How to master without smashing the drums down? Anyone?

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bruhbechillin

New member
So I always end my master track chain off with a limiter but at this point the drums get smashed down and don't hit hard like I want them to.
I want my overall song to sound loud but I don't want to lose dynamics and that hard hit of the kick and snare.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques they use to keep the kick and snare hitting hard while having the rest of the song loud?

Should I peak my drums so that they clip a little? I know analog distortion is good but digital clipping is a totally different thing.

Should I try a little more distortion somewhere in the master bus to make it sound louder?

Usually my master chain is simple: Izotope Ozone 5 ( ill probably tweak some presets to my liking), then some glue compression, then a limiter at the end just for light limiting.

I haven't been mastering long so if my master bus sounds amateurish, you know why.
And I also know that its better to get a professional mastering engineer to master my stuff blah blah blah, but I don't have the funds for that so I am doing it myself.
 
bruhbechillin said:
So I always end my master track chain off with a limiter but at this point the drums get smashed down and don't hit hard like I want them to.
I want my overall song to sound loud but I don't want to lose dynamics and that hard hit of the kick and snare.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques they use to keep the kick and snare hitting hard while having the rest of the song loud?

Should I peak my drums so that they clip a little? I know analog distortion is good but digital clipping is a totally different thing.

Should I try a little more distortion somewhere in the master bus to make it sound louder?

Usually my master chain is simple: Izotope Ozone 5 ( ill probably tweak some presets to my liking), then some glue compression, then a limiter at the end just for light limiting.

I haven't been mastering long so if my master bus sounds amateurish, you know why.
And I also know that its better to get a professional mastering engineer to master my stuff blah blah blah, but I don't have the funds for that so I am doing it myself.
Click to expand...
* 97% of getting a song loud and clean is about getting the frequency balance on the mix right before attempting to add level. Full range monitors and experience help with this.

* I'd advise not to try and master the mix from the mix session . Mastering is a separate process and I can pretty guarantee that none of the records in your collection were mastered in the mix session.

* Digital clipping can accumulate artifacts down the line when converting to lossy and posting on utube, soundcloud, or whatever, so I would personally stay away from clipping. I'm not a fan of clipping or adding distortion.

* It's mainly about frequency balance and gain staging. Especially getting stuff loud and clean while retaining a sense of dynamics.. Learning to master is a craft just like mixing or playing an instrument that you have to put a lot of hours into before you start to feel confident about it and can produce good results, so it's not something that someone can say "Do this" and it's that easy, because it's not.
What I'm saying is there is no easy answer to your question. gl
 
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Waltz Mastering said:
* 97% of getting a song loud and clean is about getting the frequency balance on the mix right before attempting to add level. Full range monitors and experience help with this.

* I'd advise not to try and master the mix from the mix session . Mastering is a separate process and I can pretty guarantee that none of the records in your collection were mastered in the mix session.

* Digital clipping can accumulate artifacts down the line when converting to lossy and posting on utube, soundcloud, or whatever, so I would personally stay away from clipping. I'm not a fan of clipping or adding distortion.

* It's mainly about frequency balance and gain staging. Especially getting stuff loud and clean while retaining a sense of dynamics.. Learning to master is a craft just like mixing or playing an instrument that you have to put a lot of hours into before you start to feel confident about it and can produce good results, so it's not something that someone can say "Do this" and it's that easy, because it's not.
What I'm saying is there is no easy answer to your question. gl
Click to expand...

This is good advice. I would like to emphasize the point of gainstaging, as I feel it is often something that gets overlooked with new producers. If I focused on gain staging earlier I could have learned to get a more balanced and dynamic mix a lot earlier.
 
The key is just to start all the mix buses and like -15dB. If You want your kick to sound harder simply just raise the dBs on the Kick.
 
If your having problems with it being smashed, just pull things back. Pull faders back. Turn compression and EQ down if you need to.

Main thing is to achieve the balance like the others pointed out. Start pulling things back and you will hear the mix snap into place.
 
Using a limiter will always give you the opposite I once thought, compression doesn't from what I can tell although it could.
Not much of a mixer/master dude but almost as long as making track I just use equalizers and the faders on the console and adjust levels that way because I myself never understood the controls on a compressor lol.
 
Try using compression to shape the transient and envelope of your drums. Sounds that are sustained longer will sound louder than something that just has a quick, but loud peak. When mixing, I might reduce the level of a peak on my drums, but form a transient that is sustained a bit longer. A lot of that has to do with attack & release settings, which I determine by ear. I'd try compression on drums while mixing to get your desired sound before trying to accomplishing that with mastering.
 
When I use to limit all my music really hard I would run into this all the time in the master and personally I liked my drums the way they sounded before I started the mastering process.
So what I ended up doing for a bit is taking my Kick/Snare and making a separate track and loading just them into it and saving it as a .wav file, then master my track without the drums in it and add them afterwards.
I'm sure it's highly unconventional and not the "proper" way of doing things but it achieved the sound I wanted at the time.
 
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Ozone 6 has transient shaper next to the maximizer you can try
Also try putting a transient designer on your snare kick after you get the volume you desire,
Also there are super punchy samples on the Vengence packs , like the dub step and club snares just pops out

but honestly those advices are not as effective as mixing right (which is the worst advice you can get case it doesn't say anything)
 
no audio = no opinion on what you are doing wrong and what you can do to fix it

agree with waltz - mastering is a separate process and involves minute, subtle changes (most mastering engineers who discuss this say more than 2db adjustment on any aspect they will ask for new mix as the problem is in the mix: they will persist only if there is no opportunity for a new mix, i.e. tracks.stems do not exist any more, working from decades old media that is so badly worn that there is no way to recover by remixing, etc) in character not in-yo-face stuff like a brickwall limiter

however, having what is essentially a mastering chain on the master buss is not necessarily a bad thing, just have to remember to bypass it most of the time to know what the mix actually sounds like rather than what pseudo-master sounds like
 
First of all your drums might be too loud, and thus when you try to compress or limit them they get smashed. Check your low end, depending on your speakers, you might not be hearing all the information that's there. I tend to low cut my bass and drums around 20hz, just to give me a little more headroom, and get rid of as much un heard bass energy as I can.
I would suggest using a mastering compressor with a side chain filter so your not compressing the bass as much as well. If you use UAD stuff the Shadow Hills does this pretty well.
-Matty Trump
mixandmastermysong.com
 
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