we're gonna do now is we've kind of got the majority of our chart, we've got our overall loudness. We've fixed a couple of issues. We've talked entailed with the images to mono down the kick and get a balanced overall. And we just wanted to sort of have a look and make sure we're in the right place and listened through the track again. In doing that, I can hear some little bits of the shaken that the vocal that have come up now in the tutorial videos, we found a really nice thing that we did with the spectral shape or so. I think we're going to do that again. We can just take it hit off the dynamics. So we've still got the top turns out EQ into the maximize it right at the end. And we're going to focus down in the area like we did before. I'll just try to take some of that little harshness that's come out by bringing up those other areas using the spectral shape, which is really useful tool. You should be able to hear that's kind of harsh and little bit too tinny. So we're just gonna use the threshold here and use the tone. Just dial it back just a little bit slightly slower on the attack and thinking as well, perhaps even as much as like warranty. Cursor just thought that I tried having the release a lot slower. However, you could hear it taking up too much, taking too long to come back. And the reverb of the vocal was there, but the main vocal was still there. Introducing its punch set 40 seems to be a nice space for that to work in. Just some a being a bypassing the whole thing. Well, I would suggest is we have given you a huge, massive boost or anything to the height. We've done the best compression really around here, this area here, the same area when spectral shaping. We've given this three dB lift just above three k here, in-between 34. Okay, That's all we've done in terms of really lifting it up. However, when we listen to the whole truck, listen to how much more focused the vocals are, the shake has come up the balances just overrule, nicer toward it previously was. So we'll just do these bars and then bring it in. Gamete. Just so much more focused in now, I can tell you right off and the harshness there before his God. Yeah, that's getting very, very close. Now, what we need to do in the next videos, we're going to have a look at the codecs that we're going to look at, balancing out our final file. 24. Ozone 9 Mastering Pt7 Codecs and Bounce: Okay, so we're really close now. We've got the sound we like. We've got our overall levels nicely set. The mix sounds good when we play it right the way through. What we need to have a look at now is the codec section. And this is really important for making sure we get everything correct when it comes down to a streaming service. At the moment, we're listening to a really high-quality file, unfortunately, streaming services, lower-quality. We just need to make sure that no other issues are going to arise in a situation where that's the case. Over here on the GUI, we've got a codec section. What we can do is enable this. And now whichever selected in here will be listening to the track in that format. So let's say a pore mobile stream or SoundCloud, which can be as low as 96 k bps. This would now be the output. What's important is we're not getting any clipping. We can still hear it with the elements of the track and that's the worst quality we can really expect if we go over to things like Apple Music to five-sixths is the range we're gonna be in. Let's solo the artifacts. Let's hear what artifacts are being caused by going to an MP3 it to five-sixths. Now, strictly it would be mp3 on Spotify and AAC for Apple Music they set up very similarly. What you're here now are the artifacts that are created via the fit rate compression. This is what MP3 creates. We take it right down. We get a lot more artifacts, 320, much less. So let's make sure our track sounds okay. It's MP3 at C5, C6. And certainly no issues really being created. And that's great. And that's just a nice check to get an idea for how everything's going to be. This is pretty much our master done. Let's say I allow this bit where minus 13.1, That's great. Overall, we know that it's going to be okay for us going out to those platforms. We're gonna go to something like CD. We would've maybe push that a little bit more and get a little bit more loudness out of it with definitely adjust our ceiling to be nought 0.3, we will run through a whole track, make sure that we don't get any clipping. I showed you a reason that that can occur in ozone. So make sure we've got nothing. At the end. Either a maximizer or limiter is active at the end of the chain. And now we're going to look to balance out track. There's two things that we can do here. We can balance it out in the file quality that it currently is. Or we can go down to 16-bit 44.1, which is CD quality. If we're going to go down to CD quality, we need to test out dithering if we switch into dealer at really simply gathering is a noise profile that's added and it's really important to do your audio if you ever lower in quality. This file, as you can see by the name, is 24 bit and it was at 44.1, it's going to go to 16-bit as a CD quality file. So we would test our do that. Now, there are multiple things we can look at. We can see here the bit depth is going to be 16 at the amount, depending on the audio, might be fairly low, medium or strong, really, really dynamic music such as an orchestral recording that goes to almost silent in the house, huge swells. Those dynamics are affected a lot more by the change in Bit Depth. We mainly the strong in this instance, low will probably be okay, but we need to listen to them. We've then got types of noise shaping. Again, these vary per track, but you can see roughly the curves that are going to be applied. Just have a listen, we would decide which one would be best. In this instance, I'm not going to go down to CD quality. I won't be sending this file off for printing to disk. It's only going to be a digital release, at which point I can submit the highest quality file and the streaming services will do the downgrade. For me. That is why it tree peak and ceiling is absolutely so important. If we left that at 0, they're downgrading algorithms could cause a peaking issue. We give them a little bit of headroom, but we manage it with an overall loudness and loves that we're going to be a good volume without any PQ or distortion to balance where project in logic it would be Command at B, your DAW may very well need to go to cn and I'll get to choose WAF. And I want the resolution to be 24. 44.1 hertz and interleaved, which is going to be the stereo file joined together, dithering is set to none and we are going to export the entire track. We don't want any normalization. We can include an audio tail because we've cut it off and created a faith, so it will end exactly at that time. And I would always suggest doing a real-time bounce, bounce on the second cycle, pass some DAWs point, allow this, in which case you need to review your audio after you've bounced it. Or in the case of Pro Tools, I believe nine and below, you can only belts in real time anyway. So review your audio as it's bounced. We're going to bounce this track and save it to where it needs to go. I'm going to take this to my folder where I keep all my tracks. We are in 2018. This truck is called heart that I have a coloring system like green means finished and released. Purpose in progress. Yellow is vocals and in progress, red means it's been scrapped. So this is called heart. We don't have a folder for the Masters. We're gonna make a new folder. We'll call it master files. Here. This is gonna be 24.144. I like the exact Bit Depth sample rate that this master is in the wheat belt. 15 inside. Because in science, in science guys is our final bouts of Boston.