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30Oct

Mastering Your Own Songs: Key Processes and Considerations

On the first post, “Mastering Your Own Songs – Yes You Can Do It, But…” I talk about the general considerations of the mastering process, different mastering approaches you should have in mind while mixing and mastering, and a 20-year mastering engineer’s true and honest opinion about why you shouldn’t master your own songs.
In this post, I will address the same subject but discuss the mastering process you should apply to your own mastering at home in a more detailed way.

MASTERING MULTIPLE SONGS INDIVIDUALLY OR AS A WHOLE?

Mastering a multitrack project in real time is a reasonably new technique; it’s not for everyone and is unsuitable for all situations.
So, let’s look at two traditional approaches to mastering that use your computer more like a standard digital audio editor. The more old-school approach is to take each song, master it, and then, as a separate operation, assemble all the songs into a cohesive whole.

Another approach is to assemble all the songs first and then apply any processing on a more global level. This combines mastering and assembly into one operation.

MASTERING PROCESS – INDIVIDUAL SONG APPROACH

Open up a new file and import the mix into a track.
No. Firstly, not all mastering situations require a professional’s touch. Maybe you have a live recording that you want to give to friends or sell at gigs.

If you need to process the right and left channels independently (for example, if there’s an instrument in the left channel that has excessive treble and you want to EQ just that channel a bit without processing the right channel), then use a M/S EQ process only on the side you want to tame those frequencies.

Usual Processing Mastering Processing You Might Want To Do:

REDUCE PEAKS USING AUTOMATION

If some peaks are significantly louder than the rest of the material, the chance of having a higher average level is reduced, as the peaks use up much of the headroom.

One solution is to add limiting, but another option that can affect the sound is to use an automation envelope to reduce the levels of just those peaks.
If the automation works on just a single waveform cycle, you probably won’t hear any difference compared to not reducing that peak. Still, you can raise the overall level once the major peaks are reduced. Furthermore, if you do add any compression, it won’t have to work as hard.

ADD DYNAMICS PROCESSING

Generally, you’ll use a dynamics plug-in for the track holding the file or possibly for the bus it feeds.

Multi-band dynamics processors are your best option; compared to standard compressors, they’re more transparent, because dynamics control in one frequency band doesn’t affect other frequency bands. However, some people like slamming a stereo compressor, because they can hear some ‘pumping’ and ‘breathing’, which gives more of a vintage sound.

Another popular option is a loudness maximizer plug-in, like the venerable Waves L1. However, in my studio, we use iZotope Maximizer. This processor type can significantly increase the average level, producing a hotter sound.

As a rule of thumb, I advise increasing the maximization until you can hear the effect working. Then reduce the amount so you don’t listen to it working. Eventually, you’ll find a sweet spot where you can increase overall loudness while retaining good dynamics.

No matter what form of dynamics control you use, it will affect the mix by reducing peaks and bringing up lower-level sounds. This is equivalent to having a more even mix and might be desirable. But if the mix sounds too uniform, reduce the maximization amount.

Peaks and valleys are essential to a satisfying listening experience. A loud cut may seem impressive initially, but it becomes fatiguing after a short period.

ADD EQUALISATION

You’ll hopefully be dealing in broad strokes — a mild bass cut or a little high-end lift for mastering. Many older equalizers are favored for mastering because they have a subtle yet pleasing effect on the sound.

Significant EQ problems, like prominent mid-range or low-end peaks, should have been fixed in the mixing process. If they weren’t, you would likely need to plug in a full-blown parametric EQ and tweak the individual problems.

Your DAW probably already includes EQ, but be careful when using it.
Built-in EQs are usually optimized to open many instances simultaneously, so they can’t consume too much CPU power. Mastering-oriented plug-ins, on the other hand, tend to eat more power, but it doesn’t matter because you’re using them on a simple stereo file rather than running a bunch of audio tracks and soft synths.

OTHER PROCESSING GOODIES

Some people often use particular plug-ins for mastering, like enhancers, stereo-image widers, etc. I tend to avoid these because dynamics and EQ cover 99% of what’s needed in most cases.
But I have found situations where a little high-frequency exciter helps add a different kind of sparkle than EQ.
If a mix has a particular direction, it’s often best to enhance what you have rather than transform it into something completely different.

MASTERING PROCESS – VARIOUS SONGS APPROACH

You can do an album assembly in a multitrack DAW. Once the tracks are in the desired order, you render the whole thing to disk as one large file. You can import this file into a CD-burning program to add track markers, CD Text, etc.

But let’s suppose that not all mixes have the same coloration. In one project I mastered, I had three distinctly different ‘flavors’ of mixes: some were mixed in a studio that probably had bad acoustics because the bass was too heavy; another set of mixes was very neutral; and the third set had compression applied to the master buss, and was already somewhat squashed.

Now what?
I sorted each type onto its track on my multitrack DAW and applied the same processing to like-sounding files.
The bass-heavy ones needed a different kind of EQ than the neutral-sounding ones, and I also added multi-band compression to both of these tracks.
The already compressed songs didn’t get any multi-band compression but did need a fair amount of EQ — this created a few peaks, so I added a small amount of limiting.
You should create crossfades, for example, using an automatic crossfade function where overlapping two tracks creates a crossfade or having the songs on separate tracks and adding fades manually.

WHAT IF YOU NEED SOME SENDS?

Most dedicated DAWs don’t have the option to have sends rooting.

If you need to apply a specific delay or reverb to a song you’re mastering, you should do it as a send-return on your DAW. Studio One by Presonus has a Song and Project option for mixing and/or mastering projects. We usually use the Project option for our mastering work, but when we need more flexible rooting, such as sending returns, we use the Song project, and all the mastering is done there.

MASTERING FOR VINYL

Although the market for vinyl is now minuscule at best and is still increasing daily, it remains important for DJs and some audio purists who regard CDs and digital audio media such as MP3, WAV, AIF, and flac as Satan’s invention destined to cause the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Despite what you may have heard, mastering for vinyl is the most accessible type of mastering you can do, as it involves only two steps:

  1. Find a mastering engineer who has mastered many recordings for release on vinyl.
  2. Present your final mixes to that person and say, “Here, you do it.”

Vinyl is an unforgiving medium, and mastering it is extremely difficult. Even decent vinyl has a puny dynamic range of 50 dB, compared to the 80 dB or more we enjoy with even the most basic digital media.
As a result, compression is essentially mandatory to help music’s wide dynamic range into vinyl’s narrow dynamic range.

But vinyl has other problems. There’s a trade-off between loudness and length. This is because a groove in a record is just a waveform, and a louder waveform will cause the groove to have a more comprehensive physical excursion. So, to get a lot of material on an LP, you have to cut the vinyl at a pretty low level.

Bass is also troublesome. Bass waveforms have an extensive excursion, and with stereo, if the left and right channels are even slightly out of phase, the stylus can ‘jump the track’ as it tries in vain to follow different curves for the right and left channels. We take concepts like stereo bass for granted now, but vinyl bass had to be mono back then.

And that’s not all! As the record approaches the end, the tone arm hits the groove at a greater angle (except with linear-tracking turntables), causing inner groove distortion. As a result, song orders often used to be created with the softest songs coming at the end of an album’s side so that the inner grooves would be less subject to distortion.

In the old days, recording engineers were well aware of vinyl’s limitations and considered them during the recording process. Many of today’s engineers were brought up in an essentially vinyl-less world and didn’t consider the problems discussed above. This makes it more critical than ever to use a mastering engineer who is an expert in the art. When mastering vinyl, the advice is simple: don’t try this at home!

CONCLUSION

I wouldn’t want to imply that following the abovementioned techniques in the first post will make you a mastering engineer. However, if you apply these ideas correctly, you’ll end up with mixes that sound better than before, and that’s the whole point. Besides, if you start working on your mastering chops now, you might discover a whole new outlet for your creativity.

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