The Complete Music Mastering Masterclass

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to the complete Mastering masterclass. I'm so excited to finally have this class live. It's taking me a long time to make it really wanted to get it right. And I'm really excited to be at the point of being able to release it. If you don't know me, my name is Jay Allen. I have I have made over 100 classes now, over 1 million students in my online classes all over the internet. And I'm really excited that so many people have found my classes so useful. I hear from him every day and I love it. I have a PhD in Music with a focus on electronic music and a master's in computer music. I've been producing, writing, composing for 2030 some years now. I worked on some records that have been in the top CMJ charts. I've been acknowledged by the Grammy Foundation for some of my educational work. And I've produced, mixed and mastered tons and tons of tracks. But the most important thing is I just really love talking about this stuff and being a nerd. So if that sounds like you, you're in the right place. One of my favorite things to do is get up in the morning, read all the questions I have in the classes and answer every single one of them every morning. It's my favorite part of my day. In this class, we are going to deep dive in mastering. Everything you need to know about mastering is in this class, we're going to talk about types of mastering, the theory behind Mastering what we're trying to achieve. And of course how to do it. We're going to get in the weeds and master a track. The track we're going to master is actually a student track that I invited someone to submit. We're going to master that track throughout this class and I'll walk you through every gruesome step of it. I'll talk about all the effects you need, all the tools you need, how to build your chain, details of what you're looking for and what you need to submit to Spotify and the other streaming services. How to control the three-dimensional space that we're working in, adding additional sweeteners. And then of course, rendering to the different file types and what your Perfect Render settings should be in order for it to be accepted by the streaming services. Lastly, I'll talk about things you can do to make the mastering process easier for yourself in the long run and how to get gigs as a mastering engineer. So without further ado, let's dive in and start doing it. It's important for me to convey that you can do this in just about any software, any audio software. If you're using Pro Tools, Logic, FL Studio, reaper, the, the tools we need for a mask. Just kind of sticking out. L and I stopped doing Dequeue. So okay, so what we've done here is we've just really pushed it really hard. But that's not what we want to do. Obviously. Adjust our ratio attack and release times here, okay, so everything works the same as just slightly different interface. Here's our side, right? So we can set compression, smash up against that ceiling. It's going to distort. That's what it does. So what this one does is has this soft clip function. So as long as we don't smash up on there too hard, it is going to let us have a little bit of distortion from doing that, but it's actually kind of a nice distortion. So it's okay. 2. What is Mastering?: Okay, so what is mastering? Let's go through just really quick to get us on the same page. So let's go through the process that we do to make a track. Okay, skipping the hardest part, which is the actual art of making the track. You sit down to make music. You make track in whatever software you make a track, hurray, you wrote the music, you're happy with it. Cool. Now, what happens after that? And this is the typical thing that happens after that. After you write the track, then typically what people will do is I'll say, Great, I've written a good track, I'm happy with it now it's time to mix it. So you're going to spend a bunch of time mixing that is getting all the levels just right, getting the relationship of one sound to the other, just right, and getting it sounding exactly how you want it. Chefs kiss. So you've done that, okay, I have a whole separate class on that process. After you do that, then what you do is the mastering process. So you take your mix and you export that out of your dye. You export that as stereo audio tracks. So two channels left and right, the kind that we stream, the thing we hear. You couldn't call it done there. And sometimes people do. Sometimes people say like This is my mix. It sounds great. I'm going to send it off to Spotify, and that's going to be great. However, you couldn't do this last step and you should do this last step. You really should master your tracks or have your tracks mastered by somebody else. So mastering is one last layer that we do in order to get the tracks ready for streaming, for putting on a record. Although I'll talk about that in just a second, but that is something that has to happen. Putting on a CD, playing in your car or playing on crappy speakers, planning on great speakers. It's a way to make sure your track is going to sound great and as many different places as possible. It's a way to make sure that when your track is being played on the radio, no one reaches for the dial to turn it up or turn it down. It just fits in with what music is being played on the radio station. It's a way to make sure that there's no kind of oddities in the track, like a whole bunch of low stuff that you didn't hear in the mix or some weird Hi stuff that you didn't hear in the mix. Just to kind of put a shine on the whole thing and make sure it's going to work on all of these platforms. And it's going to sound It's best. That's what mastering is. The main thing I want you to take away from this first video is that mastering means we are working with a stereo track, k, two channels like this. Like look at this track here. This is two channels, you can see. And this is not all part of one session. These are 1234567 individual tracks. This is not 1 s. I just pulled in seven tracks here to show you something that we'll talk about in a few minutes. But these are completed tracks that I have in a session and I'm mastering these tracks. So we look at this one, it's stereo, it's got two files. This is not the mix. If you are mastering something, you are done with the mix. You are not mixing it anymore. It has gone. So our mix is written in stone. We, we've bounced it down to a stereo track, and now we're moving on to the mastering phase. So that's what mastering is and that's what we're going to learn how to do in this class. 3. A Note About Terminology: Okay, a quick word about terminology before we get too far, I just wanted to address this. There is a movement in audio engineering to stop using the word mastering, as it is seen by some as oppressive language. I am totally sympathetic to that. Alternatives that are being proposed are finishing and maximizing. Both of those two terms are great and work well. And I'm trying to I'm in the process of adjusting my language to say to use both of those terms for the interests of people understanding what I'm talking about. I'm primarily going to stay using the term mastering for now. But I may go back as soon as one of those two terms, kind of sticks and re-edit this, this whole class to use the new term. But for now, most people know what mastering is. And so I kinda have to use that for this class in order for people to really understand what I'm talking about. Other words and language that are being rethought up in audio. There's actually a lot of them. Things like when we have two hardware devices that work together like a tape machine and a clock, or a synthesized or annotate and computer. I'm the relationship is always called a master slave relationship. We're kind of getting rid of those terms as well. But just so you know, you may hear people refer to mastering as finishing or maximizing or maybe even something else. It all mostly means the same thing. I like finishing better than maximizing because maximising to me is one element of mastering, but not the whole element administering anyway, more on that later. So I just wanted to put that out there so that when you hear those terms, you understand what we're talking about. Cool. Let's move on. 4. Software and Hardware Recommendations: Okay, Let's talk about the tools we're going to use now. You can use a lot of different stuff for mastering. There's a lot of people who insist on hardware mastering and there's some really cool hardware for mastering. But what I wanna do in this class is we're going to stick primarily to software, or we're going to stick only to software in this class. But you'll understand how hardware works. We'll talk about it when it comes up. So I'm gonna be using Ableton here, but it's important for me to convey that. You can do this in just about any software, any audio software. If you're using Pro Tools, Logic, FL Studio, reaper. The, the tools we need for mastering our EQs and compressors, maybe a couple of other things, but any audio program has those tools built-in. Really, it totally shut. I'm almost positive. Every single, you could probably do a lot of this in GarageBand if you really had to. It's not so much about access to the tools, but using them precisely. That's what makes a good master. So whatever data you have is going to be fine even if you don't have a dog, you doing this in like Audacity, a free program? Can, you can do that. It's going to be a little harder, but you can actually master in Audacity just fine. So everything you need to master something really well, should be built into your software already. So don't let my using Ableton throw you off. If you're not using able to and it's gonna be okay. You just need to understand how to use your software pretty well. You need to understand how to use your compressors and EQs. We'll talk more about that when we get there. So you don't need to buy fancy plug-ins to do this stuff. That being said, if there is one fancy plugin to buy, and I'll talk more about how I use this later. But it would be isotopes, ozone, it looks like this. Ozone is a Mastering plug-in. You do not need it. Let me, I cannot emphasize this enough. You do not need it. You can do a great master without it. However, it does do some things really well that your dog probably does also. But ozone is gonna do it differently and there's some advantages to using ozone. We'll talk more about that later. Don't go out and buy ozone yet. Maybe you'll want to buy it by the end of this class. So I'm primarily just going to use this stuff built into Ableton at the very end of this class, I'll show you some advantages of adding ozone into our chain. But until then, use, use what you have. Any door will be fine for this. 5. Types of Mastering: One more caveat before we get into everything. And that is that I kind of mentioned this a minute ago when I was talking about what is mastering. But I just want to make sure I hit home this idea that there are a few different kinds of mastering. And what we're doing in this class is digital Mastering. We are mastering a track to get it ready for digital distribution, meaning streamed on a website, put on SoundCloud, put on Spotify, all of those services. There are things like vinyl mastering. That is a whole different animal. I don't know really how to do vinyl mastering. It really takes a professional to master something to get it ready to print on vinyl. If you're interested in doing that, you should contact someone at the vinyl pressing planet who does that. It's a whole different process. Some of the similar things, but there's a lot more that has to go into it. It's, it's much more of a science. So the type of mastering we're gonna be doing in this class is really focused on getting our tracks in any genre, whether it's acoustic or electronic, orchestral, anything. I'm getting those ready for streaming platforms, digital files. That's what we're focusing on here. Go. Alright. 6. Vocabulary: As I was outlining this class and kind of figuring out how I was going to teach this. I realized that there are a lot of terms that are gonna come up, a lot of technical terms, some of which might be familiar to you already and some of them if you've taken my other classes like mixing and some of them will be totally new to you. So when these terms come up, I am going to stop and introduce them and define them. But I also thought it would be handy for you to have a little vocab list to refer to. In the next little segment, I'm gonna give you a PDF that is my vocab list. Don't worry about reading through this and memorizing this. I'm giving this to you now early in the class, hoping that maybe you'll print it off and set it next to your computer or keep it as a file open on your desktop. So that when I talk about these things, you can reference this list. So each one of these I am going to talk about in context when they come up. Some of them won't be for a little while, but I want you to just have this list, use it as a reference. You can write on it, annotate it however you want to help you understand the concept even more. Okay, So up next vocab list, then we're diving in. 7. To Be Loud and Clear: Okay, so let's talk about the theory behind Mastering a little bit. And primarily we're going to talk about what our goals are for mastering. Why did we do this? Why did we go through this whole process? The way I think about it? There are two goals for mastering. Two things we're trying to achieve. One is to make our track as loud as possible. Now there are some caveats to that and we'll talk about that in just a minute. But loud second is clear. So loud and clear is what we want our track to be. And this is something that gets down in the mastering process. So when you're mixing what you're doing in a track as you're listening to all the different layers of the track, all the instruments. And you're comparing them to each other and you're getting the best mix. So you want, Let's say you've got your drums and then you've got your guitar, right? So you, what you wanna do is you want to listen to that drum track and then you wanna get your guitar. Maybe you want it a little louder than the drums, maybe a little quieter than the drums. Maybe write on there. But you're going to mix that relative to the drums or whatever your starting or reference track is, right? Then you're going to add in your base and you're going to mix that relative. And then you're going to add in any sense or anything else, vocals. You're going to mix all of those together. They're all relative to each other. When you're done with that, you're gonna be like, Sweet, I have a great mix. I am happy with my mix. And maybe it's good and loud mix. Maybe, but maybe it's not and that's okay if it's not, the job of mixing is not to make the loudest mix. You wanna get your mix as loud as it can be, but it won't be as loud as a mastered mix because there's special things we do. Mastering to make it a little bit louder, more on that in a minute. So you mix relative to all the other instruments on the piece of music. But you master relative to all the other tracks that the listener might be listening to. The example of the radio, I think I already mentioned this, but when we listen to a track on the radio, we don't want to listen to one that's quieter than all the other ones around it. If we do, Someone's going to reach for the dial and they're going to turn it up. Okay, if they turn it up a whole bunch, then the next track is going to come on and it's going to be really loud and it's going to blow their ears out, right? They don't wanna do that. So we want our mix to be just as loud as all the other ones that are on the radio. Maybe radio is a bad example for the modern age. I still listen to the radio, but Spotify, all tracks on Spotify, we don't want one that's quieter or louder than the other ones around it. If it's louder, it's probably distorting. If it's quieter, you're going to turn it up. Or worse, if it's really quiet, Spotify is going to apply some algorithm that's just going to boost the volume for you automatically and that's probably going to make it distort and sound not great, okay, so loudness does matter. The other thing we want is clarity. So what we're gonna do is we're going to listen for any problematic frequencies. Is there a whole bunch of base stuff piling up? Is there a whole bunch of high stuff? And there's some ringing frequency going on. We're gonna just kinda nip those out and deal with those. Then we might even apply if the track needs it. A little bit of what we would call sweeteners, a little bit of extra stuff just to make it polish, just to make it shine a little bit more. We'll talk about all that later. But our main two goals, loud and clear. 8. It's More Than Just Turning Up the Volume: Okay, so back when I learned how to do this stuff, I always thought the loud thing was a little strange. So let me explain If you're confused the way that I used to be confused about this. Because why? Like loud, I can make a track louder just by turning up the volume, right? Like, why don't we just turn up the volume, right? This isn't rocket science. It's much more complicated than that. And let me tell you why I used to compare this to like you ever see those like beer commercials where they say, we have the coldest beer. And you're like, just isn't, the function isn't the coldness of a beer, the function of the refrigerator you put it in. Just make it colder, leave it in the refrigerator longer, or put it in the freezer if you want it really cold. I don't understand this. I still don't understand that the coldness of beer as something that's advertised. But with sound, it is not the same. It is not just that like you can just make it colder or in our case, make it louder by turning up the volume. Okay. Let me show you why. Let's look at this track. This is a completed track and it's pretty loud. We can see that there is some headroom here, meaning a little bit of room at the top of the tracks, but not much. It's really mixed as loud as it can possibly be. Okay. Let's just make it louder. Okay, so I'm gonna go over to my meters here, it's on this track. Let's make these nice and big so we can see what we're doing here. Okay, So here's that track. It's soloed. It was like we'd been through it all. Highs and lows. I'm still when my dog I don't feel good crowds, I can keep my store. That's just how it is going all the way up to its peak goes like we've been doing. Is I'm still wearing my dog. That's good. Zero is the tap. We can not go above zero. We'll talk more about this later, but we cannot go above zero and this is getting up to negative 0.02. That means it is right up to the top. It is mixed all the way up there. That's great. It's loud as it can possibly be. So if we wanted it louder, we can just turn up the volume. It was like we've been doing. But the highs and lows, I'm still when my dog I don't forget crowds. I can keep my sorts of small change supposed to. That's just how it is. I didn't make a lot of strangers and close friends and Salama. Ok. Right. So I turned it up louder and what happened? It distorted. So we can't just turn it up louder because it's going to distort. If we go over that zero-point here, we will distort that got up to 5.91. Okay, we need to go up to zero. Isn't it already mastered perfectly if it's peaking all the way at negative 0.02, that's as close as you get to zero, right? Well, not really, because that's where mastering comes into play. Let's look at the waveform, right? So here's just a random spot in the waveform. This right here. This is all the way up to the top. This is going right up to zero or negative 0.02. That's as loud as I can go. So we can't get that any louder. But this is not. This can be louder. This can be louder. This can be louder. And let's go even a little bit closer. This can be louder, and these can be louder. The highs are at the top, but the lows, those can go up, right? And this is where the science of all of this comes in, right? I want those highs to stay as high as they can, but I want the quiet stuff to come up. Well, this is called the dynamic range. The dynamic range is the distance from the highest, the loudest point, to the quietest point. And what we're gonna do is we're going to squish that. We're gonna use some special tools to squish that. So the whole thing is louder. We're gonna do it in a way that doesn't ruin the music. Now this brings us to something that I would be remiss if I didn't talk about. There's this thing called the loudness wars. And it's something that you just kinda have to address when you're talking about mastering. So let's go to a new video and talk about that. 9. The Loudness Wars: We bit of history. Let's go back to the 80s, e.g. this is supposedly had been going on since the seventies, arguably the 60s. But let's say we're in the eighties and you're listening to music. You're listening to music on the radio because that's how a lot of people listen to music it back then. You're listening on the radio and you hear two songs side-by-side and one sounds louder than the other. There were studies that showed that that one that sounded louder sold better. So people started trying to make music louder and louder using these techniques that we're talking about, either actually louder or perceived louder. Now at some point, loudness is the function of the dial, of the volume knob in your car or whatever. But you can push up against that knob really quite hard. And it was very difficult to do back in the eighties. So people were just experimenting with it. Because we were still working with things like cassette tapes and analog signals. Once we got the compact disc, the CD, which was invented in 1981, but really became the standard way we were selling and consuming music in the very early 90s, I think. Now we had digital signals and those can be more carefully manipulated. So people started really pushing this. How can we get our track to be the loudest? Because if there's five tracks played on the radio and one is mixed or mastered really loud, and it stands out from the others. It's going to sell better. We know this. So this weird little war started called the loudness wars, where everyone was trying to make their music the loudest. And we're still in this little war. In some ways. Some artists have fought against it by saying that they don't want to be part of it because the there's an argument to be made that by making a track as loud as it can be, by what we end up doing is reducing that dynamic range. And that takes away the musicality of it right there. There's something lost in the delicate qualities of the music. When we do that, the artists that have said we're going to have quiet masters tended to bend to be artists that don't need to worry about album sales or streams as much as the rest of us. A really good example of this is Nine Inch Nails. I can't remember what record. I think it was near year zero. I think it was where he released two versions of that album. One was called, I think he just called it the loud mix or maybe the radio mics. And it was loud. It was mastered loud the way you would expect. But then there was an audiophile file version that was not mastered loud. It was mastered with a much wider dynamic range and that's the way he liked it, That's the way that artists wanted it. But it wasn't going to do very well on the radio or on streaming services. So he made two versions. So the loudness war is still going in some ways. We're always trying to find ways to make the master louder. But I kinda feel like we've hit an upper limit to it to where we're not going to push it much farther. Because the streaming services limit us to some extent. They have standards that they require. And they're not going to let music go above those. And there's only so much you can do to hit up against those before you're just making a weird wall of sound. But loudness is still important. So making sure your tracks are mastered loud enough to compare with the other things that your audience might be listening to you. That's what is the most important piece. So there's a lot more to the loudness war is if you Google it, you can find a history of artists that were foreign against it, albums that are kind of milestones or the loudness wars throughout the years. So if you want to do more reading on that, Go for it. But let's move on. 10. Genre Matters: A quick note about genre before we go, because genre does matter with this stuff. You want to consider the genre that you're working in while you're mastering and while you're thinking about loudness. In particular, we want to think about the importance of the dynamic range. So do this for me. Next time you're driving in your car. Tuned to your local commercial pop radio station. Listen to some music on that station for a minute. Then I want you to turn the dial as quick as you can over to your local classical music station. Okay? It's quite possible that when you get to your classical music station, you don't hear anything. It's so quiet that you don't hear anything. You need to crank up that volume on your car in order to hear the music and the classical station. Because classical music is not mastered loud, the dynamic range of classical music is important, is fundamentally important to listening to and enjoying that music. So we don't squash that dynamic range. In Mastering when we're listening to classical music, we just don't. We might have a little bit, a little bit, um, but people that master classical music are very specialized and that's not something I have a lot of experience doing. But I bring this to your attention to just remember that the genre does matter. If you're mastering dance music, you want that thing as loud as it can be because you want it to pump in the club. If you're mastering Brahms solo piano piece, you don't want it pushing all the way to the top. You want it to it's quiet to be quiet, and it's allowed to be loud. You want it to really fill that space. You don't want it to just pump all the way through. That's not what that music is about. If you're mastering, like pop punk, you want it to be pretty slamming all the way through, right? But if you're mastering acoustic folk music, maybe you want a little more breadth in it, and you don't want it to push all the way up to the top. That will sound weird if you master that extremely loud. But you do want to get it as loud as you can get it. So always be thinking about the genre that you're working and what's, what's appropriate for that genre, genre. Now, in a few minutes, we will talk to you about using guide tracks to help you with that. Guide tracks are something that we'll use in the mastering session to kinda keep us connected to what's happening around us. So we'll talk about that once we dive into our first big session, which we'll do shortly. But I want to talk about tools that we're going to use for this process next. 11. The Frequency Work: Okay, We've been talking a lot about loudness and not a lot about the other things involved in mastering, primarily the frequency work. And so I want to spend just a minute on that because it is a quite common thing that when we talk about mastering, we talk about loudness and we neglect these other important aspects of it. So when we talk about frequency work, we're talking about are there any problematic frequencies? That's the main thing. It might be low stuff, it might be high stuff and it might be stuff right in the middle. It might be that there's a weird ringing coming through. It might be that there's some low frequencies building up. That may be you didn't see when you are mixing the track. But using the tools of mastering, you can see them. Am I didn't even be things you can't even hear. But you can see them on our meters. And you're like, Whoa, there's a big problem building up in the lowest up here. Now why would that matter? Let's say you're doing like you're mixing like a big dance track, right? And you've got something that's got this pump and base like, boom, it's really great and you're feeling it got a great mix. Let's say you don't catch in mastering that there's a bunch of low stuff happening underneath what you can hear on your speakers or your headphones. So you don't do anything about it. Then you go to a club with that track, a club that has these huge PA system and these giant subwoofers. You play that track and you just hear this just terrible sound. It's because it was there but your speakers didn't catch it. So these are the types of things we tried to catch in mastering, and that's pretty extreme example. But those kinds of things can happen where you hear something on a different set of speakers. And it sounds totally different. And we're trying to eliminate that in mastering by looking for those problematic frequencies. That's why when you're in a studio that specializes on mastering, you'll often see a whole array of speakers, right? Because they're going to have some really nice speakers. They're going to have some really cheap speakers. They might have like a set of car speakers. They might have like some just cheap earbuds, all kinds of different things. They're going to have a little switcher. So they can switch between all of these different speakers and just listen for any of those problematic frequencies coming through. Then work on them. Right? So that's what goes into the frequency. Work. More on that soon. Okay, now let's get into the tools of the trade. We're going to start with our main three tools. More will come up later, but these are our main tools. 12. Tools: The DAW: Okay, so let's talk about the tools and let's start with the dog. This isn't really one of the tools, but I just want to talk about this really quick. We're gonna be working in a die. You don't really need to work in a die. Because we're really only going to be working with one track at a time here. Like a typical mastering session. Looks like this. It looks like this, like there's one track that we're gonna be working with. So you can do this in any kind of audio editor, even something like Audacity, all the way up to Pro Tools. It doesn't matter. I'm going to use Ableton. You can use whatever software you want. As long as you have access to the tools and the plug-ins that we're going to talk about in the next three videos after this. Okay? So don't get stuck on that. I'm using Ableton. Ableton has nothing to do with this process. It's really just kind of what's holding my track. Well, I do these things to it. But you need some program that you can load a single audio file in and then apply some effects to it. That's what we need. And it should have a really good meter, which is the first thing we're going to talk about. So let's go to a new video and talk about that right now. 13. Tools: The Meter: Okay, Our first and debate bubbly, most important tool of this whole process is the meter. You probably thought I was going to say compressor. If you've got some experience with this, and the compressor is very important, we'll talk about that next. But the meter is what's going to show us what's really going on. Okay? So in live, I have to flip over to this view to really see the meter. This is the meter, right? It shows based on check for me, okay, now there's a few different elements to the meter. Your meter may look different, but here's what we need to be able to see. We need to be able to see the peak. For me, it's showing up right there. So if I click on it, it says negative infinity, which means, which is very cerebral, but it just means it doesn't have any information yet. And if I play the track, this is going to update to show what my highest level is based on, check for me and this is never gonna go down. It's always just going to get pushed up, up, up, up, up. And then it's going to finally say like Okay, Nothing louder than this has happened. Okay? And you can click on it to reset it. It's gonna be important whatever software you're using to be able to see that peak level. Sometimes it shows up in the meter or sometimes it shows up somewhere else. But as long as you can see it, it'll work great. Okay, The other thing we need to see is the RMS. Ok, now you'll notice when I hit play on this track, there are two green bars here. Well, let me clarify that a little bit more. We have a stereo track that we're playing here and there's a left and a right side. You should see that you're going to see two different sides of the meter and we want to see that. But in addition to those two sides, you're going to see two different colors going up and down, okay? And in my case, you're going to see a dark green and light green based on check from me unless you've got MIA. Okay. So that's showing us two different ways of looking at the volume. Okay? So the dark green one is our peak level that is at any given moment, what is the loudest sound we're seeing? Okay? That's useful. That's basically what is showing up here. Okay? But more important for us is, in my case, the light green one, which is the RMS volume. The RMS level is what's telling us. It's kind of showing us the more perceived volume that we're hearing. Rms stands for root mean square. Some math thing. The what it's basically doing is it's calculating an average volume about every 300 milliseconds or so. So it's saying, here's all of our volume for the last 300 milliseconds. What is the average of that? And then plotting a number and then saying, for the next 300 milliseconds, what is the average of that? But they overlap, right? So it's like this. You don't really need to understand that. Just understand that it's a better way to look at the perceived volume that we're hearing. The dark green is the peak volume and that's also showing up here. So I'm not going to deal with the peak volume too much in my meter because I'm gonna deal with it here. Instead. The green, the green is our RMS value. And that's what I'm going to keep my eye on while I'm looking at our overall signal. It's also important to know that you've got two different spots. You can see your level. You've got it on the track and you've got it on the master. If you're in a dark. We want to keep our volume adjustments here right at zero. We are not going to move this fader in this whole process. Same thing over here. At our master. We're going to keep that sucker right at zero. We're not going to touch those. So our track level and our master level, our master fader, will be the same. Okay, we're not going to adjust any levels on the track. We're only going to adjust levels in our tools. Cool. So get to know whatever meter you're using. We want to make sure we're seeing the RMS value and the peak value. 14. Tools: The Compressor: Okay, Up next is the compressor. And the compressor is going to be our Swiss army knife of the mastering process. We're going to spend a lot of time and a compressor. So remember a couple of videos ago when I said, we've got our peaks up here, but if we look at our waveform, there's low spots. And if we can make those low spots bigger, let me just do it again. If we look at this waveform, zoom in, we can see like yes, this stuff is at the top, but this stuff isn't. So how can we make this stuff louder without affecting this stuff? That is largely what a compressor does. It does it in a slightly different way than what I just said. What a compressors primary role is, is to reduce the dynamic range, right? So we talked about the dynamic range is the distance and the quietest sound, louder sound. A compressor is going to compress that. So it goes like that. So it's going to make the loud stuff quieter and the quiet stuff louder, right? So that these, this distance is smaller. So it's gonna go like that, but then it can boost the whole thing up a little bit more. There are a lot of different kinds of compressors and virtually any one of them will work. So when whatever software you're working, you can use the built-in compressor. You can get a plug-in that is a fancy compressor if you want. All of them are fine. The main tools in a compressor is the threshold. It should have a makeup amount. Ideally, we are going to play with our attack and release time. The ratio doesn't matter. All your standard stuff that a compressor has. So virtually any compressor will work. So if you have a built-in compressor, you can make do with it just fine. We'll go into a lot more detail about how compressors work and what we need to do with them soon. But I just want to introduce the compressor. 15. Tools: The Limiter: Okay, next thing is a limiter. Hopefully you have a limiter built into whatever software you're using. If not, you can get a plug-in that is a limiter. You can find tons of them around. A limiter is actually a fairly simple tool. What it does is it sets a ceiling, a volume ceiling. And then we say, you shall not go above that. So it just says, no sound is getting above here. So we can go in and we can say, so here's a simple limiter. We can say zero is our ceiling. Now we can be super-duper. Sure. No frequency is going to sneak out and go above that that ceiling. That's the top. We're not going to let everything, anything go above that. Now you might find a reason to make this like less than zero, negative 0.3 e.g. so we're going to leave a little space at the top. That can be okay, there's good reasons for doing that and we'll talk more about that later. But all it does is just kinda set a hard limit and say, if the signal is going up and it hits that ceiling, it shall not pass. That's what a limiter does. 16. Tools: The EQ: Okay, one more, actually two more tools that I want to talk about just to introduce them. This one is the EQ. Now if you've done my mixing class, if you've done any production stuff already or recording, you know what an EQ is. But just to get us back in the fold, Let's look at a simple EQ. What we have when we look at an EQ as we have volume going this way and frequency going this way. And when this line is what we're affecting. So if it's zero, you'll notice this is 06120, negative six, negative 12. So if we're on the zero, that means we're not changing the frequencies at all. If I go this way, I'm boosting those frequencies, in this case low frequencies. If I go this way, I'm cutting those frequencies, in this case low frequencies. So if I have a sound right in the middle, maybe around three K, I'm gonna go up here. And I'm going to say, I want more of that signal or I want less of that signal. So as you may know from my other classes, very rarely do we want to boost a signal with an EQ. We mostly use EQs to cut. So if this, if we find a problematic frequency here, we're going to pull that down. We might make it very narrow. And say it's just right there is one little frequency that's bugging me and we can kinda chip it away like that. We're gonna do a lot of fine tuning with EQs. With that. If you have an EQ that has a bigger view that will really show you what's going on. It can be helpful. This one, if I hit this little arrow here, it gets nice and big. And I can make it really big like this. And you can see the actual frequency content of the track that I'm listening to you while I play it. Based on check for me. Yeah. Right. So I can see here this frequency viewing, play after play, play, play on Friday and you'll have repeat. If I decide that frequency is problematic, I might work with it a little bit, but this kinda shows me all the frequencies. I can see what's sticking out, what's checked from C. So that one looks weird right there. So check for me. Okay, So this would cut out that frequency, not completely out, but it's going to reduce it a whole bunch. So get to know a good EQ. 17. Tools: Your Ears: Last but not least, I want you to always remember that a very important tool, I probably should have started with this one as our most important tool. But that most important tool is your ear. Because mastering is an art. It's a very delicate art. It takes a lot of listening, a lot of focusing, a lot of practice, a lot of training to really get good at it. So don't get frustrated. If your first couple of times you master something, it doesn't really shine like some of your other favorite tracks, it takes practice. There are people who get paid a lot of money to master tracks. It's not as easy as just throwing a compressor and throwing an EQ on and rendering it out and calling it good. It's an art and it takes a good ear and a lot of practice. So also patients mastering takes patients. Alright, that being said, let's go into the next section, preparing to master where we're going to take our track that we're going to master. And I have two student tracks queued up to for us to master. And we're going to talk about what we need to do to get these ready for master and what makes a track ready to be mastered? Off we go to that. 18. Setting Up a Mastering Session: In this section we're going to talk about setting up our session. And this all falls under this big heading of preparing to master a couple of things we want to make sure we have right Before we dive into the track. So we're going to, in this section, we're going to look at the actual track we're going to master. We're gonna make sure that it's all ready to be mastered. And we're going to start to do a couple little nip tuck things. First-level stuff that we should do on any mastering project. Okay, so first, let's talk about setting up our session now, no matter what doll you're using, a couple of things you should do just to make sure you have a completely blank slate. We want to make sure that our diet is not processing this track in any way until we tell it to. Everything is very delicate here. So we want a very clean track. We basically just want like we want to emulate like a tape machine, right? Like just it just is what it is. No effects, no nothing. Okay, So first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna get rid of any tracks I'm not going to use. I want one is stereo audio track. That is all I want on this session. Next I'm going to go in, I'm going to make sure there's no effects on that track. Okay, So this is where my effects would show up. There's nothing there. I'm going to look at my master track. Make sure there's no effects on the master. Will look at my sends, make sure I'm not sending anything. These are down and they're going to stay down. All our effects processing that we do mastering, we're gonna do directly on the track. Now I know that in the production steps and even in the mixing steps, we've talked about applying some effects via bus, like time-based effects like delays and reverbs. And things are better sometimes to use on a bus and then apply into the effect. And that is still true, but it's not part of mastering. On mastering, we're gonna do everything right on top of the track. Okay? The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn my grid off. So you can see here, I'm on a grid of a full measures what I'm looking at here. Okay, so whatever your dog needs to turn that grid off because we want very fine resolution here. It's easiest just to turn off the grid entirely. So for me, I'm going to Control click, go to fixed grid off. Now I get kinda dotted lines, but I can do any kind of fidelity and I'm not locked into any kind of grid. Cool. Okay, now I'm going to pull my tracking. So this is the track we're going to master. I'm going to drop it in and I'm gonna put it all the way back here. Okay. It looks pretty good. Let's just hear what we got. Here is the loud part is it's kinda like a rock tune. There's one big thing we have left to do, and I wanted to just hear a little bit of this to kind of demonstrate it. So here we go. Okay. So you don t know this track, like idea, this is a student track. And the thing that I know that you don't is that this is way vast, able to in his planning this way fast. So if you are in Ableton, one step you need to do is turn off warping, and this is super important. So what warping does for you not able to end users is it basically analyzes the tempo of the track and then tries to play the track at our session tempo. So it's trying to conform the tempo of this track to our session tempo, which is currently 96 ppm. So we need to tell it not to do that, play it at its actual tempo. So I'm going to double-click, go into my warp settings here and turn off warping. Okay. Now I'm going to play this track and it's going to sound really slow. Okay? This is the actual tempo of the track. Okay, It's not the other one. The fast tempo I kinda liked actually, and I'm into it, but it's not my track, it's not my decision to make. So we're going to call that good. This is where the artists made it and this is the correct track. Okay, So we've turned off warping, we've turned off our grid. Last thing I wanna do here is I want to make sure all my levels are set to zero. Okay? So I'm gonna go here. Here's my main volume level and this is really hard to read. It does say zero here, so I can move it up and down. If this is at anything other than zero and able to, and you can just click on it and press Delete to get it back to zero. But if you want to see it a little better, if you could go over to Session View here. This is kinda how we look at meters in Ableton. Make these as big as I can, which is this. And here is my level. It's basically the same thing I was looking at over and before I switch to this view. So here it is. I'm just going to make sure this is perfectly and exactly at zero. I'm also going to make sure my master fader is perfectly in exactly at zero. Okay? Don't worry about this for now. This little peak indicator. We'll deal with that later. Okay, the next thing we need to do is take a close look at our premaster at this track we just pulled in here, see if there's anything we have to deal with right away. So let's go to a new video and let's focus in on this version of this track and make sure that it's ready to be mastered. 19. The Pre-Master: Okay. So what is this file that we pulled in and how do we make sure we have a good file that's ready to be mastered. Okay, so what we're looking for is first, we want the track to be mixed pretty well. We're hoping that we're happy with the mix. If you're not happy with the mix. Or if you're working with another artist's track and they're not happy with the mics. Do not master it. Mastering it is like think about mixing as like putting all the ingredients of the cake together. And mastering is like putting it into the oven and baking it. Okay? Once you've baked that cake, you can't add more ingredients to the mix, right? It's done. When it comes out of the oven. It's done. We can't go back. So don't master something thinking that you're going to adjust something in the mix later, because once it's mastered, it has done right. Okay, So our mix is finalized. We know that we're happy with our mix. Now what we really need is a full quality audio files. We need a WAV or AIFF file. And ideally it's one that has six dB of headroom, six to ten dB of headroom. Okay, here's what that means. Headroom is this stuff up here. The distance from the loudest peak, the loudest point of the track, to zero. That is headroom. Okay? So we can see the headroom here. This is our headroom. Okay? And we can be a little more scientific about that if we look at what our peak is, right now, our peak is negative time negative seven. We're hoping this doesn't get above negative. All right, Good. It's under negative six. So negative 6.18, that's about perfect. Okay? So you want to mix that levels off at about negative six, that gives us some room above it to work. We can push up into that to make it nice and loud. We can also do some work in there, some frequency work that gives us a little bit of room to play with because you don't want to track that's mixed all the way up to zero, what we call zero-sum mixing. Where you mix absolutely add up to zero. If you have a track that mixed that loud, you can master it, but it doesn't give you much room to work and you're going to have to actually quiet it, make it quieter before you can make it louder. I know that sounds weird, but that's just kinda how it works. So it's better to have a track that's mixed with up to negative six dB. If you took my mixing class, I think that was the standard that we set that I hope we said mixed to negative six dB as your highest point. So negative six to negative ten, that's what we want. We're going to make sure our sampling rates are the same. This is an important step. So if the file you have is at a 4041 sampling rate, 44,100 samples per second. If that's the way it's been rendered, that's cool, that's fine. You need to make sure you're mastering session is either at the same sampling rate or exactly double. Same sampling rate is probably great. So this track that I just pulled in here, this is at 48, 48 K sampling rate, 48,000 samples per second. It's very common to record it 48. That's just fine. So I need to make sure my session is also at 48 K or at what is that? 96, 96 K. Alright, so exactly, or double major benefit in this case to doubling it. We just don't want our computer to do the math of having to sort out 441248. That's going to create artifacts and sounds. We don't want potentially sounds we don't want, so just try to keep it at the same sampling rate. And last I already mentioned, make sure you have a WAV file or an AIF file. We need a full quality audio file here. I'm just, I just want to point out here, do not master an MP3 file is not high enough fidelity. You're not really going to get what you want out of it. I'm trying to justify not being an audio snob about that, but just really don't do it. Someone sends you an MP3 and says, can you master this? Respond back to them and say, yeah, but can you send me a wave file? And hopefully they just don't convert the MP3 WAV file because that won't be very good either. They need to go to their mics. They need to export again as a full quality wav file at 4041 or 48. Okay, cool, cool. Alright, Next, let's inspect our waveform and see what's inside this sucker. 20. Inspecting the Waveform: The next thing we're gonna do is look really close at this waveform. Okay, so I'm gonna go down here, zoom in quite a bit. And what I'm looking for is just anything that really sticks out. I'm going to listen to this a few times. Always be listening throughout this whole process. Remember your ears, the most important tool in this process. But your eye isn't that bad either. So I'm going to look through, I'm going to look for like anything that really jumps out. So right now I see this, this little peak here. There's not a lot of peaks around it, but it is right at the beginning of this thing. So let's hear what that is. It's a kick, so it's fine. It doesn't really jump out to me, that's probably another kick. So I'm seeing everything. It looks pretty cool. So dynamics are good things that we have, probably this kick sticking out here, or maybe it's a snare kicks and snares can stick out. I'm looking for anything that looks kind of randomly placed, just like a weird big spike. And I don't see anything jumping out at me. All looks pretty fine. I am noticing the right channel looks a little bigger than the left channel. Maybe that's an optical illusion. It might be. Okay, and we're going down and out. Okay, So nothing really jumps out at me. If there was just like a big spike right here, then what I would do is I'd say, okay, what is that? And we'd listened to it a few times. It could be a rendering glitch. It could be just like a sound that happened when the track was rendered. If that was the case, the best way to get rid of that would be to go back to the mix session and render it again to get that out. You don't want to try to get those out by cutting them or cuing them out. All of that is going to degrade the system or the file. So if you can just go back to the mix and re-export it, it'd be way better and faster. To be honest. If it's not a rendering glitch, it could be just something a problem in the mix. So before we get too far, we want to just make sure we address anything that's just odd in it so that we don't get all the way done. And then be like, Oh, here's this problem I can't fix. And it's now it's in the master. So if there is any problems that you see in the waveform and definitely if you hear them, the easiest and best solution is always just to go back to the mix session, fix it there. If you can find it, fix it there, re-export a new version and then load that into be mastered. There's no special audio track to get rid of those things. Go back to the mix section, fix it, come back here. But this one looks good. I don't see anything that sticks out. Okay, so what I'm gonna do now is, and I won't have you sit and watch me do this, but I'm just going to listen to it like two or three times. I'm just gonna make sure I start to really feel it. Um, and nothing sticks out to me about the mix. And I feel good about it. Okay, so I'm going to listen to it and a couple of times. And then I'll come back and we'll go on to the next step. Okay, Here I go. 21. Starting the Track: Okay, So I listened through this bunch of times and it's all good. I'm pretty happy moving forward with this. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to do three quick little. I don't want to call them edits, but kind of edits to the file. Just to make sure that it's set up to sound good. In the end. Basically, we're just going to give a hair cut to the beginning and the end. That's very simple stuff. Okay, so first, let's look at the very start of the track camera zoom way in to the start of the track. Okay, So here's what we've got. Ableton, it's automatically giving me a teeny tiny fade in right here. And that's cool. We do want that teeny tiny fade-in. We're going to deal with that in a minute, but for now I'm gonna get rid of it. So you see this track starts right away. It's just n. Okay? That's not great because some streaming services put a little crossfade. And some devices do a little bit of a cache to like to Bank a little bit of memory before it starts playing. So we wanna give a little bit of time before the track starts. So good practice here is 100 milliseconds, which is right about there. Okay? So we need to remember that when we render this out, we're going to render this whole thing, including this empty space. One thing you can do if you want is just, you can insert silence here. Or what I like to do sometimes just to make sure I do it, is you can control, click all of this and then Command J will actually insert that silence there. Okay? So now I can push that right back on it. Okay, cool. So now I've got my track all set up with that extra silence in it. So with that command J did was basically wrote in that empty time to the beginning, It's called consolidate. So if you look at consolidate, your if you're using not able to, they might call that like rendering place or something like that. Just make sure that you're rendering it when you do that at the full sampling rate, which it should do by default. Okay, now we want a little bit of a fade in. And that little fade-in can be all the way back here. But let's use this empty time to ramp up. So this looks like it's going to be a big fade. And, but remember this is over silence and it's only 100 milliseconds. That's like a tenth of a second. Okay, That's quite fast. So you're not really going to hear any of this, but this little fade is important. And here's why we need to make sure we hit as we create a zero crossing. This is what a zero crossing is. If we look at our waveform, see the line goes through the middle. You can think of this line as like your speaker standing still. The, above the line, your speakers pushing out below the line, your speakers coming back and your speakers always doing this, right? So, right when your speaker is right there or directly on the line, that's called the zero crossing over, crossing over that zero point. Ok. Now if you tell the track to start when your speakers out, it's going to make a little click because it's going to have to go and then go out, right? That's, that's makes a tiny, tiny little click, but we don't want that. We don't want that tiny, tiny little click. Same thing if it's back. So the easiest way to create a zero crossing is just with a teeny tiny little faded. Because right here there's no sound. So it's going to make a zero crossing there. So that's why we like to have a little fade-in at the beginning and we're gonna do one at the end. Also. It's just to make a zero crossing. You're not going to hear that. In fact, if we zoom way back out, you're not even be able to see it. Okay, so here's what the beginning sounds like. Now, write all that work we just did is totally inaudible. But when it's on a streaming service or something like that, will be glad it's there. It's good practice. Give yourself 100 milliseconds, and then our little fade leading into the start of that track. Now one more thing I'll point out about this before I move on. If you have a track that fades in, this can be a little trickier. So what you might do if it fades in, is still give yourself 100 milliseconds before there's anything that you plan on hearing. And then let your feet in, kind of follow it a little bit. You can brush that up into it a little bit. If you have to. Assume no one's going to hear anything until 100 milliseconds. But you kinda get a feel how you want that fade to climate. It's a little trickier and fade ins. Okay, let's move on and deal with the end of the track. 22. Ending the Track: Okay, Now we're going to do the same thing at the end of the track. And this can be a little harder because almost all tracks fade out in one way or another. If the music doesn't fade out, there might be just like a symbol ring that fades. It might be a teeny tiny little fade. I'm just reverb or an effects, but there's almost always something that's fading out. Okay, so let's zoom way in here and take a look. You can see this one's doing it to, let's hear what this is like. Okay? So what we need to do here is make sure that there's not a ton of extra empty space. So we want this to fade. We want it to do what the creator of this song wants it to do. But we don't want it to go into lungs. So we have to use our fade out because we still need to add a fade out to it. Because we want to make that zero crossing at the end. We want to force that to be there. So we're gonna do a fade out. But sometimes you can just kinda ride the fade that's already there. Like this is fading out. And it's, this tract is a really good job of fading out to the end. It looks like the sound is totally out. Around here. Let's look at our meter. See if we can figure out where exactly the sound is totally out. So go back here. I'm going to look at my meter here. Yeah, it goes by so fast, but it basically is out all the way at the end. So we're just going to mirror the fate of the end with this to get us down all the way at the bottom. So there's, there's no real extra space here that we need to cut off. We don't need to add any space to the end. That's not necessary. And we just need to make sure there's not a bunch of silence at the end. If there's a couple of milliseconds to silence, that's good. But we want just to make sure we forcibly faded all the way out at the end. Okay. Let's hear that now. It's pretty good. I could make that more aggressive if I wanted, but I don't want to alter what the artist who mixed this did, right? Like they wanted it to go that long. I'm going to leave it going that long. And that's okay. Okay. So what we did here, I said earlier we're gonna do three things. The three things we're put a little space on the beginning and then a fade at the beginning, and then a fade at the end. Those are my three things that I did to kind of prepare our track for mastering. Alright, so we are in it now, we are mastering this track, we are working on it. So I'm going to save my session. I like to always save these as I'm going. So I'm saving this as mastering one-on-one because that's what I called this class while I was filming it. So be sure you're saving along the way, right? Eventually, at the very end of this class, I'm going to talk about how to set up like a template to make this a little easier so you don't have to do this from scratch every time. But I want us to do it from scratch together this time so that you really see what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. But I do like to save sessions and keep them mastering sessions. They're quite small. They're really just one track. So they don't take up a ton of space. So I have a little folder of tracks that I've mastered for myself or for people, just in case I need to go back to it and master it again, or there's some problem with it or whatever. So it's good to save these as their own thing. Alright, Next, let's go on and talk a little bit about referencing tracks and how we can use those to make our mastering process a little smoother. 23. What is a Reference Track?: Hey everyone. Okay. Onto referencing. So first, I apologize for the shift in lighting. I know it's not ideal, but I am recording this video very early in the morning and it's still dark out. The joys of doing this while you have a young child at home. So I'm referencing this is something that's going to play into our process a little bit later, but I wanted to introduce it now so that we can get used to seeing it and know what we're looking for. And then we'll start to use it. We'll use it right away. I'll show you how to use it right now. It's going to be an even more powerful tool later. So by referencing what I'm talking about here is using another completed mastered track to compare your mastering session with. So it's very common to where if you go, if you hire someone to master one of your tracks, if you like, shoot an e-mail out to a mastering studio and you say, I need these five tracks Master. Or even just as one track mastered. They're going to respond with like a quote, say, we know we charge this much bubble blah. Then they may ask you a very, very common that they asked you for a reference track. They say, what kind of sound you're going for here. Give me an idea of what you want. Give me a reference. So you might say, well, my track is in this vein of 21 pilots. And specifically this one song. That doesn't mean that your song sounds like they're song necessarily. But maybe it's a similar style. And you really like the mix and the master of that other tune you really liked the way it just overall sound. That's kinda what we're looking for here. So that's a reference track. And what we're gonna do is we're going to load that track into our session. And we're going to AB it on occasion. So AB means this. It means I'm going to solo one. And then I'm going to solo the other. I'm going to solo one like this is a, this is B. I'm going to toggle between the two just to see if I'm getting a similar vibe, right? This is really helpful in the volume space to know if my volume is in the same ballpark, if I'm pushing as loud as that track pushes. But also just for frequency response in my bringing forward the same kinds of things that the other track is bringing forward. There's not a ton you can do in that area. In the mastering part. That's more of a mixed thing, but there is a good amount you can do with just EQs and making sure that you're helping to clean things up. So let's find a reference track for this tune and loaded into our session. 24. Finding A Reference Track: Okay, so remember what we're looking for here is something that has similar vibe, what we want. Now, this artists didn't give me a reference track. So I'm going to find one on my own. I'm going after what I think we're, we're listening for now. This is dangerous because it's going to input a lot of my own bias into this. But that's okay. I think it'll still result in something nice and I think I found something good that'll work. So here's our track just to get it back in our head. So I thought about this for a few minutes. I thought What what is something that is that I really liked just the overall sound of the overall vibe of that distorted kind of hard, but not like screaming metal, but has a, has a crust to it. What is something that fits that kind of genre? And I just kinda scan through my playlist of stuff. When it came up with was deaf tones, white pony. Now I'm using an MP3 here, which isn't ideal, but it's what I got. So I'm just going to import it right into my session. I'm going to turn warping off. Okay, now, I don't really need to align these up with anything. They're totally different tracks or not on a grid. They're not warps, They don't need to be lined up. But one thing I do like to do is kind of put the loud section where the other loud section is. So you can see allowed section starts here, and this is some kind of intro. And in this track, this is intro and this is loud section. So I'm mostly worried about aloud section here. Not worried about, but kinda focusing on loan section. So I'm going to line this up just like that. It doesn't need I don't need to fill in the space. It's fine and all of this is fine. But we can see this track. It's good and loud. It's got a dip here, some kind of bridge or something like that, which is great. But it's loud. It's fears if you don't know this tune, I probably shouldn't play it, but here's just a little taste. Okay? So if I compare the two, AB, the two, you can hear right away. The difference is, I mean, it's gonna be obvious in the volume, right? Let's go. Okay, So they're very different volume wise. So that's something easy, intangible I can work with. I can play with my compressor and get the volumes to be more in line with each other. But there's other things in here that we'll use to reference a little bit more later. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do with this. For now. I'm just going to mute it and let it hang out there. I might even collapse it like that. And what I like to do, and you totally don't have to do this, but what I'd like to do and I'm not really sure why it's put it on the top. I like to have this reference just kinda sit there out of the way as possible. But whenever I really want to hear it, I can just go up here and grab it, turn it on. I can look at it. It's there when I need it, but not in my way. That's kinda how I like to have everything setup. Okay, now you might be thinking, does that create a copyright problem? Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 25. Copyright and Reference Tracks: Okay, so copyright issues and reference tracks, not really anything you have to worry about. And here's why. For two reasons. Really. One is that no audio from this track is going to make it into our master export, our mastered version, where we're not gonna put any of this in there. We're going to make sure this is muted or deleted when we export it. So there's no content from this is that it's going to get there. So that's kinda reason why there's no audio coming out of that track in our final product. Reason number two is you can't copyright a mix and you can't copyright a master. Like the process that someone used to master something that is not copyrightable. And we don't know what their process they use to master this. We're just kinda try to emulate the sound of it to get a similar feel. It's the same as like listening to a death camp for acuity song. And realizing that you really liked death camp for acuity and studying their music to figure out how they write such good songs. There's no copyright issue there as long as you don't actually copy their music. So same thing here. No copyright problems at all. The only copyright problem we face with doing this is me playing that deaf tones song for you in this video. But that has more to do with the way I sell these classes and not the way we master things. So you don't have to worry about it. It's not a new thing. So you can pull in what ever you want into your session without any copyright problem, as long as none of it makes its way into your final bounce, and it's not uncommon to have multiple reference tracks. You can put two or three tracks up there. I'm just stacked one after the other like like this. You can totally do that. I don't like to, I like to just work with one. Adding multiple. It's kinda complicate things for me and I wanted to just kinda focus in on that sound. But if that works for you, you can totally do that. But that's not my thing. Cool. So we're gonna leave that reference track up in there. We're going to use it. We're gonna we're not gonna use it a whole bunch right away. But when we get done, when we, after we do our maximizing, after we do our E queuing, after we build our whole effects chain on this. Then we're going to come back and we're going to listen and compare to the reference. You can listen and compare it to the reference all the way through whenever you want. Okay, so don't be afraid to just fire that up and give it a listen. But in this class we're especially are going to use it in the end to kinda use it as a way to check our work to make sure that we're in the right ballpark. And there's a reason, right? Remember that what we said early on is like the radio analogy, right? You're driving in your car, you're listening to the radio if that deaf tones song comes on. And then our song, which I should refer to it by its name, it's called black shirt. Our song called black shirt comes down right after it. We don't want anyone reaching for the dial and having to turn it up or turn it down. We want it to compare with that deaf tones sung. We want it to sound like it was recorded in the same studio on the same day, maybe even by the same band. So that's where these reference tracks really help, right? Okay, let's move on. 26. Mastering Effect Chains: Now it's time to start doing some processing. Okay? So the first thing I want to talk about is the effect chain. You see people talking about the effect chain all the time. So let me explain to you what an effect chain is. You can find the slide if you Google around like, what is the Lady Gaga vocal effect chain like this is something that people search for. And what they're searching for when they type that in is the string of effects like this effect and then that effect and then that effect that people that engineers use when they're mixing Lady Gaga's voice, right? You, you can find a popular effects chains for popular guitarists, right? So in effect chain is a series of effects. The distortion, the echo, the reverb in this order on these settings makes the effect chain that so-and-so likes for their guitars or their voice. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to build a mastering effects chain. Now once you build a master effects chain that you really like, you can save it and use it all the time. You're never gonna be able to just slap it onto another track and say, sweet, I mastered that track and walk away. It's always going to require tweaking and working with it. But I'm going to give you right now, right up front, my master effects chain skeleton. Okay, so this is what, when I'm mastering something, I'm gonna put these three things on it right away without even thinking about it. And then I may add some more stuff. And after that, it's a matter of dialing it in and tweaking it. That dialing in and tweaking it. That's where the real art of this comes in. And don't forget what I think I said at the beginning here is that all of this is an art. And it's a very precise art. So it takes experience and it takes time. So if you're not getting sound you want right away. Don't worry, it'll be okay. But this is where the art really starts to come in when we're dialing in these effects. But more on that in a minute. Let's go into the skeleton effects chain and then we'll start working through how to dial it in and what those settings actually are. 27. The Basic Mastering Effect Chain Setup: Okay, here we go. So first thing I want is an EQ. So I want your biggest best EQ you got. You need at least eight bands. A really nice graphic EQ that you can work with. I like the EQ Eight in Ableton, but any EQ plugin will work great as well. Okay, and we're gonna put this right on track. Remember, this is a good example of why we're gonna do this right on the track and the master bus, you will see some people do all their mastering on the master bus. And there is one occasion where doing your mastering on the master bus or the master channel is a good idea. I'll talk about that way at the end of this class. But the reason I like it, the reason we're gonna do it right on the track is because of our reference track. Right? Like if I put this on the master that I got to, I got to know that this reference track is being affected by my effects. Also. Don't want that. So we're going to keep our master clean, no effects on it. We're going to put it right on the track. So I've got an EQ here, we're going to leave it flat. We're not gonna do anything with it. One of the things I like about this EQ is that I can hit this button here and open it up and get a nice big graphic interface for it. I see down here the frequency and pitch and decibels that I'm looking at. All of these make this really nice. It's only showing four bands here. A-band is each of these points, but I have up to eight. I can turn on down here, can also dial them in. More precisely with this. So this is a good EQ, but again, any professional EQ plugin, it's going to work great. Okay, after our EQ, we need a compressor. And the compressor that I'm going to use is this multiband dynamics. Okay? This is kind of like an EQ and a compressor combined. This is three different compressors. The layout of this and the graphics of this are a little confusing. We will go over how it works later, don't worry. But basically, this is going to let us compress the low stuff, the good stuff, and the highest stuff differently. So if I've got a lot of base, I can compress that different than I can compress the high frequencies, right? So this is three compressors in one basically. But this is going to do my heavy lifting of my compression. Okay, and I'm gonna put that right on the track again so that it falls after my EQ. So, well, let me do one more thing and then I'm going to talk about signal flow here. Okay? After this, my third thing is going to be another compressor, but a slightly different one. I'm going to use this glue compressor. So this is another compressor. You can use any compressor you want here. But the reason I'm putting this one here is because this right here gives me a limiter. So if you're not in Ableton, you might want to put a limiter here instead of a compressor. This particular compressor. It's called a glue compressor because it uses an algorithm that supposedly helps glue things together and make them feel like one. It's kind of an abstract idea. But it has this, this really nice soft clipping limiter in it that I like a lot. Your third thing should be either a compressor with a built-in limiter or just a limiter would be fine. Okay, Now, I'm going to add in some other stuff as well. Right? There's going to be there are some occasions where I want reverb in here. It's not very often, but sometimes a D&C bit of reverb is handy. And I might want that in here. There's also a plugin called ozone that I like to use. I don't always need it, but sometimes I do. So we'll add those in later. So just think of this as your skeleton effects chain. You can EQ, multiband dynamics and a limiter. Basically, those are three things that we need to get things going. We can add in more as the track requires it. But basically every track I've ever worked on needs these three things. Last thing I'll say about this is, remember the signal flow is important. And that means the order of these are audio signal is coming in here and it's moving this way. So it's going to go through this EQ than it's coming here. And it's gonna go through this dynamics, the multiband dynamics compressor. And then it's coming here. And then it's going to go through this limiter or this compressor or slash LTR. And then it's gonna go here and then it gets sent to the master channel where it goes out. Okay, So what that means is that this arrangement I have now is gonna be quite different than this arrangement. Right? Now we're going to compress it and then EQ it. That particular thing might not be radically different, but it'll be different. We want to keep it in this order. Okay. You can see what I mean by this criminal flow. If I hit play on it. There certainly coming in there, then it goes to there. Then again, there's nothing. None of our effects are really doing anything yet, but that's our next step. Okay, So from here, I want to dial these three things. And so first, let's start with our EQ, first-pass of our EQ. 28. How an EQ Works: So for our UQ, so we remember what an EQ does. We've talks about EQ and my mixing class. We've talked about EQ and production, but the short version of what an EQ does is on the left side is low frequencies, on the right side is high frequencies. The, you can see here it says 06120 negative six, negative 12th. Okay, So here if you look at the numbers 101 K, ten K, Okay, so if I go to 100, I move it up to six. That means everything at this frequency at 100, I'm going to boost six dB. That's a kind of a lot. So I'm going to boost it, but also the frequencies around it, right? So this area around that center frequency, this is called the queue, is how wide this is. If I go down here, and this is what I'm working with here. Here's the queue. So let's see, I'm on band 3123, the queue. I can make it higher to make it narrower, or lower to make it wider. Okay, that's gonna be important later. Alright. So if I want to boost low stuff, I can do something like this. I want to boost high staff. I can do something like this. Now rarely with an EQ do we want to boost? We almost always want to cut. So I can pull things out this way, right? So if the line is on the zero, we're not doing anything. This EQ is not doing anything until up here, but we'll talk about that in just a second. Suzy Q isn't doing anything. If we go under zero, we're reducing that range of frequencies. That band of frequencies. If we go above zero for boosting that band of frequencies. Ok? So you can see the whole song on this EQ. Most EQ's look like a slope like that. They look like yeah, I can't really do it manually here, but they generally sloped down this way because our low stuff is louder than our highest stuff. Generally do something like that. I'm not always and that doesn't really even mean anything and it's not something you should use as a basis, but just something you'll find. You don't want to try to level this out. You don't want to boost so that everything is even all the way across. That's not what you wanna do. You're going to see things just kinda sloping down like that and that's fine. That's how it should work. Okay. So I'm going to zero this back out by just, I'm just going to press Delete on all this stuff to get it back to zero. And then let's do some dequeuing. So we have to kind of housekeeping EQ steps and then the first round of ringing out. So let's, let's let's get into it. 29. Low End Starting Points: Okay, first thing of just housekeeping, do this on every track. We're going to cut our Lowe's has, so we're gonna go down here. We're gonna look at this first band. I'm gonna change this to a high pass filter. Okay, so if I go down here, your EQ may be different, but basically, what a high-pass filter does is it makes a bracket like this and so that all the high frequencies can pass and the low stuff, it gets cut out. Okay? It looks like that. Or if I want to be more extreme about it, I could do it like that. Let's not do that. Let's give a little more gentle. Okay, so what's happening here is wherever I put this, everything under it, under this point, which is called the cut-off frequency. Everything under it is going to thrown out and everything over it is going to get let through. Now I don't want to do this. This is a little too extreme. But I want to put this around 25 hz or so. So we can look down here and see that 25 hz is right there. Okay? Now why would I do this? So we hear frequencies, remember, down to about 20 hz and up to about 20,000 hz. Okay? So reading these vertical lines is a little deceptive, but this is 100. This is zero technically, but it's exponentially goes up. So this is a 1,010,000 and this line here is 20,000. Okay? So we don't hear much under this, but there can be a lot of frequencies that buildup there. So there's not much that we can actually here in this area. But there can be a lot of stuff there and it can lead to volume problems. So we're just going to cut it out. We can't hear it anyway. But let's make sure that there's nothing there. So let's hear what we always want to be listening while we're doing this. Let's here and make sure we're not actually losing anything. Okay. Let's go forward. Clearly now we've lost that day. We want to make sure we don't lose anything. I might move it up until I started here at the back it off a little bit. But it's generally going to be about 25 and even clearer picture, right? Okay, great. We can make sure it's not doing anything by a being that EQ. So let's turn off this compressor and turn off this limiter. And I can turn on and off this EQ by toggling this button right here. Right now, we really want to hear nothing. That's pretty good. So this might seem like a pointless step, but just remember, just because you can't hear them doesn't mean that there's not a bunch of frequencies there. So we're just doing some tidying up, making sure there's nothing down there that's going to cause us problems. And remember, we're doing this first thing in our effect chain. So it won't give us any problems in our compressor are limiter or anything like that. Where it's going to shave this off right at the bottom. Make sure there's nothing there. Cool. Good practice. Always do that. So that's step one, step two, Let's give it a little haircut at the top. 30. High End Starting Points: Next we're gonna do the opposite. We're going to go up to the top and we're just going to do, I guess not really the opposite. It's kinda the same thing, but at the top, we're just going to cut off any frequencies above what we can hear or what we're using. So we already have up here a low-pass filter. So that's the opposite. So this is a high pass filter, meaning is the highs can pass through it. Is the low pass filter, meaning the lows can pass through it, but the highest get cut off. That's gonna be this one right here. Okay? So again, we can hear up to about 20,000 hz. A lot of high-frequency stuff. Distortion is, has a lot of high frequencies in, as symbols have a lot of high frequencies in it. So with this one even more than the low one, you really want to listen and make sure you're not really changing anything. This thing, this n, both the low stuff and the highest F is the kind of thing that we might not here on our speakers. But you can hear these, some of these frequencies if you're on a big club system or something like that. So it's it's good safe to get rid of them. Okay, so generally I'm aiming around 16 K or so, is where I really kinda wanna get rid of. Start rolling this out. But let's listen. Definitely here, something's happening here. Some muddy, right? Because I've lost a lot of high frequencies that are contributing to the distortion and symbols that I don't hear really anything changing up this year. I'm going to go up 15151. That felt good. So I'm going to leave it there at 151. That didn't seem like we're really affecting anything. We're just killing all this high stuff. Okay, and while I'm at it, I'm going to tighten up this, this low EQ. Alright, so now we've made sure that we're not going to have any unexpected things, the top or the bottom. Next, let's work on wringing out the tune. 31. "Ringing Out": Okay, So this next thing is called ringing out. And what we're trying to do here is look for any frequencies that are just ringing weirdly and we don't want them. This can take a lot of time to both to just do in a track, but also to kind of get good at hearing. So here's my method. We're gonna take our EQ, we're going to pick up a band. We're gonna make it pretty narrow, so we're going to tighten up this Q coming around there. And it's going to boost it all the way up. We're going to crank it. Even though I told you just a minute ago, Don't ever do this. And then we're gonna kinda scrub through and listen for these bands. So I'm looping a section of the track here. I'm just going to listen. Oops, let me get to that loop. I don't want to go to a part where there's the symbols really like to put it here before. Right here. This is a pretty subtle one. But hearing this, this frequency right here, which is about 650 hz, just kind of standing out. It's ringing in a weird way. So one thing you can do is if your EQ, let's you isolate that band. It's even better. So in my EQ, I think click this little headphone icon. And with that enabled, when I click and hold this band, it's going to only play what I'm affecting here. So it's going to really boost that. So here is just that bad here that this is a picture That's just kinda ringing through. Doesn't feel like it has a musical reason to be there. It's just kinda sticking out the cow and I stopped doing. Okay. So what we've done here is we just really pushed it really hard. But that's not what we want to do. Obviously. We've boosted it with our EQ here for the sole purpose of funds. Lost it. There it is. Okay. Now that I boosted it, I'm going to cut it. So the easiest way is to go to the gain here and just go. And then I might even tighten that EQ a little bit more. So I don't need to take it all the way down to zero. But that is going to help. Now that frequency is going to be reduced. You don't usually want to take it all the way down to zero because you do want that frequency. I used to want it to ring. Now, that's not there. Now let's keep going. I'm going to turn on and off. I'm going to pick another band and keep going. Yeah, I don't love that. Man. Three. Let's pull that out a little bit. Like I said, this can be really tedious. Here's four, boost up that queue. This needs to be, there we go. Sometimes you'll see them really kinda spike up in the interface here that can help you identify them. When you're doing this, especially difficult areas to keep an eye out for is like two K to eight K or so. Um, so that's about here to about here. Jumping out. What kind of okay, here. Now, you might be asking yourself, well, what am I actually listening for? This is a good example that we're right here. So you can kind of hear what I'm boosting. You hear that kind of whistling sound going up along with my EQ, right? So what I'm listening for is, as I'm moving up, is there a jump in volume on any frequency, right? Is it going like, it's going like as I go down but does it suddenly go like, you know, like is there like some frequency that really jumps out volume wise? That would mean that frequency I should probably deal with, but not really hearing anything. So I think we're in good shape, so I'm gonna get rid of that one. But we did find these two. And I think she's got a little better without them. Alright, so that's ringing out, finding anything that's really ringing and dealing with it by cutting it. So this is one of the first things we'd like to do when it comes to the processing elements of a master, but this isn't the last time we're going to do it. We're going to come back to this later after we've done some more processing because some of these compressors and limiters can affect this a little bit and kinda can let some frequencies come forward. So we will be back to take another look at this. But for now, let's move on and talk about compression and getting loud. 32. How Compression Works: Okay, let's get into our volume control. Now. In some ways this is an easy thing to do because we're just going to try to slam it to the top. But there's a lot of delicate control we want here to make sure that we don't clip and to make sure that we don't boost, things that we don't want boosted. But this is the most obvious thing that we're doing, right? It's the most audible thing. Like we're making it louder, but we're making it louder and very smart ways. So step number one, let's do a little refresher or a new, or learned from the beginning how a compressor works because we need to get to know our compressor pretty well. So I've loaded up a multiband compressor here, and this one's a little tricky. Let's look at just a normal compressor really quick so we can see how the controls work. So I'm gonna go to my dynamics here and just throw the normal Ableton compressor on here. I'm gonna get rid of this in a minute, but I like its interface the way it shows us what it's doing better than this one. This one is really confusing. I just want to show you what the controls are and how it works. Okay, So no matter what compressor you're using, whatever software you're using for your compression. It probably looks like either this, this, or this. These are the three different layouts that most compressors have. Here's might be doing something different and that's okay. But these are just three different views of the same kind of info. Okay, so I'm going to start on this view so that we can really see what we're doing. Okay? So this line up here is called my threshold. I can move it up or down. Alright? So the threshold is what I'm going to let the volume get up to before I start messing with it. Okay. So everything under the threshold, we're going to leave alone, right? And this is volume we're talking about. So everything quieter than the threshold will just leave be okay. If it goes above the threshold, we're gonna do some stuff to it. Okay, so let's look at what's happening here. So I'm really kinda right on the top of my sound here. I'm not doing very much. Okay, so our threshold is just sitting right there, right at the top of the sound. Now, this gold line here is called our gain reduction. That's how much we're reducing the volume. Okay? Now these two things are related, right? So every time the signal goes above the threshold, the gain reduction is going to push it down. So imagine this is our threshold volume is gonna go up and then the gain reduction is gonna go no. You stayed down there. I didn't plan on using my head for this, but it kinda works. So we're gonna go above the threshold and then it's going to push it down. Let's do that and see, you'll see this pushing the volume down. Let's turn our threshold to get a little more aggressive there. Now you see moments like this where there's a spike right there and there's a spike coming down to counteract it, right? So the gold line is really just our volume. It's like a volume knob, someone going whoop and trying to catch those spikes and compensate them so that our volume stays about the same, right? So we're kind of squishing the highest stuff, the loud stuff, and making it the same going through. Now if I wanted to be totally compressed and have all the volume be exactly the same from beginning to end. I could throw this threshold all the way to the bottom. Right. And now you see this gain reduction is happening all over the place. It's just really trying to push that volume down to make it just flat. Right? Now, there's one thing we haven't talked about yet, which is what does a few things here I'm talking about yet, but one of the main things we haven't talked about yet is we have some control over how the software deals with those sounds when they go over the threshold. It's not just that we smash them down, right? In this case, it is that we smash them down. But we could let them go over the threshold by some amount. And we could craft how they are dealt with when they go over that amount. So the first way we can do that is the speed at which we slam the volume down and then the speed at which we let it go again, right? That those things we're going to find here, attack and release. Right now we're at one millisecond. Attack and 30 milliseconds release. So that means when the plugin sees a signal go above, it's going to take one millisecond to push it down. That's really fast. And then after that signal goes below the threshold again, it's going to take 30 milliseconds to kinda back off and let it go up. Okay? Now that timing is going to be important because we went pretty fast amounts in mastering. So we'll come back to that timing, but that's what that is. That's what those settings are. I'm sure. And whatever software you're using, you have that. You have a timing, attack and release time settings somewhere. It's an all compressors I've ever seen. The next thing is the ratio. That means when something goes above the threshold, are we going to just always push it all the way down to their threshold, or are we going to let it crafted a little bit? Okay, so for that, let's go to a different view here. I'm gonna go over to this view. Okay? So what we're seeing here is here's our threshold. And a little bouncing ball is our, is our threshold also. And you're going to see our current volume show up as another little ball here. There's our current volume gain reduction here. Okay? Now, look at this line. If I was just going to smash it down and say, Do not go over the threshold. I would do this. This means if the volume gets louder and louder and louder, That's okay. This is, we're going to leave it alone. Is what this perfect angle means here, is we're gonna leave it alone. Once it gets above this threshold, We're going to act as a ceiling. We're not going to let anything go above that. But maybe we don't want to act as a ceiling and we want to tilt it a little bit so that the really loud stuff still gets a little bit louder. And it has a little bit of room to get louder and quieter, but not much. So for that, we would do this right? Now. When something gets really loud, it can still get louder than the threshold, but it's still scaled way down. This point up here would be if we didn't do anything to it. Okay? Now this setting, the angle of this line is called the ratio, right? Hey, if I set the ratio all the way down to 11, And I did this, our compressor is doing nothing. This means all of the sound coming in is the same as the sound coming out. So we can do this. And we can say, well, let's trim it down a little bit. This is actually a lot. Let's say this will be a little bit. This would be a lot and this is just flat. Okay? Now, in addition to that, we have a couple of other settings. We have something called lookup that's going to help it move a little bit faster. Shouldn't need that here in Mastering, we have the knee, which is the angle of this right here. So we kinda round that off by boosting the knee. We shouldn't need that too much. But there is one other setting that I want to tell you about. We're getting pretty long here. So let's go to a new video and let's talk about the makeup gain, which is how we actually make it louder. 33. Makeup Gain: Okay, Let's go back to this view. Okay, and let's do the thing I did a minute ago where we just take the threshold way down and just compress the heck out of this thing. Okay, there we go. Now you can see we're just pushing that volume way down and making everything the same volume. Okay, let's crank up our ratio so it's just like flat. Okay? Now, we have a problem here, right? Because our whole point here is to make things louder. And all we really did is make it quieter, right? This is the opposite. We've gotten the wrong direction, but we really haven't. So here's what we've done. We've done is compressed it, right? That's what the thing says it's gonna do. It's gonna take the volume, the spikes and the volume that go up. And it's going to flatten those down and it's going to make them all the volume equal or close to it depending on what our ratio is. Now, now that we've done that, now that we've flattened out that waveform. Now, we can boost it. And it's going to stay right where we want. Now if only there was a way for that compressor to say, for us to tell the compressor that you reduced it by x volume when you are compressing it, after you're done compressing it. Now I want you to add in x volume back to the whole thing, which will basically keep the highs where they were and boost everything back up to the highs. Let me explain that again. So let's use this. Okay, Let's say our signals coming in and it's about, hey, here's the top of our signal. Okay, so our threshold is at about negative 13. Okay? Now, let's say I compress it a whole bunch down to negative 14, 45. Okay, This is insane. Don't do this, but it should make my point. So we've compressed it down to negative 45. So we were at negative 13. Now we're down to negative 45. So what we want to do now is tell the plugin, take the difference of those two things and boost it by that much. So that negative 13 is what our highs we're at negative 13, We're now going to push everything back up to that. Okay. It's a confusing concept. I don't feel like I'm nailing it. Maybe I'll try this a few more times. But the long story short is, see this little button here that says makeup. That is makeup gain. What that's gonna do exactly the thing that I'm talking about here. It's going to just boost everything. Okay? So let's do it. So here we are. Super-duper compressed. Okay? I'm going to turn on make up our allowance. Okay? Right, so let's, let a be this, Let's see, with this compressor on and off. Here does off. Okay, turn-on. Definitely added volume, right? Let's compare it with this deaf tones track. Here's ours. We're in the ballpark, right? We still got a little bit more work to do, but we're in the ballpark. Okay, so to wrap this up, get to know these controls on your compressor, and then make sure that you have makeup gain turned on because that is what we need. Now, we're gonna be, when we go back to our multiband compressor, which we're gonna do in just a second. The makeup gains a bit more delicate. We can really push the output exactly the way we want. So let's now go back to that. Okay, so now that we know how the compressor works, let's go to our multiband compressor and talk about that. 34. Multiband Compression: Okay, so I'm gonna get rid of this compressor and go back to our multiband dynamics. I'm going to turn it on. Now what we have here in a multiband compressor, okay, I think I explained it earlier, but let me just make sure we're on the same page here. So what we have basically in this is kinda two devices in one we have an EQ and we have a compressor. So we've got a little bit of an EQ saying. And that's this right here. So it's saying here's our center frequency. And it's saying this is highest stuff. We're going to let this be highest stuff. And then we're going to compress it different ways. We've got low stuff, we're going to compress that different ways. We've got middle stuff and we're going to compress that different ways. If you don't have a multiband compressor like this, this one just comes stock in Ableton. So if you're using Ableton, sweet anyway, you have this, but there are a bunch of multiband compressors out there. If you don't have one, you could do this without one by setting up a kind of complicated chain using an EQ and then a compressor, and then, and then in parallel, another EQ and another compressor and other EQ and Miller compressor, you would need to have some sort of effect rack ability to be able to split the signal. But it can't be done. That's a way to do it and that's fine. It's just a lot more complicated. Having one effect that can really do this for you is going to be a good idea. So right out of the box, Here's what it looks like. So here's our three bands is high stuff, mental stuff, and low stuff, right? I can solo each of the three compressors. There's really three compressors happening here, right? So I can solo the high one with this little S right here. So here's just our high stuff, right? So we can kinda, we can compress it differently and we can see what's happening. Here's our middle stuff. Okay? And here's our low stuff. Okay, See now, this is great because I can say, I want to boost that low stuff. Get real bumpy with it. They don't want to cut some of the high stuff. This is effectively our makeup gain over here. So we don't really want to do what I just did. We're going to be a little more focused than that. Okay, So let's dive in. Let's focus on the highest stuff first. 35. Setting up Multiband Compression: Okay, so the first thing we need to do here is make sure our EQ part of our multiband compressor is set up the way we want it. In other words, is this focusing is the highest stuff, focusing on just our highest stuff. And then our middle stuff. Where does this line is too high, too low. Let's lock that in and get it just right. So there's a couple kind of quick and relatively easy ways to do this. I'm kind of general rules of thumb. This is how I was taught to do it. So think of the highest stuff as you're shimmery stuff, okay? Distortions, symbols, things like that. And that kind of line between the high stuff and the midst of kinda has to do with the snare drum. This is just like my rule of thumb. You can do this however you want. So I'm going to solo the highest stuff. Okay? I want to not hear that snare drum. We're hearing it. Right? So let's raise. Yeah, that snare is so crack. Like I don't think we're gonna be able to totally get it out, but we definitely don't want to hear any body of the snare. We're hearing a little bit of the crack of the snare, the highest stuff. But we're not hearing the body of it. Let's go down to the body. Here. I'm feeling a little bit of the body of that, fair? Right. I don't want to hear that bodies when you go up. That's pretty good, right about there, it's feeling pretty good. That snare doesn't really have any body to it. It's just the, the crack part. So I'm going to live with that. Okay, Now, I'm gonna go down to low stuff. I skipped the middle for the moment. Okay, so low stuff, I just wanted to hear this mud I just want to is gradually muddy stuff. Again, I'm going to use the snare as a reference. I really don't want to hear the body of the snare here, which I don't, but let's go up. Okay, Now I feel that that's there. That's pretty good right there. Okay. Religious muddy stuff. Don't want that snare to feel that snare in there. Okay, And then what we're left with is the mid. You'll notice here that we don't have control over the mids because the mid is going to be the distance from this to this. So we should have basically all of our snare drum. Pretty good. So I'm comfortable with that. So we've kind of dial this in there. So the snare drum thing is really just kind of a trick I was taught. It doesn't always work, but it's a good rule of thumb to kinda set those areas. It's worked well for me. 36. Dialing in High Frequency Compression: Okay, so let's look at how our bands are moving around and which ones are the most active. The one that's the most active is usually the best one to start with. We're gonna mess with all of them. I just like to start with the one that's moving around the most. So we're still soloed here, okay. Okay. So motion here, not a lot of motion in the midst. Eyes are moving around the most. I think they're going all the way down to here. Okay, So let's solo the highs. And let's work with this a little bit. Okay, so here's our multiband interface. It's a little different, but a lot of the same stuff happens. Okay? So this is our threshold right now. So we want to take our threshold down to where we're just doing a little bit of compression to this high stuff in there. A lot. Back it off a little bit. So we want to be reducing the gain just a bit. We're getting into the threshold now. Our signals are in their angle a little bit more. Okay? Now I should have said this before we started. Make sure you are in RMS mode. That's gonna be really helpful to us now, for me, that's this button right here. We can do RMS or peak. Rms is really going to be better. Because we wanna look at the kind of the average signal right now. So be sure you're looking at RMS and not peak values. Okay, So now my signal is going above the threshold. I'm giving it a little bit to go over. Now I need to apply the ratio, right? I need to tell it what to do with that signal that's going over the threshold. The way you do that, and this one is really different. Okay, So what we're gonna do is I'm going to click in this box here and pulled down. And what you're going to see is that these vertical lines represent ten dB, right? 30 to 40. These represent ten dB on our way up to zero. So these are all negative on our way up to zero. And what moving this down is gonna do is it's going to move those closer together. So now for our highest stuff, each of these lines still represents ten dB, right? So in other words, this is like angling that curve that we looked at so that it is compressing that sound that's going above the threshold. It's a little confusing in this way, but but it's actually kind of a cool way to look at it. It's, it's a different kind of interface, but I don't know, I like it, It's cool. But it does take some getting used to. So just remember the closer these little vertical lines are, the more we are compressing it. And you can see this number coming up here. This is our gain reduction. So this is the amount that we are squashing it down. Just for good measure. Here's our attack and release times. I'm going to adjust this to one. And these 230 are attached to one sec, one millisecond and are released to 30 milliseconds. Okay, so then our output, this is that makeup game, right? So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to look at how much we're reducing. Reducing. Let's see, 9.49, 0.7, ten. Let's go nine. And so now with the output, I'm going to boost it by that much. So I'm going to boost this by nine. Okay? Now, this amount of boosting, this is just our ballpark. Okay? What we're gonna do is we're going to un-solo this. We're going to listen. And we're going to make sure we haven't done anything crazy, right? Always, whenever you're doing any of this kind of mathematical stuff, like we're cutting by 90 beats, we're going to add nine dB on the other side of the compressor like this. Always remember that your ear is the most important thing here. So let's listen. Let's feel it okay for now. Let's continue on to our lows and then our mids and dial those in as well. 37. Dialing in Low Frequency Compression: Alright, let's head on down to our low stuff. Okay, so I'm going to solo our lows. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to take my threshold down to, we're just hitting the tops there. Don't need very much here. And I'm going to pull it back a little bit. Now the amount of compression I'm doing here with this, There's not a real scientific thing here. I'm feeling it, I'm kind of guessing, and I'm going to come back and dial it in a little bit more later. But generally I'm going around here. I want to see compression happening here. I want to see gain reduction happening. My whole point here is gain reduction. So I want us to gain reduction happening here. I'm not being real scientific about it, but I'm going to come back to it later. Again, I'm going to change my times. You can be a little more. This one doesn't need to be so fast, but I found that making it so fast doesn't really hurt. If you have a slow computer, this can be a problem, but should be fine. Okay, Let's go there. We've got about 6526 dB of gain reduction. Let's add that up here. Let's go 5.5. Alright, let's hear it. Now. Let's do our mids. 38. Dialing in Mid Frequency Compression: Alright, mids, next. Now you may be asking yourself, why did I jump over minutes? Why did I do highs and lows than mids? I don't know. That's just what I like to do. You can do high, mids, lows. That's fine. I like to start where there's the most movement to try to lock that in. Then I tend to usually highs or lows for me. And then the opposite is the one I'll do next. But that's, you know, you can do this in whatever order you want. Alright, let's look at the lowest or the midday. Pretty solid. They're a little bit by little bit of compression. Okay. I was just saying I kinda felt that like lock in and kind of a fun, a way that felt kind of good. Alright, so reducing by three up to three-and-a-half. Three. Alright, let's do a little thing. Okay. I feel like I've got a little too much lows happening, but I'm going to leave it alone for the moment. We'll come back to it in the next step. 39. Upwards Compression: Okay, Before we move on, I want to talk a little bit about upwards compression. I don't think we need it here, but I want you to know that it exists. So upwards compression would be messing with this stuff. So this would be like, let's use it on this base, e.g. we went up here, gotten the threshold, this line kind of close to our, to our downward threshold. This is downward compression. And then we moved our lines. This is now upwards compression. And what that's gonna do, it's gonna keep it loud. It's going to not let it go under the threshold very much, right? It's going to keep pushing it to make it loud. It's not so useful in rock stuff and this kind of a vibe. But if you've seen like compressors with like OTT settings, That's what, that is. It's really popular in like EDM and stuff for keeping things really loud all the time. You can also on the quieter stuff, which is this. You can also compress down, which is kind of like and compressing it. If you have something that's really compressed and you want to try to uncompress it, you can with this, that'll kinda space it back out and let it, let it breathe a little bit more. But we do not need it here. So I'm gonna move this down. Then there's kinda reset these, then girls playing with these a little bit. So I don't really need them. This can I get to be the default? Alright? I can get that exactly set at zero, but that's okay. It doesn't need to be. Alright, so that's what those things are. I don't think it's useful to us here, but it's good to note for you to know about. 40. "Ring Out" and Compare: Okay, at this point, I'm going to kind of wring it out. Again. Go back to my EQ, make sure nothing's really standing out. Oops, jumped all the way back there. Now I'm feeling the base has gotten on muddier. So my dial this back a little bit. And then it's hard to wringing out thing to really get base Medina is dealt with. That's really in the mix. But there's a few things I can do. So I've got a band here. I'm gonna go back to look for any kind of problematic based stuff. That's one. So I'm listening for what's making that moneyness worse. Okay, So kinda feel it right there. You could see a frequency jumping out right there with widen that a little bit. They're actually helping out. Good. Okay, So let's hear it now without the EQ and the multiband dynamics. Here's our original. Alright, so we're definitely on the right track. We haven't gotten real loud yet, right? We've done some compression to kinda team what's, what's in there. Our real volume is going to come from the glue compressor and the limiter on it. So what we've done here is kind of squashed it with the compressor, kinda tamed the sound a lot. And now we're going to move it over to that Glue Compressor, where we're going to use that to really push. It's kind of like our own makeup gain. But the limiter is going to make sure we don't, we don't go over. So let's move on to that next. 41. Using a Second Compressor?: Okay, up next is our Glue Compressor and limiter, or our compressor and a limiter. Or if you want to just keep things simple, you can just use a limiter here. So what I'm using here is this Glue Compressor, um, because I really like it for the soft clip function, but I am also going to use it as a compressor. So you'll find a lot of people when they're doing this kind of work will use multiple compressors. Typically when you do that you use different compressors. So different plugins, different hardware things, they all compress things differently and it can give you a little bit different quality to it. So it's not uncommon at all to have a second compressor in your chain. So we are going to use this compressor for one more level of just kind of thinning out the dynamic contrast in here. Okay, so I'm just going to, so I'm just going to turn down my threshold a little bit till it's, until it's hidden the music, and we're just cutting a little bit off that top. There it is. Alright. Now I'm gonna make sure my attack and release are going nice and fast. Okay, so when we adjust our attack and release time here is one really kind of odd thing here is that the attack time here, this knob is in milliseconds. One millisecond here. Okay, That's good. We'll leave it there. We could even pull it back to be a little bit faster if we wanted to do like a tenth of a millisecond. But I'm actually okay with one millisecond here. The release time is actually in seconds. So I want to pull this all the way back to 0.2 s or 0.1 s. Okay, I'm going to leave the ratio right there. I think that's fine. Okay, So now we've got this compressor doing some work for us. Now let's talk about using the limiter built into this. 42. Limiting: Okay, so now we're going to turn on this soft clips. So what this soft clip is gonna do, it's gonna, it's a limiter, right? So we're going to set a ceiling, and that ceiling by default is zero. Okay? So it's not going to let us go above zero. So we can crank up the makeup gain here as hard as we want. And it's never going to let the signal go above zero. Let me show you. So I'm gonna go over here so I can look at my meters. I just hit tab to get that if you're in Ableton, I'm gonna look at my master output here. Okay, Let's reset that. And you might want to turn down your speakers for this. This is gonna get a little loud. So I'm going to hit play and I'm just going to push the makeup. I'm just going to crank it. Okay. See we stopped at negative 0.5, right? We never hit zero, even though clearly we're way past it and we heard it distorting, right? It didn't sound very good. Because when you have a limiter and you go up to that limiter, if you just smashed up against that ceiling, it's going to distort. That's what it does. So what this one does is has this soft clip function. So as long as we don't smash up on there too hard, it is going to let us have a little bit of distortion from doing that, but it's actually kind of a nice distortion. So it's okay, but we don't want to hit that heart. Okay? So what I wanna do is use the makeup gain and go up until we're seeing this clip light go off just a little bit. We just want to see it flicker a little bit. Okay, so let's go up there. Pretty good. Pretty good. Let's reset our meter here just so we can see where we're landing. Right at negative 20. Okay? So now we're using that limiter and we're pushing hard on that, on the makeup gain in order to get it all the way up to the absolute top that it can be. And we're actually going a hair farther and letting that limiter kind of rolls off at the top to get that soft clip. Okay, So now let's talk about headroom and figuring out how much we want and how to get it. 43. RMS Headroom Standards: Okay, so remember headroom is the distance from the loudest signal to up to zero. Because remember all our signals are measured in the negative. So if our louder signal is zero, negative 0.5, which is where we are now. That means we have 0.5 of headroom. We have this much space before we hit zero, okay? So our limit is setting us there. But remember, that's our top peak, that's not our top RMS, right? If we look here, the RMS is the bright green line. So let's look at where our RMS is sitting. This is showing us our peak. Okay, so our RMS peak is about negative six, negative seven or so, just under negative six is what it looks like. That's okay. So what we want in general, a good rule of thumb is you want your RMS to be landing around negative four and negative five for like kinda heavy stuff like this, or more aggressive stuff. If it's maybe acoustic stuff, maybe you want to chill back to negative eight, maybe ten. You definitely don't want your peaks to go over zero. But that, that area, the difference between your RMS peak and your actual peaks. This we want to be relatively small and we can make it bigger or smaller by more compression. Okay? So this is pretty aggressive, so I actually want my RMS to be a little bit higher. I'm going to leave my peaks right where they are. Negative 0.5 is great. The reason I'm not going all the way up to zero is that it's always good to leave a little extra headroom. 0.5 is kind of like the minimum 0.5 to one in terms of that headroom is really what you need. And the reason for that is because when you convert this to an MP3, there can be some digital things that happen. And it can, it can boost the volume a little bit. And if you're all the way up to zero, That's going to clip you and it's gonna make distortion than not good. So we always want to leave a little bit for any of those conversion errors to happen. So it'll still sound good. So we'll leave that at negative 0.5. That's great, but I want to boost my RMS a little bit. Okay, So I'm just gonna do that here by tightening my threshold a little bit more and pull back on my threshold a little bit to kind of squeeze it down a little bit more. And then I'm going to kick up my makeup a little bit more. Now I'm up to 0.6 pretty reliably. Well before I would go. Alright, now that compressor is really working hard, but I think I got it where I like it. So I got my RMS peak around negative five, maybe getting up to negative four. And my peaks up to negative 0.5. That's kinda of money for where I want to be. So you make that gap between your peak and RMS bigger or smaller by more compression, or you make it smaller by more compression. So you're going to compress more than makeup gain, compressed more makeup gain. And that's gonna get that RMS up to where you want it to be. The limiter is gonna make sure your peak does not go above that. Negative 0.5. Okay, That's gonna get us good and loud. Next, let's listen and let's do our AB with our reference track. 44. A/B It!: All right, Let's listen. We're gonna go back and forth between our reference and this one. Okay, Let's go back over to here just so it's a little easier to see what we're doing. Let's make sure our reference has something nice and loud here. Perfect. All right, so here's our track. Whoops. Okay, and here's deaf tones. To me are sounds louder or an R sounds a little more crisp too. I think we're getting a better sound out of those guitars. Let's look at what their values are doing and the deaf tones track. Going up to positive. There are a mess. Rms is sitting around negative six, negative seven, that's where we were before we went up a little harder. Okay. And are there going over there going up to 0.1? That could be just from the conversion to the files I got that. They probably didn't mix it up there. That just can happen from files getting thrown around and getting converted and converted into converted m plus. I think I took this one. I think we're actually listening to an MP3 file here. So that's not great. But that's probably where that comes from, is that conversion. But even so, pretty happy with what we got here. Cool. 45. Looking at our Work: Okay, Let's real quick just take a look at what we've done here. So I'm gonna go back over to look at our waveforms here. Because a little extra space. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this entire track, effects and all. Okay, now I'm going to render this track so that we can see the wave form. So I'm gonna go to freeze and then flattened. This is like if you're in another Dawes is like rendering place or some like that. Okay. Let me get that sucker. Big thick black lines. And that's where we were. That's what we are now. So let's zoom in and look a little closer at that. Alright, we still have our dynamic contrast and nothing's clipping. We're just real good and loud. If we go up real deep here, we're going to see some of that soft clipping. It's like things like this where we're getting right up on the top. But we're not going over that limiter is just kinda rounding off the sound and then rounding it off back down instead of just slamming it up in there and making like sharp angles. That's what's typically what we see when we see eclipsing dull. We see this rounded edge to it, which gives it a little bit of distortion. But again, like a soft distortion, something that's usually pretty nice, especially if you've got look distorted guitars. But that is good looking. But let's move on and we're going to talk about stereo imaging and doing some extra sweetening. We still got a little bit more to do. 46. The Role of Reverb in Mastering: Okay, So at this point, we've done a really aggressive but good master of this track, right? Like when we looked at that waveform, it was solid. We could back that off a little bit. This is very aggressive master, but that's okay, that, that can be good. We've, we can be done. We can walk away and say we did it or we can keep going. Okay. Now, I'm going to caution you from doing too much, right? Like you don't want to overdo it with all this stuff. So from here on out, what I'm giving you as options to consider, um, our volume is good, we've got any problematic frequencies dealt with. So now we're looking at kind of extra things we can do. So the first thing I want to talk about is reverb. The role of reverb in mastering is somewhere between none and teeny-tiny bit. Okay? We do sometimes use reverb and mastering, but if and when we do, it is very, very subtle effect. But if we are going to do it, this is the place to do it is the next thing in our effects chain. So here's what we would do. And I'm already going to tell you that this particular track we're working on is not a good candidate for this, but okay, so we've got our chain, we've got our EQ, multiband Dynamics Glue Compressor, and then some reverb. Remember this is going to Pi reverb to the whole track, right? It's not just that we're going to add reverb to the vocals or the drums or whatever. This is gonna be on the whole track and we can't separate it out. So to do this, you want to use a very, very minimal amount. The only situation I would do this in is primarily acoustic music. Very gentle music that has a feeling that it's just a little too dry. If it feels like it's just got that little dryness to it, then you can add a little bit of reverb here. It's the kind of sound where if you feel like you've, you're aware of the reverb, you've probably gone a little too much. So acoustic music, sometimes classical music, if it's recorded really dry. I've used it on vocal music like pure vocal music like acquire. Because that's music that is often, we hear it in like a big church with a ton of reverb. And if you get a recording of studying like a studio, it might need a little bit of reverb to make it sound normal. If you're going to use reverb, just remember a little touch and only use it if you need it. And it's only in those cases where you've got very gentle music, acoustic, acoustic guitar. This kind of sound that we've got going on here, big rock stuff. It's not going to work. We can try it. Yeah, I already don't like it. So we're not gonna do that here. It's not going to work here, but it is something you can consider. 47. What is the Stereo Image?: Okay, the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to talk about the stereo image. We haven't spent any time on this yet, at least not intentionally. We may have done a little bit with the stereo image in our dynamics processing. But now we're really going to look at it. So what we're talking about here, stereo image is the sway of music. You can think of, kind of like volume is that this way, stereo images, that this way, weird way to say that basically we can hear music all around us. We have these ears and they're designed to hear things all around us. They're not so good at hearing things in detail behind us because it really kinda aimed at this way. But when we work on music, we can make it sound like it's coming from right there. We can make it sound like it's coming from there or there, or over here or over there, right? That's why we use two speakers almost always, right? So two speakers means stereo, that means the stereo field. And with that, we can do tricks to make it feel like sound is coming from anywhere in that area. So if I want something to sound like it's coming from right here, I'm going to place an exact copy in both speakers and your brain's going to kinda put it together that it's right there. I'm going to try it. My voice right now in this video should be mixed right in the center. So if you, if you're wearing headphones, take one out and you're pretty much going to hear the same thing except only in one ear. You can switch it and you'll hear the same thing. That is because exact same copy in both ears. It makes it sound like it's coming from the center. Now, if I wanted to make it sound like it was coming from the left or the right. I would use panning, right? But we don't want to use panning here. So paintings, that process we do where we can move sound around. We wouldn't really use panning in mastering because we have access to the whole bloody song. And if we use panning, we can move the whole song left or right, but that's not going to sound very good. Right? Panning is, is something we would use in mixing. After the mixing process, we can't really use panning anymore. But we typically want to make our tracks sound like it's filling the whole space in front of us, right? We want to take up this full stereo image is what we call it, right? I want to make it feel nice and big like that. So we have some tricks we can do to make it really fill out this space. And that's called stereo imaging. Adding a little bit of reverb can be one of them that can help make it feel bigger if you want it to feel bigger in the space. But there's a lot more we can do that doesn't involve reverb. So for the next couple of videos, we're gonna be talking about techniques for kind of filling out that space, the stereo space. Alright, so here we go. 48. Mid/Side EQ (MS EQ): Okay, so the way we do this is something called mid-side EQ. And this is maybe something you've come across before. Maybe you've seen this. It does get used in mixing sometimes. The point of it is basically we're going to EQ things differently, whether it's in the mid, which is the middle, or on the sides, the sides, like over here. So by doing that, we can control what's in the middle and what's on the sides and kinda really fill the space better. So it's called mid-side EQ. Sometimes you see it written as M, S EQ or MS imaging. I stands for mid side. So we have a few tools we can use for that. You need something more than your average EQ to do this. Built into Ableton, we do have a few tools that can deal with it a little bit. Mostly down in the utilities. We've got left channel mid only. We can mono, which is handy for listening. Write-only sides only. So there's your mid and your sides. So you can kinda play with things that way. But it's not very useful for what we need. So we really need to go to a new tool for this. There are some other tools you can get for live through like Max for Live and stuff like that. But doesn't matter. If you have a tool that will give you access to a mid-side EQ. That's great. It probably is enough. Because as you know, I like to focus on tools we already have in this class and not say you should go out and buy some plug-in. However, I'm going to tell you to go out and buy a plugin here. You don't have to, but it's handy. There's one plug-in that's really kind of a standard Mastering plug-in. It gives us really good midside control. And it gives us a couple of other bells and whistles that we're going to use. So for the next couple of things, I'm going to use this plugin, this plugin. So let's go to a new video and let me introduce isotope ozone. 49. Izotope Ozone: Alright, so I'm gonna go to my plugins. I'm going to load isotope, ozone and ozone seven. We're currently there is an ozone ate out and they're constantly updating this. So get the latest one. I'm gonna be using ozone seven. Okay, so I'm going to throw this on that track on the chain after my glue compressor. Now, ozone made by the company isotope. Not a free plugin. I don't remember how much it costs. But it's not as expensive as you would think for what it does. This is a powerhouse Mastering plug-in. This is what a lot of people use for everything we've done so far can be done in ozone. You can build effects chains right here. Just like we've done down there. I like using the built-in Ableton stuff to get us this far. But you don't have to. I mean, here's an EQ. Here's dynamics, There's maximizer. I think there's a multi-band dynamic processor in here. Or maybe you can, yeah, you've got access to the multiband compressor here because you've got an EQ in there. There's a lot we can do, right? There's a lot of different views. We have. There's presets. I don't really have any presets installed here. I'm not really sure why, but doesn't matter. We're not gonna need them. So this is going to show us a ton about what's going on in our track. Let's look overall. But what I'm going to use this for is just mid processing for now. So I'm gonna get rid of that and that. And let's just go to equalizers. I'm going to get one equalizer back. And then one thing you'll notice here is that the level meters look a little different. So what we're seeing here is, first of all, this level meter is our input, That's what it's hearing, and this is our output, what it's sending out. Okay, So the difference between these two is what isotope is doing, which is right now nothing. So the yellow in the middle is our center, and the blue on the side is our side. So this is showing us midside level. So it shows us our sides are quieter than our center or middle, which is fine. And that's typical. And we can see a good amount of motion in both the mid and the side. Again, we're seeing the peak as the lighter color and the RMS as the darker color. Cool. So this midside is what we're going to tackle next. There's a couple of other things to look at with it. And this is going to spread it out quite a bit. Now, I can already tell there's been a lot of midside work done in the mixing of this track because there's already a lot of action happening there. So there's probably not much I'm actually going to do to this track with midside because it doesn't need it and why I never wanna do it if it doesn't really need it. But I do want to show you how it works. Let's go to a new video and let's crack it open. 50. Reading a Mid/Side EQ: Okay, I was just thinking about this in between videos and there is one thing I'm going to try to improve on this track with. I still feel like the low end is a little bit muddy. And I think I might be able to get it back a little bit of a back or a little more clarity in it by using a mid-side EQ technique. So let me first show you how to see the different settings of the mid and the SAT. We already looked at this. But what I'm gonna do is go over here, we see stereo, that means we're looking at a stereo right? Now I can click the next one. Now we're looking at midside representation. Okay? Here's our mid and here's our side. Notice also up here it says side. So right now I'm looking at the EQ for the side. And the side is soloed. Okay? So this is soloing my sides. Right now. Let's solo the middle. And here's the sides. Now I can EQ them separately. See here's the mid, because that's what I have selected here. This is the middle and this is the sides. So what I have selected there, okay? So now I can adjust the EQ for the sides. And I've got an EQ here. You're used to seeing this kind of an EQ. And I can adjust the EQ for the mids differently. For the mid, I shouldn't pluralize that mid differently. So what I'm going to try to do here, let me turn that down. And I'm going to try to separate out that base a little bit and push some of the low frequencies to the side and keep some on the, on the middle and see if we can separate them out to clear out that moodiness. Okay. Let's try it. 51. Cleaning Up the Low End with Mid/Side EQ: Okay, So I'm going to start with my mids here. And I'm going to cut these down around 300 hz with a high-pass. Make that a little sharper. Let's get down to about 20 hz. This is just going to kind of redundantly do what we're doing with our EQ down here. So this actually shouldn't really be doing anything. But I'm going to leave that there in our mids, now in our sides and get rid of that. And our sides, I'm gonna do a high-pass and cut it off around 200. Tighten it up. Okay, So if I do this, what's happening now? Our sides don't have those really low frequencies, those really low things. Anything under 200 hz is only in the middle. Everything above 200 hz is going to be in the middle and the sides. So we're kind of separating out that really low stuff and just putting it in the middle. Okay, now I'm going to dial this in the taste by listening and see if that helps. Solo the sides. There's that moneyness. Write that out. I don't want to get rid of, I don't want to lose the low end. I just want to control a little bit more. I think that helps a little bit. So that's one technique we can use for with mid-side EQ doing to help control that low end a little bit. 52. Adding Shimmer with Mid/Side EQ: Okay, there's, there's a lot more we can do with mid-side EQ and the mixing stage, right? Like it's a really good technique while you're mixing to carve out different areas in your mix so that you and your vocals can sit better, or sometimes your drums can sit better. Any kind of sense can kind of sit better. Explore using this for your mixes in mastering. The only other thing that I would regularly use is using this to add a little bit of shimmer back to it. This really helps with your stereo image as well. So I'm gonna go to my sides, solo them. And I'm just going to bump up my upper frequencies just a tad. But like really high stuff. Let's try that. Let's bypass them. That's interesting. If I AB the side, what we're doing, you can hear that rumble comes back. All that rumbles what we've trimmed off. And also we're, we're kind of boosting the upper end of it a little bit here. So this is what's this EQ is. Get a little bit more out of it about there. Alright, now let's do this together. My bad. So that's giving us a little extra color on those sides. There's other things we can do to give us more life in the upper end. With harmonic exciters, we'll look at those in a little bit. But this is kind of doing a similar thing, although a little cheaper. So you can have some good results with it. This is really subtle what I'm doing here because there's, with all that really distorted guitar, there's already a lot happening, so it's pretty subtle, but it's, it can be nice. 53. Mid/Side Compression: Okay, Next and more relevant to our discussion of the stereo image is midside compression. We looked at mid-side EQ. Compression seems concept except we're going to compress the two sides differently. Okay, So in ozone, I'm gonna go to my compressor. They called dynamics here. And I'm going to switch it to midside mode. Here I have my midside readout. Just by default, we're already doing a little bit of compression here. I remember what kind of compressing the tar out of it back here. We might want to dial this back to give us a little room to do this if we want to. Okay, so here's this image that we remember seeing. We've got our threshold here and we're looking at our mid, right? So we've got our threshold here. And then we can adjust our ratio and our attack and release times here. Okay, so everything works the same. It's just a slightly different interface. Here's our side, right? So we can set compression here. Now, two things. If you're going to do this. First of all, you don't have to do this. A lot of people don't use mid-side compression at all in mastering and that's fine. Experiment with it, see if it's something you'd like. It can sometimes take the place of multi-band compression. The argument that I've heard is that multi-band compression takes away from the mix a little bit. So if somebody has a really good mix, you can destroy it a little bit by using multi-band compression. Whereas in mid-side compression, the mix that was made still mostly stays intact. But you have access to kinda refine certain elements of it and control it in similar ways that the multiband dynamics gives us control. So you could consider this to be a replacement for multiband dynamics if you want. I like using multiband dynamics because it's easier in a way and gives me a little more control. And it's a little more for, it's a little easier to just kinda from my brain to wrap my head around multiband dynamics than it is midside compression. I don't know why. But experiment with both and see what you like. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can use both. But typically people use one or the other as I understand it. Another thing is that we've added a lot of compression here with our Glue Compressor. And if we really want to make good use of this, we're going to have to dial that Glue Compressor back a little bit or whatever are, whatever compressor is doing our main amount of compression. We're gonna wanna make some room for that with this. In fact, let's do it. I'm going to turn off my multiband compressor. In fact, I'm going to do another thing. I'm going to duplicate this track. Let's do this. This is not something you should do in your mix. I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes. I'm going to duplicate this whole track. I'm gonna mute that one. Hello, This one. Go back to this one and delete Ozone. Okay? So this one does not have ozone on it. This one does. Now with this one, I'm going to turn off multiband dynamics. And I'm going to dial back our compressor. We've got a lot of room here for compression. So next let's do some compression that focuses on increasing our stereo width. 54. Mid/Side Compression for Stereo Width: Okay, so the theory here is if you want to expand your stereo image, what you want to do is compress the middle more than the sides. Okay? If you want to make the stereo image smaller, compressed the sides more than the middle. That's the formula. So we wanna make this bigger. Let's try it. Okay, so one of the things that isotope that ozone is doing here is it's doing multiband dynamics at the same time. So I've got the four bands of an EQ here. You've set the compression differently for them. I hit there's a link things, they were all the same. Okay. Now I'm gonna get my makeup. I've got a limiter in here also. My glue compressor is still on here by the way, but it's before this. So I should probably put my ozone before my glue compressor. Okay, Well I have this styled in. Pretty good. And now it's my side compression. Cool. So I don't know if you can feel that through the magic of video. But for me it does feel quite a bit bigger. To do that. We have increased the stereo field. However, I don't love the sound of it versus what we had before. Like I said earlier, this has already had some midside work done to it in the mix. So it doesn't really need this. So this is kind of overdoing it, I think. But let's listen to the two of these side-by-side. So this one has ozone has ozone midside compression, and this one has multiband dynamics. So yeah, I like the guitar tone we got in this one better. And our base is a little better controlled with this one. Now, maybe that has to do with I'm much more experienced and comfortable with with multi-band compression than midside compression. And so I'm just not as good at it. I think if I dial this anymore, we we'd get it. It definitely needs something because it looks like we're peaking here, but things to consider. Okay, let's talk about adding some additional sweeteners. 55. Controlling The Low End (Again): Okay. So let me tell you what I did. In between those last two videos. I got rid of our duplicate track because that one was getting a little out of control. We just went back to our one. I put back in ozone and just set up the opening back up here. So I just have a mid-side EQ doing this trick that we looked at to help us control the little that moneyness that's still in the base. I worked a little bit more on the Medina is here. And what I think I would do, I prefer to do to clean that up even more, is just go back to the mix. So I might send this back to the artist or whoever did the mixing and ask them if they can clean that up a little bit more. I've kind of reached the limits of what I can do in mastering to clean that up. It's just kind of there. This helps a little bit. But let's look at where we're at. So here's a quick reminder of where we are. Yeah, I just, I really wish I could get more clarity on the low end here, but I think it's just kind of in the mix. So that's about as good as I can get with mastering. You can't solve mixing problems with mastering. You're really only going to accentuate them. So I did a little bit of what I could do to clean that up, but there's not much else I can do. So let's move up. Next we're going to talk about, so again, what I talked about at the end of the previous, previous section, after the dynamic section was that we couldn't be done. We could be done at that point. But we went on and talked about stereo imaging, trying to fill out that stereo space, right? That's a thing you can do. You don't have to do, but it can help the master. This next thing is the same as that. This is a step you can do if you think it's going to help the master. You don't have to do there. There are certain situations where this will help and there are certain situations where this is going to hurt. So what we're gonna do here is use a harmonic exciter and just add some shine to this whole track. We're going to make it pop. So let's talk about what harmonic exciters are and how they work. 56. Harmonic Exciters: Okay, a harmonic exciter is, in a way, a form of synthesis. There's a lot of different ways this can be done and plugins do this differently. But basically what it is is if you know anything about synthesis, if you took any of my synthesis classes or you've done any work on a synthesizer, or, you know anything about how the overtone series works. Basically, what we have is when we play a note, I'm playing my clarinet. When you play a note on a synthesizer or an instrument or anything with any sound, It's made up of a series of other sounds that are above it, right? Those are the overtone series. So the sound that we hear is made up of many sounds. Okay? So what a harmonic exciters gonna do is it's going to bring out some of those upper sounds. Usually upper. We don't usually do this for the lower sounds. Now the way it does that, it can do it with a kind of EQ by listening for the fundamental, which is the note you intend on playing. And then using an EQ to bring forward the upper frequencies that are already there, it can work that way. A lot of these harmonic exciters don't work that way because that tends to bring with it a lot of kind of moneyness. What these plug-ins tend to do, the good ones, the high-end ones, is regenerate those higher overtones. So they will look for the fundamental frequency and basically dial in like a synthesizer to have that. And then the upper harmonics, and then they'll bring those out. So it is adding something new usually. But it's not really adding any new notes. It's information that's already there. It's just kinda muddled in there and this is going to bring it forward. And it's going to give it an extra kind of shine. Now again, we normally do this on the higher stuff, higher frequencies. It can make things like distorted guitar, which we have a lot of in this track. We can dig a distorted guitar and kind of shape the distortion a little bit more. We can give it a little more color if it's a flat sound. Really, anything that is kind of a flat sound, we can give a little bit more life to. It's really easy to go over the top with this and give it too much just because it sounds cool for the moment. So you have to show some restraint while you're doing this. Okay. So if I'm in Ableton Live, I could look at my built-in stuff. I could do some of this with some of the built-in stuff is saturate or even these various distortions would do some of it kind of because a lot of the time, this kind of a third way that this can sometimes work. So I mentioned in the first way is with an EQ that's not very common, but it can work that way. Second is to regenerate these upper frequencies. And the third way is to kinda do it with kinda just really careful clipping and get some distortion in there. So distortion is a way to do this. So you can do a little bit of it with distortion. Even a carefully used phaser flanger can give you a little bit of this sound but not perfect. Okay, So what I'm gonna do for this is I'm gonna go back to ozone, which has the easiest to use a nicer sounding exciter that I like. So if I reopen my ozone patch here, I'm going to go through here and add an exciter to my ozone chain. Okay, let's go to a new video and dial this in. 57. Dialing in Harmonic Exciters: Okay, Let's dial this in. First of all, one thing I didn't say in the previous video on this concept is that this is adding harmonic exciters like this is something that we're often doing in the mix. And it's kind of a better place to do it in the mix. If we're doing it in the master, It's certainly allowed and you can do it. But we're going to go a little more gentle than we would in the mix and the mixed process. You can really use these kinds of things to really shape your distortions, even like your snare sounds and stuff like that. Here, since we have just the overall track, we have a lot less control over where it's applied. So we're gonna be a little bit more gentle with it. That being said, let's dial it in. Okay, So here's my interface for our exciter. There's two main things we have here. First is we have these presets here. You can kind of guess what they are. So warm, retro tape, tube, triode and dual triode. Let's dial in a little bit of this. And then we'll switch through these these processes. You can think of these as like different algorithms, like warp modes enabled and if you know what that is. So we can add the amount that we want and then try it out with these different presets. Let's add a lot just so we can hear the difference. Okay? So what we have done here is we have four bands. It's kind of becoming a similar interface, right? You can see those bands here. There's the second one, it's the mid-range. Third one kind of upper mids and fourth one is the highest stuff. So this knob is our mix. Like how much of this we're hearing. I'm going to leave that at 100. Leave all of the mix of these at 100. You can play around with this, but I like leave them all up and then just push in a little bit of this harmonic excited. Okay? So this is the amount. Now, like I said, doing this on the low end, not gonna be very useful. And especially in our case where we already have a low-end problem, this is just going to create a bigger problem for us. I'm going to leave that one alone, leave this one alone to, but I will go up to here and see if we can hear it. So I'm going to push it in a little bit and listen close. It's really affecting the guitar. The guitar tone almost kinda liked what it did the guitar tone, but it really kinda, okay, let's leave it there for a minute. Let's add a little bit more. Let's add some to the high-end. Okay, there's a lot, but it's a bit more subtle up there. Now let's experiment with these different sound. So here's the warm setting. Okay, So this warm has given me a feeling of like a fresh compressor look anew, not compressor. A new preamp, like we're running the mids through a preamp here. Retro is like running it through an old preamp is the feeling that I got tape sounds like running it through an old tape machine, tube, running through an old tube AMP tryout and dual try out. I'm not actually sure what these are. Tube exciter circuit modeled. So this is modeled after a triode circuit. They're not really sure what that is. All of these were too much for what we were doing here. Let's go to warm. I'll leave this how it is and let's AB it. See if you can focus your ear in that real high stuff. It's really present, but only in that really narrow band of high stuff. Listen again. Okay, So I'm going to back it up here. Okay, I think that's a good sound. We added just a little bit of shaping to that distortion. Now much also keep in mind here we can do this in a mid-side pattern. So we could do it to just the sides. Try that and then dial in about where I had it. This might actually get us a good sound here. And we'll leave the mids all the way out. So we're going to add that harmonic exciting just on the sides. Okay? I kinda like that. It kinda gives a little more width with our distortion, makes it feel a little bit bigger. Okay, let's, let's take a little pause and listen to our whole master and just kind of gut check this whole thing. 58. Gut Check: Okay, so what I wanna do right now is I want to be able to AB the entire effect chain, okay? So this will be easy or difficult depending on which doll you're using. But in Ableton and it's really easy. So I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go here and select All and hold down Shift and click on that. So that we've got this kind of blue band on all of these. I'm going to press Control G. What are you going to put them in Iraq? So now they're all you can see there's no space between them. We get this little bar over here. It's going to sound exactly the same. But now what I can do is toggle the whole thing on and off. Okay, so I've not changed anything except I added some global controls for the whole thing. So here's the whole thing off. Okay, so obviously our volume is working like we're much louder. And one thing I'm also hearing is that that low Medina this is in when we're off when this is off here and all of that load stuff. That low buddy Think fighter but it's there. So we're not making it worse. I think we're making it better, but if I hear the rumble from that. Okay. So at this point, what you might do is you might say, okay, it's time for me to kinda ring out again. Go all the way back to the EQ setting, see if there's anything new that you're finding that needs to be dealt with. Any frequencies. I still, I'm tempted to try to clean up the low-end more, but I don't think I'm going to be able to do much more for it or find anything. I'm going to leave that alone, I guess. But so wring it out again, adjust compressors again, just kinda go through everything again and just keep seeing if you can make it better. So I would like to do one more pass through everything. And I'm gonna do that now I'll do that off camera and just do another pass C and I'll let you know if there's anything that I changed. So here we go. 59. Last Tweeks: Okay. I did do one thing. I here's why I did that. That low-end was his bugging me and I knew I could get it better. And I handed it back to my dynamics compressor. I boosted up the compression on the low end and then I adjusted my EQ a little bit. What this did is really take away a lot of the low end, but it's not muddy. So this kind of cleaned it up a little bit, but it also reduced our low-end bylaw. So here's what it sounds like now. Oops. Sorry, AB. So I've, it's lacking and low end a little bit, but it's at least it's not really muddy and there's so much rumble in it. So again, I really need to send this back to the mix engineer and say clean up that low end. If we really want us to be perfect, because I really just can't do much more. So we're going to call it good like this. But that's it. I left everything else the same. I adjusted our our makeup compression a little bit here. After. I can adjust it, this compression. And Plato's my EQ just a little bit. Okay, So I think we're going to call it a day with this sucker. Next though, we need to talk about our render settings and make sure that we're rendering it exactly perfect because this is it. This is our last stop before streaming services. Whatever we kick out here, we're going to send directly to Spotify. So we need to make sure our Render Settings are spot on Perfect. So let's devote time to that. 60. Rendering Settings: All right, Welcome to a lovely winter snowstorm here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, right here at my window. It's snowing like crazy. But that doesn't matter to you. That's the joy of online classes. I don't have to go anywhere in order to teach today. So let's talk about our render settings. Like I said in the last video, this is our last stop. We got to make sure we get these right because if when we send these to the streaming services, there's no going back. Okay, so in Ableton, I'm gonna go to File Export Audio. Now in your diet, it might be called export, it might be called render, it might be called bounce. All of those do the same thing, different programs call it different stuff. I think maybe logic now calls it share because that's an Apple thing. But whatever, you're gonna get to a screen like this that has some options. If you don't see a lot of options here, see if there's a More button somewhere or you can get into more rendering options. We want to make sure that we're right on this. Okay, so I'm gonna go through these and a lot of detail because again, this is important. So for me, I got to make sure that first-time rendering the right thing. That's this first block of stuff. Which track do I want to render? The master? Yes, that works. So everything going through the masters, what's going to get rendered here. I could, because I'm really only working on this track to, I could select this track too. But I like to just leave with something Master. That's fine on the master. Render start an end. This is very important. We're starting at 111, so that's all the way back at the beginning and it's ending at 64 to one. Let's double-check that. So 111 is here. And I added this little fade. So that's right. 64 to one is way out here. Oh, that's the end of the white pony track, probably. Yeah. That's all the way out here. That's a little farther than that. We don't need that. So I want to make sure I'm rendering the right thing. So I'm going to select this track, make sure my fade-out is still there. I'm getting the whole thing. I didn't make any edits to the track. We want to make sure we select the region that we want to export, in this case, the whole track. So I'm going to select it just like that. Now I'm gonna go back to my export settings and it should have updated 4712. I can't scroll that windows open, but that should be right. 4712, why does it want to export it to right there? It should be. Let's try that one more time. 4712. Okay, so it's defaulting here to 4712 as the length. I'm not sure why it's defaulting to end it here, but I definitely don't want it to do that. I want it to go all the way to the end of this file, which is 48.2, between 0.2 and 0.3. So let's, we can err on the side of going all the way to 48.3. So we're gonna make sure we get three and then we'll end that at one. That'll put it to right here. That's okay. That's insanely small amount of time we're going to add to it. That's just fine. Okay, So I got my length dial done correctly here. We will, of course, double-check that after we render it, we're going to listen to it and make sure that it's right. Now we're gonna go on and render options here we need to make sure basically what I look for really fast here. I want these all off. Include return and master effects. No, we don't want those. That's gonna be any of these return tracks. We shouldn't be using any of those render as a loop. That would mean probably it's going to try to put zero crossings at the end, which is fine because we've kind of manually done that with our fades. But let's just not do that. We don't need it to be a loop. Convert to mono. No, we don't wanna do that. Normalize. You may know, normalizing is if you've taken some of my other classes, but this is a volume thing, this is a dynamic thing. And we don't wanna do it here. Probably. It's something you might want to consider if you're having a very specific problem. But what normalizing does is it kind of like compression, where what compression will take your volume and take the quiet stuff and the loud stuff. And if you process it right, kinda even them out, right? What normalizing we'll do is take the quiet stuff in, the loud stuff. Not even them out, but just boost it so the loud stuff as, as loud as you're going to let it go. So might say are allowed, his peak is at negative one and we can boost it up to zero. So if it can boost the loudest point up to zero, it's going to lose everything else that same amount. So it's basically just turning the volume up to hit the maximum. In our case, we've done a lot to get the volume exactly where we want it. So we don't want this normalize on. Create an analysis file that's an Ableton thing, we don't need it. And the sampling rate, we already looked at the sampling rate, but we want to make sure our sampling rate is the same as our initial track or double, right? So in this case our initial track was 48 K. And so my sampling rate is 48 K. We want to render it at that sampling rate. The same thing as our track that we're mastering, or double. Okay, so those are your quick mastering or rendering options. Next, let's talk about the file type business. 61. File Type: Okay, so what I have here is a little confusing looking, but when you see this PCM, what we're talking about here is if full quality audio file, That's what PCM generally means. It means pulse code modulation. It's the way we convert analog to digital. But you can kind of translate that as full quality audio file. What we're actually seeing here is it says, what do you want for your PCM file? And I can turn it off, right? I can say No, I don't want a PCM file, meaning like a wave file, a full quality audio file. Say instead I just want an MP3 file That's not a full quality wav file. That's very compressed file. Or I can say I want a video file, which I can't do in this case, I can turn on video because I don't have any video in my session. I can import video into my session. And then it would import or export the video and audio put together into one video file. But that isn't letting me do it here because there's no video my session. So I can do an MP3 or a PCM. Okay, so we'll talk about mp3 in a minute. But for now, let's talk about PCM. Pcm is the encoding algorithm, pulse code modulation. You don't need to remember that. But we still have to choose the file type. We have, I have three options you might have different in your DAW, but you definitely have these two options. You have WAV or AIFF, you may have flak. Okay, let's talk about them. A WAV file or WAV file is a full quality audio file. No compression. This is the full quality audio file. This is what you want. This is the gold standard. This is your master file. Okay, wave, It's good for that. Cool. There's gonna be no loss. Aif, same thing. Full quality audio file, no loss. You can totally do that. What is the difference between WAV and AIFF? Not much anymore. For awhile. Long ago. Wave was the standard on PC and AIFF was the standard on Mac. That's kinda gone. Now. They can both handled both. Even on Macs, though, I think wave has become more common, we generally render out to waive more than AIFF. I think that file standard is starting to go away. You sometimes see it as just AIF, also. Same thing to both of those are fine. I would go with wave though. We also have FLAC file here. I hate FLAC files. I know there's some people who live and die by FLAC files and love FLAC files. I don't like them. I believe they are a little compressed. They have some compression in them, which means you lose some fidelity teeny-tiny bit. It's supposedly lossless compression style, but they do do compression. It's just a certain kind that's supposedly lossless. They're just it's just not a universal standard. Not everything can play FLAC files. They're hard to work with. I don't know. I don't like working with FLAC files because I don't understand them. If you understand them and think they're awesome By all means, do FLAC files. I'm going to go with Wave. Okay, bit depth. If you're going for a standardization, you want to leave this at 16. Or you could go higher if you wanted. But the standard here is 16, so you can leave it at 16. I wouldn't worry about that. And did their options. This is a really complicated one. So let's go to a new video and talk about dessert options because dither options, because it is important here. 62. Dither Options: Okay, so dithering is maybe a term you've seen before. It's you see it kinda floating around a lot and it's often misunderstood thing and I'm not going to lie and say I know every detail about dithering because it's very complicated topic, but I know a little bit about it. And I know what we need to do here. So basically, what we're doing with dithering is protecting against any kind of aliasing, which we can think of aliasing as artifacts from digitization. In this case, this is a gross simplification, but let's say this track was made with samples. And some of them were at 41 k and somewhere at 48 K and somewhere at other sample rates are bit rates. And so in order to render it, the computer has to do a whole bunch of conversion, right? It's kinda do a whole bunch of conversion anyway, because it's adding all these effects and doing all this conversion. So in the process of doing all the, all that conversion artifacts can happen. Artifacts are weird, little digital glitches basically. And dithering can help protect against those. Now in some cases, the way dithering works is it's a very low-level amount of noise that gets put 0-1 dB, it's like nothing. And what that does is when the volume of something is going down to zero, that's tends to be where it glitches when we hit zero. So that low-level noise, you'll never hear this amount of noise. But that low-level noise basically prevents the volume from hitting zero, right? It can't go down there because that noise is just taking up that band. So the dither protects the computer from making any of those rendering errors that cause little tiny glitches. Okay? So when it says dither options, we can say no dinner, we can say rectangular or triangular. These are the different algorithms available. I don't know exactly how all of these algorithms work. I really don't, but here's, I'm going to tell you, Pao minus R1. That's where the money is. That's what I use for mastering and I've had good results. Also. That's what mastering people that taught me how to do this have used. And so I stick with that. This power minus R1 setting is what I like, It's what I was taught and it works great. Okay, so that's what dithering is. Use this setting when you're mastering. And it will 99% of cases, you won't even notice that it's there, but in that 1% of cases you'll be glad you did it. So just make it a habit to do that when you're exporting a master. 63. To Mp3 or Not to Mp3?: Okay, so let's talk about, do we want to make an MP3? Also, if I turn this on, I'm gonna get both a WAV file, an mp3 file. Why would you want an MP3 file? Well, maybe you want one for sharing. Maybe you want to email this to some friends. Maybe you want to put it up for sale on your own website and you just want to make an MP3. That's fine. You can totally do that. Just make sure that what you're submitting to Spotify or whatever is the WAV file or an I just looked this up. Spotify does like FLAC files. They say they'll take a wave or a FLAC file. So you might wanna do FLAC file for submitting to Spotify, but wave is also fine. They're going to generate their own files based on your own. So you just need to give them the highest quality possible. So you can make an MP3 for your own purposes. If you want. I typically don't. Actually. I would rather have the official wav file from my reference. But if you're, if you're doing something, you need an MP3, you can make one here. As a step. That's just great. You can export it here. And then again, like I said, the video options, if there was video in here, you could export video, but there's not. So we can't. So once all of that is done, we're happy with our settings. We're going to hit Export. Now, coming up with a name here is actually kind of a complicated thing. So let's go to a new video and talk about naming conventions. 64. File Names: Okay, so the thing about naming these files is you just want to keep track of them as the master and version. Like this was sent to me as the name of this file was black shirt, white Converse dot wave. So I don't want to call it that. I want to make sure this is the mastered version. So I could put it in a folder that was separate and mastered versions and put it there. So typically what I would do is make a folder for the album and then put this in a folder called mastered. But I also like to put an M1 after it and you can do this however you want. This is just my convention. So I'm going to call this black shirt, white Converse M1. I don't put spaces in the file name. I think you can just fine. This is just like a old habit I developed from back in my being a bad programmer. Day's file names with spaces always cause trouble. So I use a capital letter for every word and not leave any spaces. You can probably leave spaces and that's fine. This is just what I always do. Then I end it with underscore M1 master, one, first master. So that when I export this, I can listen to it. I can evaluate it, which we're gonna do next. And if it needs adjustment that I'm going to come back. I'm going to make another version. I'm going to call it m2. Then I know that my final is always m. Then the highest number. That's the one that's the best. I can show you, e.g. here's my last album, The mastered versions of it. You can see these are all m1, m1, m1, m1 except for three. This time givers track wrong day. And then the first one, which is a remix of wrong day, all our M2, which means they got mastered twice. Now I didn't do this master. This was something I sent out to somebody else to master. So this underscore m1m2 is not just my thing, I've seen it. A lot of people use it. And you might be saying to yourself, why didn't you master your own stuff? I'll talk more about that in just a few minutes. Stay tuned. But here we have the name of the album. And then Masters in that folder, we have the M1 versions. So come up with a convention that you'd like. Underscore. M1 system works really well. 65. Check Your Work: Okay, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull our mastered version. Says our black shirt, white Converse M1 track back into our session. And let's just take a look at it first. I'm seeing like, yes, clearly we have mastered it, right? Like this is much louder than this. Let's also compare it to our reference track, this deaf tones we see we're at about the same ballpark just looking at it. Let's listen. Okay. And deaf tones. Okay, like similar volume, these two things can play together nicely on on Spotify or on the radio or anything. We can see our levels like pushing on the top. Perfect. Now, if it wasn't perfect, we can, this is, we're not we're not at a point of no return yet, right? We could easily open this backup and go back into here and maybe pull back our compression a little bit. Maybe those guitars aren't just a little too distorted for me, which I think they are. Maybe we can help a little bit with that by pulling down some of our makeup gain just to touch. Maybe taking off that soft clip in our limiter and replacing it with a different limiter that might be worth considering. And then render it out again and pull it back in. So you can absolutely still do that and listen. Go back and do a second master. A third master. Just make sure everything is dialed in exactly where you want it. This is our last step to just kinda check our work. 66. Save Your Session!: Okay, Just a couple last housekeeping things. Make sure you save this session. Just save it exactly like this. Not just the file, but the whole session. I would save it and plan on holding onto it for at least a few years. If you're mastering this for another artist, then you kinda wanna hold onto it just to make sure that they're not going to come back in a year or so and request or we master. Because if they do, you can update it and you'll at least have a head start and you don't have to do it from scratch. If you're mastering your own work. If this is one of your own tracks and your mastering it, then keep it in the same session folder as your folder for that track so that you have the mastering session and it's always good to have and you can always go back and tweak it later. So what I do is I have a folder setup on a hard drive for mastering projects. Things I've mastered that are not mine. When I'm asked her one of my own things, I put it in the session folder for that track. So just make sure you save the whole session, not just the track, so that you have access to it. If you want to go back and make any revisions or modifications later. 67. Save Your Effect Chain: Okay, another thing that'll save you a lot of time in the future is to save your effect chain. You have now created an effect chain that is this all our effects with these settings. You created an effects chain that is unique to you. It's the things that you like to do. Maybe you put more stuff in there, maybe you took some out. So if we save this, then what you can do is the next time you master something, you can pull this out and plop it on there and start dialing it in and save yourself a lot of setup time, right? This isn't like an automated master. It's not like you can just throw this effect chain on another track and it's going to master it for you. You need to dial it in and you need to know what you're doing. But it can save you a lot of time. So all of the different doors have different ways of saving chains. So if you're in something other than Ableton, I would just search for how to save and effects chain. In Ableton. What we do is we already put this in a rack. That was the thing we did with Command G to get it so I could turn the whole chain on an off. But the added bonus of doing that is I can go down here and press this. And now I can save the whole effect chain, right? So I could call this j is mastering chain. So now whenever I need to master something, I can import my track, maybe import a reference track, and drop this right on that track. And then I've got my whole mastering chain. Cool, huh? Saves you a lot of time. I still got to dial it all in, but gets me halfway there. 68. In-Session Mastering: Okay, I want to address one more big thing in this section, and it's something called insertion mastering. So let's look at the big picture here. What we do as music creators, producers, composers, wherever you want to call it, we make it. The typical workflow is we make a track, we record the track, we produce the track in a DAW. We export that as a stereo file. We either send it to a mastering engineer or we've asked for it ourselves. And we bring that track back in. We do some mastering stuff to it, and then we export it again. It's a bit of a cumbersome process and there is a trend developing. I wouldn't say it's a trend yet, but it's something that's new that I've just seen a few people doing. That's really interesting and I wanted to point it out to you. And it is to skip the mastering process as a separate step. They're still mastering. But what they're doing is in session mastering. What that means is that they're working on a track, their recording attract, they're producing a track. And there are taking a mastering chain. They're putting it on their master channel. Everything's running through that master channel. That's where their master effects are. And so they're mastering it while they're mixing it, right? In the same session. They're not doing a separate session to master it, but they're mastering in the session. This is weird. I know one guy who's doing it and I was talking with him the other day. And it makes really good sense. In his case. He does a lot of work for television. He does a lot of work for producing for different artists. And he's in situations where he's got to work fast. So he's producing a track. He's working with a vocalist, he's making a track. He's got to kind of bounce out a mastered version really fast. So he's doing everything in the session now in his track session, not a separate mastering session is a cool technique and I think it's got some merit. If you want to do it, you can totally do it, but you have to be really careful about it. Just make sure you're stepping through everything and not letting your volume get out of control, you still want to produce. And then as a next phase mix, then as a next phase master. But we're going to do it all in the same session rather than exporting and then pulling back into a new session to master. This is called insertion mastering. It's really interesting idea. It's not something I've done yet on any of my tracks, but I might try it. I might see if I can get good results that way. Somebody consider, I think you'll probably see people talking about it in the next couple of years if you follow mastering, chatter online. But something to try out if you're interested, all the same techniques. Just gotta be a little bit more careful about it. 69. Should You Master Your Own Music?: Okay, two more things that I want to cover. Should you master your own music? I think I alluded to this earlier. And I think we've talked about this a little while ago and I said we devote a little bit more time to it near the end, which is now. Here's the deal. One of the things you need when you're mastering a track is a fresh set of ears. Listen to that track. Totally new, totally raw. Hear it for what is in the track, not what you think is in the track, right? This is a super important part of mastering. So for that reason, I don't like to master my own tracks. I really don't. I have a mastering engineer that I send it all my stuff out to. Most of my stuff out too. If I'm just doing something fast and trying to just get something out for a collaboration or something like that, then I might master it and I have done that. But I kinda like the process of having someone with fresh ears listen to it and just say like, Hey man, like you're really low on base in this track. Like the base just really isn't cutting through like you think it is. Then they they apply some material to some processes to increase the base and make it pump a little harder because I thought it was pumping harder. But it wasn't. This has happened to me many times. Like you think something is in the track and you hear it, you hear something in that track that is not actually there. Maybe it was there and you took it out and your brain is just still processing it. This is just an illusion that our brains do. We hear stuff that isn't there all the time. And I swear I'm not that crazy. So to me, there's a huge benefit and having someone else Master our music just to make sure everything's there the way it needs to be. That being said, if I'm moving fast, yes, I will master of my own stuff. But also as much as I like for someone else to use their fresh ears on my music. When they do the master. I like to be that person for some other people. So when one of my friends finishes attract, they might send it to me to master so I can be the fresh ears for them. So you can certainly do it. You can master your own music all day long, but I just want you to consider that there is a benefit to having someone else do it. So something to consider. 70. Getting Gigs as a Mastering Engineer: Okay, Let's say you enjoy mastering tracks for other people and let's say you're getting pretty good at it. How can you get gigs? Maybe you're interested in starting a little company to be a mastering engineer. It is certainly possible. So the key thing to doing this if you want to, is probably two things. The first is a portfolio, which means you need to already have mastered a whole bunch of tracks. And I would make sure you've got a somewhat diverse portfolio. So you want to hear a lot of different kinds of tracks in that portfolio. So what that means is that for a year or so, I would master everything you can get your hands-on. Ask everyone you know, that's making tracks if you can master for them for free. I know like doing stuff for free is kind of a dirty word, but you're making a portfolio here, so get a big portfolio of stuff. Just to show you're good at it. That's what you need. The second thing that you need is some connections. People need to know who you are. And that will come partially from having done a lot of mastering already for free, reaching out to everyone you know. That'll also come from building a reputation as someone who's really good at it. And you can do that by reaching out to some studios in your neighborhood. By getting to know people who are doing mixing, but getting to know a bunch of artists and working with them. Any connections you make will be good. So getting a lot of people, build yourself a little website. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. It can be like a Squarespace website. It's just gotta be able to host some audio files that show your mastering work. And then once you start getting calls for gigs, set a price. It's usually a price per track. Some people do it per album though. I've seen that done, and I've seen some people do it per hour of their time to master something. But what I would do for pricing is looking at what people in your area are charging. It's very different around the country. So look at what people are charging. Be realistic about your experience. Start off low because you're new and then build up from there. I will say if you really if you want just like if you want me to just tell you a number what people charge, I will take this with a grain of salt, but someone who's pretty good at mastering, but not like a rock star at it. Someone local here in Minneapolis. That's good at mastering, but not very experienced at it. I would expect to pay about $100 a track. So 100 bucks track. Sure, That's good price. I've paid their professional person that I use is about $250 a track. I've seen it higher, I've seen a lot higher. So it can be a lucrative gig. But portfolio and connections, that's what you need. 71. Thanks for Watching!: Okay, this is the very last video where I tell you. Thanks for watching this video. It's always fun to make these. I really love it. People have been asking for a mastering class for a long, long time. And I finally got around to doing it. It was really fun. Thanks for watching. I hope you are. I hope you got a lot out of it and I hope you are able to master some tracks, maybe find a new career for yourself in mastering. So yeah, thanks for being a part of this experience. Thanks for taking my online class. I've got a little bit more for you in text after this, so please check that out and I will see you in the next class. Bye.