Self-mastering, myths and bad bad bad very bad habits.

C

chris carter

New member
I see so many posts about self-mastering and I see all the crazy stuff people are doing to their mixes.

Trust me, I was there once as a noob, amateur, semi-professional, whatever you want to call it.

I get the frustration. But you are NOT helping yourselves using all these plugins to mastering your mixes.

Honestly, the only thing you should be using is a limiter for volume and THAT’S IT.

If you are using anything else, then all you are doing is allowing yourself to develop bad mixing habits.

Do yourself a favor and use nothing but a limiter and if you need an adjustment, then go back to the mix (after all, you have it sitting right there!). And NEVER use any of this crazy stuff, other than a limiter, to try and get your mix competitively loud.

There is NO reason to. Absolutely ZERO of my mixes require any crazy multi-band compressors or other voodoo maximizers and stuff to get up to volume.

Only a basic limiter. If you can’t do it with a basic limiter, then go back to your mix.

Stop incentivizing yourself to build bad habits that will only hold you back in the future.

Now, if you just want this to be a hobby, or if you otherwise simply don’t care about getting better, or don’t care about having success, then keep doing what you are doing.

If you want to be like me, or any of the other people here who mix records for a living and have stuff on the radio and on the charts or whatever, then stop intentionally hampering your ability to improve.
 
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Although I agree with everything you've said, its gonna be misunderstood I'm sure, The demographic youre trying to reach is just going to use this as fuel to throw on the fire that all mastering is is getting your tracks louder with a limiter.

Theres nothing wrong with using some slight EQ on the whole mix or harmonic distortion in order to tweak certain bands upto your references standard. Why go back to the mix if you only need a little bit and can do it right there. If you're doing everything yourself it doesn't really matter where you get the job done as long as the final .wav has it done.

Mastering should be thought of as doing anything you can to a track to get it sounding as close (frequency wise) to your commercial standard as possible. Much like using a mix reference but just another layer of the cake. Not just getting to the volume of your reference using a limiter. Because you WILL run into certain scenarios where in the master you need to do more than use a limiter. And thats ok. If you understand why. In a perfect world your frequencies are perfect and all you need is some volume boost. But it will never always be like that, and if its only a slight amount needed theres no point in going all the way back to the multi track mix. If its a big screw up then yah...
 
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I feel like it's more important for people to know why they should/shouldn't use certain tools for achieving a certain result (as opposed to reading what "special technique" your friendly neighborhood engineer does on occasion).

On topic...

I tend to only use a limiter on my own mix since I already add compression throughout a mix to get the particular sound that I want. However, if I'm mastering multiple tracks of my own, I'd likely use more than just a limiter.
 
Thanks for this help/tip...im big noob at producing, but im using only Izotope Maximizer (maybe ill change to fl limiter, but i thinkg its the same thing) and maybe add EQ for putting the low and high pass...becouse its not necessary...

i wanna ask this, becouse it is in some way associated with the thread:

should i export my beat in .wav or in .mp3? im always doing with .mp3...i heard that the every mp3 file format is (somehow) louder/compressed (i dont know whats the professional term for that 'change') than the .wav....maybe thats not true...if you can say anything about this rendering ill be happy, thanks
 
Both FL Limiter and Izotope Maximizer are limiters. Ozone has more features, but you may need to look into how they work/what they do to determine if you need them (the FL plugins work just as fine)

Don't do mp3. The only compression from mp3 is data compression (not the same as a hardware or software compressor). Stick to 24-bit wav unless you have need to render in another format.
 
aham...thanks for these..ill see some tutorials about maximizer...

just last question, so when i want to record my vocals or i want to send someone my beat (when someone for example pay for it), i need to work with .wav with 24-bit style (so no more .mp3) ?
 
Yes.

The data compression for mp3 takes away some higher frequencies that an engineer may want to use. Wav files do not lose any data after exporting and are in no way an inconvenience to work with.

If you want, export a copy of a one of your tracks to a wav file and one to mp3. Run them through some sort of spectrum analyzer at the same time (try wave candy in fl). Use separate instances of the plugin and compare both visually.
 
Adrian-MarQ said:
Yes.

The data compression for mp3 takes away some higher frequencies that an engineer may want to use. Wav files do not lose any data after exporting and are in no way an inconvenience to work with.

If you want, export a copy of a one of your tracks to a wav file and one to mp3. Run them through some sort of spectrum analyzer at the same time (try wave candy in fl). Use separate instances of the plugin and compare both visually.
Click to expand...

aha...i recently read that for taking away some freq, so i ment i should change my program for rendering, like makinga beat in FL -> export in Cubase hah :D

thanks, ill check it..possibly on SPAN analyser
 
I do not even mix with a limiter in place - mainly to avoid becoming complacent, but also because a limiter can cause more problems than it cures in my experience

Once the mix is done then I may try a limiter to improve loudness but I will not leave it in place unless it is adding something positive to the final mix

i.e. loudness "mastering" should be done (if at all) separately to, not concurrently with, the mix.....

@kodid: I would disagree that mastering is about making your track match some other tracks sonic profile, and I know that you know that is only a very small part of the overall process of mastering....
 
My DO NOT list:
- Never use any lossy compressed (data) audio format in your production. Ban all mp3, aac, ogg... Only the flac (alac for macs) is OK because it's lossless.
- Never compress by default
- Never use any stereo enhancer
- Never cut lows by default
- Never mono the low end by default

Keep it simple.
 
laurend said:
My DO NOT list:
- Never use any lossy compressed (data) audio format in your production. Ban all mp3, aac, ogg... Only the flac (alac for macs) is OK because it's lossless.
- Never compress by default
- Never use any stereo enhancer
- Never cut lows by default
- Never mono the low end by default

Keep it simple.
Click to expand...

any explanation for this? i mean, i m not using it, but i read here it is not bad to put on your master track, just to be a little 'wider' sound...(im talking about S1 from Waves )
 
Stereo must be addressed when mixing. Increasing the energy of the S channel (S1 is a MS processor) always leads to lose some impact (M channel) for the whole mix.
 
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OP, you are in my view kind of right in general terms, I certainly would not say your advice is bad and not useful it is useful especially to beginners, in my view there is some color to this stuff though, trust me I've tried everything from creative and happy to strict and obsessed, I have very very expensive gear and not so expensive gear, I've mixed top of the line mixes and garage mixes. The difference comes when you use the right tools the right way based on a fundamental understanding of how it all works. For instance a multiband compressor can do wonders to a mix if you know what you're doing. I can easily say that I get more quality from a multiband compressor properly used than from a standard limiter properly used, that's because I can create more with it. It's a creative process. As long as you do not fundamentally change the transients through transient design, you're just going to loop through the same results with your balancing.

Bad habits would for me be to take the bass and kick and just push them into the mix bus like crazy, or use crazy low threshold levels and long release times, put a cheap sounding reverb on the mix bus and let the whole mix sink into the noise floor. Other crazy habits would be to turn down the input track volume faders to almost max believing that somehow all the signal is still there or do some really weird routing in parallel without any phase re-alignments. Other stuff I'm not a fan of is when people don't care about the side mix at all, or totally forget to balance the weight of the L and R channels. Or how about learning the habit of always cutting and never boosting, that's the top most bad habit ever, totally kills your whole creative process and does nothing to improve the sound.

Generally I'm also not a fan of stereo based mastering, although under certain circumstances that can work well too. It all depends on what you do to the content when the content flows through the various processes. Although stereo enhancers can do damage they can also do good, I'm not buying that but disagree, more often than not they do more good than not. I'm using them and could not be without them.

Other crazy ideas would be to use cheap converters, cheap monitors, Cubase and stuff like that, never works really well.

Loudness is for me not a mystery at all, I have never struggled with loudness, or a very long time ago I did not understand what I was doing so I killed the signal and the volume went down with it. Over time you learn how it works, you become less and less addicted to golden rules, you stick to some rules you know work every time, because they are great, but other than that you are free with just a very sensitive ear that can easily notice sound degradation and find explanations for it. It is not so difficult, but can go wrong, also for pros.
 
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I've forgot the main point avalaible for both mixing ant mastering.

Do:
- use a calibrated monitoring system

-K-18 for general propose
-K-14 for both EDM and rap
 
chris carter said:
I see so many posts about self-mastering and I see all the crazy stuff people are doing to their mixes.

Trust me, I was there once as a noob, amateur, semi-professional, whatever you want to call it.

I get the frustration. But you are NOT helping yourselves using all these plugins to mastering your mixes.

Honestly, the only thing you should be using is a limiter for volume and THAT’S IT.

If you are using anything else, then all you are doing is allowing yourself to develop bad mixing habits.

Do yourself a favor and use nothing but a limiter and if you need an adjustment, then go back to the mix (after all, you have it sitting right there!). And NEVER use any of this crazy stuff, other than a limiter, to try and get your mix competitively loud.

There is NO reason to. Absolutely ZERO of my mixes require any crazy multi-band compressors or other voodoo maximizers and stuff to get up to volume.

Only a basic limiter. If you can’t do it with a basic limiter, then go back to your mix.

Stop incentivizing yourself to build bad habits that will only hold you back in the future.

Now, if you just want this to be a hobby, or if you otherwise simply don’t care about getting better, or don’t care about having success, then keep doing what you are doing.

If you want to be like me, or any of the other people here who mix records for a living and have stuff on the radio and on the charts or whatever, then stop intentionally hampering your ability to improve.
Click to expand...

I semi-agree. You don't even need a limiter to your mastering track. Proper gain staging and simply turning up the speaker volume is enough :)
 
To clarify, I'm not saying you shouldn't use whatever tools are necessary to make a record sound as good as possible during mastering. What I'm saying is that if you use lots of mastering processing to overcome issues in your own mixes you will never learn how to make great mixes. If you use nothing but a limiter for "mastering" it will force you to make good mixes.
 
KODID said:
what? I dont think ive ever heard a mix that sounded clean with a bunch of lows hard left and right? Maybe i misunderstood.
Click to expand...
Name dropping: The Beatles, Lee Scratch Perry for vinyl releases...
If you're in quest of the maximum possible volume, clean up the lows or mono them at the mix step. This shouldn't be a mastering thing.
 
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