Mastering Like a Pro!!! Tips!!!

P

Protools8

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for all those cats lookin' to get that professional sound, you gotta know how to master.

Mastering is polishing the track up for distribution by, giving it a good gain level while keeping the dynamics, and giving your record an environment.

First things first, you should have a great mix bounced down to a stereo track, sometimes stem mixes are used in mastering.

Headroom in the bounce -3 dB's vs. -6 dB's
Okay, I've read a lot of post saying that you should leave -3 dB's of headroom and others saying to leave -6 dB's for headroom. You should only need -3 dB's of headroom do to the fact that you shouldn't e.q. anything more than 3 dB's in your mastering session. If you have to e.q. more than 3 dB's, then you're mix just wasn't great to begin with. SO BOUNCE/RENDER at 24 Bits Stereo Interleaved without dithering yet!


Now, after you have bounced you're track, open up a new session, a Mastering session. pull up a master fader and you're song you are going to be mastering. Assuming that you have a mastering plug-in, Izotope Ozone, Waves L3 Ultra-Maximizer, and others. You can duplicate the track if you want to and set the duplicated track really low and add a little lo-fi or anything like that.


Polishing the mix, the first thing you want to start out with is your e.q. DO NOT MAKE BIG CHANGES, USE WIDE AND SUBTLE CURVES AND SLIGHT GAIN!!! start with a low-shelf Q. lower the e.q. in the low end around 40 htz as needed. Sweep for e.q. from the 120-200 htz range and boost it (again, subtle) If there is a little mud still in the mix, then loser the Low-Mid Frequency range ass needed, sweep it for the frequency, and widen it or narrow it as needed.
Roll off the high end around 15 khts as needed.



Now, Recording enviroment is made with reverb, plate and room reverb are the most used for this part of mastering, and are used very lightly. Just play with it untill you find the sound you are looking for.


Look up how to use multi-band compression and apply it to the mix.

Now, use you're limiter to get your maximum gain without distorting it. Use the thresh-hold to give it more gain, and switch between you're different limiting stlyes to find what fits your mix. Brick wall limiting, intelligent limiting, ect.


Finally, you should dither your song down to 16 bits with noise shaping so that It keeps the highest quality while lowering the bit-rate.



(I skipped some stuff because I'm gettin tired of typing. But I hope this helps you guys!
 
I think compression and limiting are the trickiest, yet most essential parts in getting your gain up to a nice, competitive level. Im a fan of the Waves SSL compressor and Waves L2 or Voxengo Elephant. Never used a MBC on a master, to me the mix should be good enough to not need one. Compression shouldnt be overbearing either, my attack is usually >30ms, medium release, 2:1 ratio, threshold set to 3-4 db of gr. Limiter threshold set to get about 3-5 db of gr.
 
A lot of mastering I do is for underground mixtapes and CD's people use for stage performances, etc. usually with their vocals recorded over a low quality 128kbps .mp3 copy of a commercial song or over a poorly mixed amateur producer's beat. I often have to do a lot of correction and/or enhancement to get the songs sounding "professional". I know in a perfect world with the perfect mix, the only mastering process would be to raise the gain. Sometimes my signal chain is as complicated as Waves X-Noise/Waves Q10/Waves RBass/Puncher/Spectralizer/Waves LinMB/Waves L2. That may seem like an insane amount of processing during the mastering stage, but if you heard some of the stuff I get to master, you might understand the need for so much correction and enhancement.

---------- Post added at 01:47 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 AM ----------

By the way, I like about -10 of headroom. I just seem to get the best dynamic range that way when all is said and done.
 
Although you describe some of the processes that one might undertake when mastering, you cannot just apply this formula to every piece of material you master.

Different tracks call for different approaches, some of the best mixes require little or no extra processing, some others require a lot of corrective work (if a remix is not possible).

Things like reverb should be applied at the mixing stage, doing this at the mastering stage is very rare.

The best advice I can give if you want to do your own mastering is to read Bob Katz's book Mastering Audio. This will give you an insight into the processes involved and hopefully make you appreciate that this is best done in purpose-built facilities with the proper equipment. Your bedroom with a $300 pair of monitors is not gonna cut it. With practice you will be able to improve the sound of your tracks, but you won't achieve release-quality without the proper facilities and experience.
 
Ok. No prob, I'm new here and still figuring out how this site works. I got an email saying that you replied to this topic and I wasn't sure if that meant you were replying to my post.
 
Ha yeah sorry mate, I didn't even see your post there when I originally opened the thread to be honest, was just before mine :P
 
crunkman24 said:
you forgot about stereo imaging...widening the field
Click to expand...

Ideally, that should be addressed during the mixdown process. If the stereo image needs widening or is off balance and all I have to work with is a single stereo track that the client provides, I use Waves Stereo Imager and/or the Stereo Expander in Steinberg Wavelab.
 
Cavvy Studios said:
Ideally, that should be addressed during the mixdown process. If the stereo image needs widening or is off balance and all I have to work with is a single stereo track that the client provides, I use Waves Stereo Imager and/or the Stereo Expander in Steinberg Wavelab.
Click to expand...

yea but when your mastering dont you generally widen the stereo field of the entire track?
 
I do ton's of mixing and mastering for clients and I use alot of the same software, but I also use hardware eq's and compressors (AVOLONS) I feal like it gives it that fat rich sound, and not that harsh digital sound you get when only using protools and rtas plug-ins. I also, use T-racks and the Izotope plugin. they are great when you know what you are doing. Try A-B ing the rack next to a major hit, try and mimic the sound. ATTENTION: you can also do much more damage then good if you dont know what you are doing so I suggest getting a pro engineer to handle the job and provide you with a industry sounding master. The industry expects nothing less then major level sound....

-AG the Hustla - Producer of FelonyBeats.com
 
crunkman24 said:
yea but when your mastering dont you generally widen the stereo field of the entire track?
Click to expand...

You can only widen it but so much before it sounds unnatural. And he means that panning done correctly during mixing should equal out to no need for stereo widening in the mastering phase. Some people might do it anyways just to do it, I guess its all up to the individual.
I'll do it during mixing on an 2track beat that I didn't mix and don't have the track out for, because usually its not mixed very well anyways.
 
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