MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Dec 13, 2023 1:02 pm Always keep the master fader at 0. So your chain would be for ex: EQ, compressor, limiter, loudness meter. Adjust the overall level/amount of limiting with the threshold of the limiter.

I'm a professional masterer, ask me whatever and I'll try and help!

Thanks! I've started using a track for a mix buss and doing the mastering in the master channel.

Do you have any suggestions for those of us who are just getting started?

cakes wrote: Thu Dec 14, 2023 7:09 am Do you have any suggestions for those of us who are just getting started?

For starters, I think the best thing anyone can do is simply listen to a wide variety of music in your own studio. That probably sounds obvious, but I sometimes get mixes that are so far out of whack that I can tell that whoever mixed only ever listens to their own stuff in their studio. I was kinda guilty of that when I was starting out.

Even if you have terrible speakers in a terrible room, if you listen to loads of music in there, you're going to have a feel for what a really bright or bass heavy record sounds like, what a dense, compressed record sounds like vs an open and dynamic one. You'll have an idea of the size of the ballfield (fortunately for all of us, it's a big park).

If you never listen to anything else and only ever work on your own stuff, you're basically in a vacuum. Which is fine if you only ever want to listen to your work in that one room. But probably you'd like other people to listen to it. Mastering is really all about taking something from the one room where it was mixed, and best presenting it to the rest of the world.

So to that end, I would keep your mastering process separate from your mixing process. If you like to mix with an eq and/or compressor on the mix buss that's fine, that's not mastering. Do whatever you like just don't worry about the overall level or limiting.

One thing I find really helpful...if I'm mixing a batch of songs, as soon as I have any sort of reasonable rough mix together, I print all of them and open them in a new session. I won't do any mastering at all yet, I just quickly adjust the relative levels and space them fairly close so they play more or less like a finished record. And then I just go sit on the couch in back and listen to it. Doing this really helps to get mixes more consistent, because it's easy to hear that the snare on track 2 is way too loud when it's in context with the rest of the songs. Or the vocal on 3 is too quiet, whatever.

If you're mastering your own stuff, try to take as long a break as possible between mixing and mastering, you want as fresh a perspective as you can manage.

That's enough generality, some actual technique stuff in the next post.

One thing pretty much all ME's do is we work at a calibrated, fixed level. Meaning my DA that feeds the speakers reads "27" when it's putting out ~83db spl in the room, and I make (pretty much) all my decisions at that level, and have for like 15 years now. So when you do that, you have a reference point, I know if I make it "loud enough" to my ears at that fixed level, it'll be loud enough to make most clients happy but not squashed any more than it needs to be.

So to that end, when I'm mastering a song, once I've listened to it and gotten an idea of what I'm working with, the first thing I do is get the level up to roughly where it's going to need to be. In other words, don't spend 10 minutes messing with the eq and then turn the track up 6db with the limiter. Get the level up first and then work on it.

General mastering chain idea is corrective stuff first, then toneful stuff. So for ex, if a track needs de-essing, almost for sure the de-esser will be first in line. If the low end is all over the place, I'll have a dynamic eq/comp controlling that before anything else.

Following from that, if you have a track with bad sibilance or spiky high mids, you're going to have a tough time adding any nice high end to it. If you corral all that peaky shit first and smooth it all out, then you can do a nice broad high boost that makes everything sound better and doesn't get harsh.

Getting a track even a little bit loud is as much about eq as anything else. If the eq is right, the other stuff downstream doesn't have to work as hard. So for ex, it's not uncommon for a track to have way too much low end in general and sometimes way too much sub in particular. So when you slap a limiter on that mix and try to get the level up, what's going to be hitting the limiter the hardest? All that unnecessary low end. Fix that first and you'll probably be able to turn the track up a few dbs even before it hits the limiter.

Shelving eq is your friend, first order shelves are great to quickly get mixes in line. Likewise wide bells. I pretty much never use narrow q boosts, and any real narrow q cuts would be with a dynamic eq.

I'm rarely doing more than 2db gain reduction with the limiter, I tend to prefer getting the level up in little bits prior to the limiter. So a bit from compression, a little from saturation, a bit from clipping. A bunch of things doing a little bit tends to sound better to me than one thing doing a whole lot. Don't be afraid to run a clipper before your limiter and shave off the biggest peaks with that. If the clipping is only happening on short-duration transients (drums) it'll likely be totally inaudible. You run into trouble with clippers when they're hit with longer, sustained notes, so be wary!

The most common problems I see are boomy low end, peaky high mids, and sibilance. There's lots of days where the de-esser is the most valuable thing in here.

If you're new, keep it simple, start with a 4 band eq and a limiter. Broad strokes. Work fast, don't get bogged down, that's what mixing is for.

Excellent advice, thank you! Great idea with listening to other music in the studio. That is so obvious now that you said it, but I hadn't thought of it.

Yeah, cool info! I'm basically never gonna master my own stuff (or anything else), but a lot of that stuff is good to be aware of in recording and mixing stages as well.

I think I know the first rule of all this is to "use your ears". That said, do visual aids or tools ever come in handy for gauging EQ or level? I'm sure you do eventually learn to hear all of this (especially if you really invest in acoustics and monitoring), but I'm just thinking as an intermediary way of catching stuff that might not be obvious.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: I'm rarely doing more than 2db gain reduction with the limiter

Yeah.. a few years ago we were mastering an album for vinyl and of course, digital/streaming as well. The album had a very round kick drum sound, and I thought the digital levels left a little to be desired, so the ME gave me several versions like -1, -1.5, -2 I think. I was surprised how much, even to my 'untrained' ear, how bad -2 sounded. I think we settled on -1, even though the album still seemed comparatively quiet to our other recordings.

(In retrospect we should have been more careful dialing in the kick drum at the mix stage, as the rumble isn't integral to the overall character of the album. It's always surprising to me how much of bass-y instruments actually rely on midrange or even upper midrange to shine)

penningtron wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:47 am That said, do visual aids or tools ever come in handy for gauging EQ or level?

Not really. It's easy to look at the spectrum display on an eq and think OMG I've got a huge peak at 50hz I need to fix! No, that's just the kick drum, that's what they do. So never go by what the spectrum display says, those are just things that are pretty to look at when you're stoned, and you shouldn't be stoned when mastering. Any other time is fine.

And I mean, lots of times there IS way too much 50hz on the kick drum, but you'll know that by listening, not by looking at the eq.

As far as level, I have VUs and RMS/Peak meters always visible, and they're nice to have....some old engineer somewhere sometime said something like "VUs aren't very accurate but if you've been staring at them for decades you just kinda know what they're telling you" and that's true. But really it's mostly by ear. If the VUs are pinned and it doesn't sound loud to me in the room, something's wrong and I need to fix it (it'll be way too much low end).

One thing that is sometimes helpful with eq: my main parametric is DMG Equilibrium but i assume most can do this: If I right click on a band it'll solo that band, this is sometimes useful if I feel like a mix is clogged up in the low mids, i can fish around with the eq in band solo and try and find where exactly it's the grossest...is it 120 or 150 or 180, whatever, and then cut a bit there. Not something I really do all that often but definitely useful, and that's probably a good thing to experiment with if you're new at this.

It's always surprising to me how much of bass-y instruments actually rely on midrange or even upper midrange to shine)

For sure. Even though a kick drum has tons of 50hz, if that's all it has you'll never hear it in a mix.

cakes wrote: Tue Dec 12, 2023 11:50 am
What limiters or type of limiters do you like to use? I am looking to control the peaks with a light touch.

PSP Xenon

Here is one I have never dealt with.

What if you were preparing a live version of a song to have as a bonus track to send to a ME. It has all the hallmarks of a audience recording, but has a quality I like, is it worth cleaning up on my end, or should it be sent over warts and all to the ME? If I should do some cleaning up what would make the ME life easier?

penningtron wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:47 am I'm sure you do eventually learn to hear all of this (especially if you really invest in acoustics and monitoring), but I'm just thinking as an intermediary way of catching stuff that might not be obvious.

Thought about this some more....so, right, my fancy mastering studio has real nice speakers and serious acoustics and is super well treated and tested, the freq response is real even and tight and blahblahblah...and all of that does make it exponentially easier to clearly hear what you're working with. I can really trust what I hear coming out of the speakers. This is all stuff you want your mastering engineer to say.

I'm so used to this now, I have to remind myself that I spent years NOT having a room/system I could trust, and try and remember the battles I had to fight.

So, one problem I used to have in previous rooms was really uneven low end response, some notes booming out way louder than others. This is easy to test for yourself, load up a generic sine wave patch (the default synth patch in Reaper works fine), start at a low B and play chromatic notes up the scale, if you don't have sufficient low end treatment, you'll hear some notes sound much louder than others, some might be almost inaudible. Move your chair back a foot and do it again, you'll hear different notes ringing out or cancelling.

So in this situation, you might be working on something and when the bass goes from A to D halfway through the verse, what the hell? Where did it go, why's it seem so much quieter now? I guess I need to compress it more. Well, look at it on a level meter, does it actually get way quieter? It probably doesn't, it's your room fucking with you. I can remember having this exact problem years ago. So in a case like this it is actually better to trust the meters than your ears (oh it hurts to type that).

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 9:14 am One thing that is sometimes helpful with eq: my main parametric is DMG Equilibrium but i assume most can do this: If I right click on a band it'll solo that band, this is sometimes useful if I feel like a mix is clogged up in the low mids, i can fish around with the eq in band solo and try and find where exactly it's the grossest...is it 120 or 150 or 180, whatever, and then cut a bit there. Not something I really do all that often but definitely useful, and that's probably a good thing to experiment with if you're new at this.

I've been trying out a bunch of different EQs, and the one's I've been liking the most let you solo bands. It's really useful to be able to listen to what's being affected.

I'm really only interested in mastering for myself. I've been playing around with different plugins to see what works for me or would be good to learn on. I found the ProFab L2 to be a really geeky tool, and there are pros and cons to use it or not use it. I found for myself, there's just so much going on under the hood that I didn't understand. I watched a video of an engineer go through the simple dials and settings and talk about it in a math perspective with stems and I thought, holy shit it's so simple, it's actually too overwhelming! For someone like me that I needs to know things and have some sense of control, I found it to be really frustrating, to be honest. In practice, my mix buss is just under 0db to remove any clipping going out. The mix going into the L2 was already pretty quiet, it was barely doing any limiting, even at just above 14 LUFS. Just a touch of some peaks here or there. That was nice, because I don't want to squash anything, but at the same time I couldn't hear any difference when toggling it on and off. So, it was either so transparent it was amazing, or not doing anything and I was really wasting my time using it. It's not a limiter that you can just turn dials on and listen to, it's more about picking the right preset and hearing the subtle differences.

I did a comparison between two different mastering setups:

The first one: EQ > Compression > L2

The EQ was a full band EQ with some mono and stereo enhancements and the compressor added a little warmth and saturation that I liked, while rounding things out a bit.

The second one was with Ozone : Vintage EQ > Compression > Vintage Tape > Exciter > Imager > Vintage Limiter

I started with a preset that sounded pleasant and then modified from there. The only things I changed in the chain was the compressor, because I felt things were too jumpy in the dynamics for me; and I switched out the 6 band EQ for the Vintage one, because I felt I was messing things up with the parametric EQ and the Pultec-style vintage EQ felt more comfortable to mess with. I thought the Tape and Exciter were an odd couple, since they both kind of do the same thing in a sense. However, the Tape is an overall saturation, where the exciter is based on 4 bands that you can turn on and off. I really loved the Imager, though. The EQ in the first setup was an AMEK EQ 250, and the mono maker and stereo are standard width percentages. That's fine for sure, but the Ozone imager is cool that you can work on the image space between EQ bands. So, instead of using a monomaker for low end and a stereo for high end, you can tweak frequencies at a really fine grain. I just loved being able to do that.

I tried all other kinds of things out, but I like where it's going. Both masters sounded pretty good and I probably could tweak the EQ on the first setup to get it more to my liking.

As far as the tools I've been using, I am really liking Ozone a lot. It has everything you need to master, but unlike a master desk, you have more variety of tools that you can pick and choose to add to the chain. Price-wise, the standard edition is probably the most cost-effective. I just really liked that you can get started on a preset, then get to tweaking. There's some other useful tools that I think would be good for me, personally. I like that you can load up a song that you like and have Ozone analyze the spectrum to give you a similar feel for your track and a guidepost for tweaking around it. For someone starting out, that seems like a really cool learning tool. I also tend to work on my stuff at night when my wife and kid are sleeping, so I don't really get to turn the speakers up when I need them. I also have hearing loss in the 4k range, so I do feel like having some visual aid is helpful at times to make sure my high end isn't too crazy. And like morespaceecho said... the treatment on my room isn't scientific or specific enough to address all the possible problems; the space isn't ideal, but it's what I have to work with. What I have for treatment is more than nothing, so I'm always going to be fighting those battles and I could use all the help I can get.