Mastering Beats (without vocals)

[SORRI DENTE]

I see everyone nowadays uploading their beats mastered.. (normally I know that mastering comes after recording the vocals on the beat and mixing them, but for advertising purposes producers who want to sell online, master their beats after mixing them)

Anyway, I want to upload some music of mine for the first time (hip-hop beats), and I tried to master one of them to see how much louder it could get

It got much louder and everything sounded good except from my kick and snare..
Kick got less punchy and snare sound a little bit under the instruments while it was much brighter without mastering (other than that I think I'm ok with what I have come up with)


So my quastions are:
1)Do u master your beats before uploading them? and if so
2)Do ur kicks/snares become less punchy?

Thanks in advance

 

[Adrian-MarQ]

1) Yes
2) Yes

The decreased punch is probably a result of compression, which will be hitting transients first. I said yes to the second question, however, you can still end up with a punchy kick or snare on heavily compressed song. I've learned to go back to the mix to fix this instead of fiddling around with a limiter on the master channel. One trick I use is creating my own transient by making a copy of the kick/snare and using a filter and noise gate to get isolate the the transient. From there I can saturate or distort the transient and subtly mix it in with the original kick/snare. That usually doesn't increase the peak level of my kick/snare by much so limiting won't ruin it as much.

Sometimes I use saturation one a kicks/snares and that seems to help too.
Here is an audio example of results from the above methods on a instrumental I "mastered" (mastered is in quotes since I primarily used soft saturation and a limiter on a mix):

 

[Milo Burke]

Your track may sound a little louder and a little more glued together after you put processing on the master bus, but there's no reason to push it, particularly to the point that the sound of your track suffers. A few dB here or there shouldn't matter when you're hoping an artist will choose your track to put vocals over. And they'll want to use master bus processing after their recordings to make the vocals gel with the track better.

I would apply very limited processing on the master bus before uploading it for sale. You can bus compress for glue, but there shouldn't be more than 2-3 dB gain reduction. And use a slower attack if you want your track to still sound punchy. The limiter really belongs after the track is finished with vocals. But if you're sure you need it, don't hit it more than a couple dB. Anything more distorts at best and pumps at worst, depending on the style of limiter.

 

[Kalm]

Yes I do master my beats now for presentation. Unfortunately when you listen for a good beat the seemingly "Mastered" version is going to win by definition. Now when I give someone an instrumental, I give them the unmastered version (depending on the price point). You got to learn how to mix your music with insight that it will be mastered. That means if your kicks need to be a tad bit letter cause you know you'll chop of transients in the mastering phase, then that must be done. EQ'ing drums to stand out in a beat is probably the biggest game changer I've had (besides balancing appropriate levels). It's also worth mentioning to learn a good limiter for your beats as well. Limiters have different behaviors like compressors and some will do better than others.