Pt. 4 Mastering:

Talking about mastering to a bunch of none engineers is like talking to kids about sex.
(This isn't super funny, but why they and who did make this??? -schmootzie)



You don't want them to do it but you know that they are going to anyway. To make things worse there are so many horrible tutorials online written by people who do not know what they are doing. Sure if you are mastering music that is made with soft synths you can get away with it because your dealing with perfectly clean audio, but add a vocal to that mix, or any outboard equipment and things start to fall apart.
So what do the pros use? And I am not talking about the hacks that will master a song for 20$'s online but the real pros that can charge anything from 100$'s to 1000$'s a track?




You can get that big studio mastering sound with very little (albeit very expensive) equipment, and two very well trained ears.

1. A Pre-amp; this acts as the first gain stage and depending on its design it can help add "character" to the audio.

2. Stereo Parametric EQ; This is where most of the work is done, we already covered EQ's yesterday but I should add that different Analog EQ's tend to have different qualities based on their design which is why most big mastering houses may use several at once.



3. Compressor/Limiter; they don't use normal Compressors but ones designed for mastering that unlike the "brick wall" limiter plug-ins that people use for DIY mastering these compressors have a very musical sound and do not compress evenly across the frequency range.



4. Full range monitors; these are monitors capable of reproducing sounds from 20hz to 20khz (the human hearing range).



5. External DAC; these convert analog sound into digital signals to be rerecorded onto a computer.


6. Their ears; Although there are a plethora meters and scopes available most Mastering engineers (ME for short) rely on their ears, even when they are deciding whether a track is loud enough.



At this point you should be realizing why 100$s a track is a steal. The truth is the two things that digital isn't capable of accurately reproducing are vintage EQ's and Outboard Mastering Compressor/Limiters. This has more to do with the complex math involved than anything. Not to mention "character" can't be faked by a computer. The things that create character are just too random, like the imperfections of sound running through vacuum tubes. Sure there have been numerous attempts but no one has succeeded; otherwise your music would already sound as good as a Bluenote record pressed in the mid 70's.

But...if you are in a fix you might have to master something yourself so...
let's go through that list and try to find you some reasonable work arounds.

1. A pre-amp...well unless you have some sort of pre-amp emulator you are pretty much out of luck here. That said, its not the most important piece of gear.

2.Stereo Parametric EQ; Its actually pretty hard to find a computer based one of these that lets you EQ the left and right channel separately but you will survive without that functionality. Waves has a decent Linear EQ, Sonitus has a decent parametric EQ, chances are your DAW has something you can use, though obviously it is not going to be as good as the 3000$ dollar EQ in your local ME's suite.



3. Compressor/Limiter: Don't use an L2 here. Your better off using a multiband limiter (or a multiband compressor with a ratio of 10:1 or higher on the bands) set the compression ratio lower on the upper band so that the high end has room to breath. In the low end try using a soft knee (if you know what that means then maybe you're worthy). If you need to then use a second compressor/limiter to prevent overs.

4. Full Range Monitors: This is a "budget" series so you would only have these if you designed and built a pair. You could try using the KRK's I recommended in part 1, but don't even bother trying this with a pair of NS-10's.

5. External DAC; well if you are keeping it all in the box then don't worry about this one for now.

6. Their ears; practice, practice, practice.

Things to learn from the mastering process:
Having had my music mastered I have learned that when the volume of a track goes up so do any problems with sibilance, so use de"s"ers and keep your cymbals under control at the mix stage.
Also the compression used in the mastering stage tends to lower the volume of the vocals and sometimes it even hides your reverb so remember to put your vocals just a touch high in the mix stage so that they always stand out, even after your song is mastered.

I'm not going to touch PQ editing or any of the other stuff an ME does. Because really you don't care about that stuff.



In part 1 of this series I already covered what programs I recommend you use based on my personal experience(Wavelab...aka the program you see in most of these videos, Soundforge, Sonar, and Protools).



Hopefully I have helped take some of the mystery out of mastering here, justified why you should pay a professional to master your music, and if you absolutely have to master your own music hopefully this gives you enough ammo to do a half decent job.



With that, this 4 part series is over.
I'm gonna take a break from these technical music making posts for a while, but a more thorough music production piece is already in the works.
peace,
One Love