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I forgot to mention another solution for a solid master: just make the music in Auxy. The baked in mastering chain is great and recent updates have allowed for it to be tweaked: you can now turn it OFF. Awesome! So if you’re a synth and samples only music maker, why not cut out the bullshit, leave the tweaking for the tweakers, and just get some tracks FINISHED.
This comes from someone is more than capable of mixing and mastering from scratch, but like sometimes, I just wanna make music ya know?
runs off to re-up that Auxy subscription
Chiming back in, plug-ins that over the years have been attributed with mastering magic is:
1. Bark Filter
2. FAC Maxima
3. MagicDeathEye Stereo
Thanks for the feedback that’s really good to know.
Youlean loudness meter could help.
There’s free web services, not exactly an fx chain, but it might get you there… after a quick search I saw many more then I knew were out there, this is just a few. Several have no sign up just drag and drop. Mostly AI technology.
Landr was free but not 100% sure it still is…
https://www.landr.com/online-audio-mastering
BandLab
https://www.bandlab.com/mastering
MusicGateway - let’s you load a reference track to match your master too. Free distribution to streaming too.
https://www.musicgateway.com/free-online-mastering
Mastering Box - 1 free Master per day
https://www.masteringbox.com/
Ian Knowles Mastering
https://mastering.ianknowles.com/
Interesting, checked a few but not all you mentioned. Will take a look. 🙏
Depends what I want to achieve. Quick master to get some loudness for demo purposes? Trinity or Grand Finale 2. Otherwise, for longer mastering sessions, I use AUM, Auria Pro or Cubasis 3 to load the audio file into it (WAV 32-bit or WAV 24-bit), if it needs some equalization, I use Pro Q3, de-essing with Pro DS, sometimes Saturn 2 or MixBox for harmonic saturation, and a compressor that drives into the limiter (preferably Pro C2 and Pro L2) with YouLean LM at the end. But if the mix is done very well, I only use Pro L2 to add some loudness. It can be as simple as that. First and foremost it’s important to start with a great mix. Not a good mix. A great mix.
eeey! that's nice!!!
and they only ask for 20% of your music sales, 20% of zero is super affordable for me xD
oh free is only for 5 songs, meh
20% is a lot! And it has to be capped, right?
I didn’t see anyone mention “Trinity” in this thread. Anyone tried it, and/or have any feedback on it?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trinity-audio-mastering/id6444727870
I’ve mentioned Trinity in my post. It’s a great all in one mastering tool where you can quickly get a great sound out of your mix. From all the “all in one” mastering applications available, I think Trinity is the best one you can get. If you do it right, you can achieve some “analog” sounding masters with it. And for the price I would say this is a must have.
Hey @Edward_Alexander, I've been experimenting with Trinity recently and it may just replace my beloved Tonebooster & DDMF apps - the ability to load a reference track and have a visual of the differences on the spectrum analyzer (which has a built-in eq for making adjustments) is a step-up for mastering on iDevices.
I was about to say..How could Trinity Audio Mastering not be mentioned. But, until we get the REAL Lurseen suite..this does a good job
So for an all in one mastering tool, has Trinity given Grand finale 2 a run for money or are they on the same level, just preference??( like TB and FF?)
Most compelling argument in one reply for a mastering tool. I am sold. Thanks
Trinity is amazing value, really great quality. But, now that I've got into mastering in-DAW I can't go back to the back and forth between mix and master. I'm making do with Grand Finale 2 for now because I can turn it off for most of the process, turn it on at the end and instantly hear where I need to adjust the mix.
Side note: Richter as the compressor on your master is surprisingly good glue.
For all-in-one mastering on iOS ..Trinity wins that easily
I must try this!!
It’s been my go to mastering app since it came out. Sometimes I do still do mastering in C3 with TB apps or the C3 plugins, but sometimes it’s just easier with Trinity. Especially if you like to screen record jams in AUM/Koala/etc that could potentially be releasable with some mastering.
That’s my main use for it. If I’m doing tracks in standalone apps like Koala, Samplr, etc. it’s so much easier that way.
I couldn’t agree more. For quick demos I use Trinity. Otherwise I use AUM with a bunch of AUv3s like the FabFilter plug-ins, TB, YouLean, MixBox etc.
Fabfilter Pro Q3 is an amazing plug-in. You can do almost everything you need to in here as far as m-s, dynamic eq and general eq needs for mastering are concerned.
Unfiltered Needlepoint is a bit of a curveball but you can get a lot out of it at the mastering phase. A bit of dither from the noise and dust set to ~ minus 60db, and the compressor is a very good I find for a quick fix levelling and pushing of the sound. The ageing features can help to give your track a bit of flavour but they’re quite subtle so it’s nothing too heavy as long as you set them right. The “age” setting itself is good as a tilt or high-pass to clean up the bass end, set to around 10% it seems to clear a few artefacts below 30hz or so.
Dotec Dee Pop Max on the other hand is the nuclear option for limiting and auto-gain make up but I like what it does generally. Again set to a low setting it works perfectly well as the last link in the chain.
Finally I also quite like the stock AUM plugins for m-s balance and peak zapping limiter. Very vanilla but completely functional and nothing fancy under the hood to confuse you.
Multi-Band compression is cool if you want a modern wall of sound approach but I prefer a dynamic eq in Fab3 set to gain -6 but pushing upwards on the transients to give a punchy but transparent sound. Alternatively use a high pass at 90hz but a bell giving +6 lower down to achieve a similar effect. Multi-Band stuff in general introduces quite a lot of phase issues, especiallly at high settings, so get your mix right first and then you won’t really need it.
Sometimes good to use these tools as a way of understanding what’s missing in the balance of your mix and then correcting the levels so you can shed the plugins. In the end if you can manage with 2-3 links max in the chain that’s desirable. Once you pile the processing on top of itself it starts to interact in ways you lose track of but ideally you want to have a grasp on what every control in the mastering chain is contributing and whether it’s doing too much and or can be replaced by a quick rebalance. That can be a plus as well though, identify the knob that’s making everything push or pull in different directions, a kind of aural macro (tm) and grab it ideally with your eyes closed then tweak. When you open them you may be surprised at how much or little you moved it.
Eyes closed, trust me on this. Prevents you from failing in 4.5 on everything because it’s your lucky number. (I do this without even thinking but I won’t tell you what the number is in case it’s somehow magical.)
In terms of your premaster you don’t want to be too loud or too quiet. Try to peak near to zero on the db scale but your rms should be -3 or -3.5 ideally. If you’re making dance music and you’re confident with your Nyquists and so on don’t discount a touch, just a little, of sample rate reduction to simulate some older digital gear. We used to use a very well known mastering studio in Berlin for our lacquers and they had some great gear like a racked up German desk module which did a kind of unique high passed inverse side chain. I’ll try to remember. Someone on here might also know. But anyway the final thing in the whole chain was this obscure old digital delay which was set to passthru. It just lopped a couple of the very high frequencies off, and if you boost 30k with a high shelf and then go into a bit of sample rate reduction, for example RX950 set to 22000khz, you get a nice bright high end without any of the sloppy super-aural frequencies occupying the headroom. Not the one if you’re recording a Renaissance choir but if you want to sound like Metalheadz in ‘95 might be worth a punt.
But as I mentioned, if you’re mastering your own stuff go back to the mix where necessary and make the correction there so you can ease off on the heavy duty mastering gear. Also that Lurssen console sim is, to my ears, absolutely useless. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
When it comes to correcting your mix, generally the following is the solution. Select all bar the kick and reduce by 6db then push the bass up so it has plenty of level alongside the kick. What’s left in the headroom you can use to nudge the other elements but don’t be afraid if your mixer resembles a two pronged ‘L’ shape with the kick and the bass to the left up at zero and everything else at -12db sending to the fx busses to claw back some presence using the reverb and delay. Sometimes it’s just like that. Again, not applicable if you’re recording a Harpsichord - Lute duet by anonymous composer who couldn’t use her name because she was a woman.
If your music is heavily sample based remember the samples all have been part of a mixdown elsewhere at some point so they’ve got reverb and delay on them, maybe. So don’t worry about leaving those bits dry because in reality they’re already wet. I see a lot of people adding a big slapping room reverb to a break which already has the same effect on it from the last record it was used on. It makes things a lot harder. And as an aside when it comes to reverb and to delay running a bounce of the wet part in audio alongside the dry can give you a lot of flexibility in terms of gating it and cleaning up late feedback loops that are muddying the elements in a subsequent sound. It’s a trick Optical espouses so it must be right.
Same applies for compression - they’re already compressed, many times over. So it’s probably not doing anything, although if you use an eq on your sidechain for the kick make sure it offers high pass (110 or 220 usually work) AND low pass (start at 10k and reduce). You want the bass end. To have some extra lunch but also you want the top end to crack through, so really you’re compressing the mid-range. Works. Eddie Bazile trick (google him). Eddie also espouses starting your channel strip with a limiter a la SIR. It’s a bit of a drastic approach but if you’re making Dubstep especially and you want that enormous sound starting with the limiter pushing +6 or +12 into the ceiling will give you a big fat saturated sound to play with.
And finally (I promise) get the arrange right and everything else will follow. Again - you can go back and tweak if you get to the mastering and you can’t get the piano and the guitar that both play a G min7 + 9 chord that land in the same octave on the 1 to sound any good. Just delete one of them. Deletion is completion.
If you’re programming sampled drums and you can’t get them to sit properly at the mastering take a close look at the start and end points on the samples. If you crop too close to the transient you’ll miss a bit of the attack phase on your sound while the sampler wakes up and gets to work delivering the hit. A couple of samples length (ie milliseconds) extra before the hit might solve your problem. Or it could be your soft sampler is lopping off the beginning of your sound to save memory. EXS24 used to do this. Try putting the kick and snare in audio if in doubt or use a drum replacer like SPL. With the latter you get some extra control over when the sound hits which is also helpful as when it comes to the kick you might want both the extra samples range before it hits but also for it to land fractionally before the rest of the sounds that are hitting on the downbeat - it’s where the action is let’s be honest. One benefit of earlier computers was that they couldn’t deliver all the data for the various samples in the same microsecond package so you got a slightly seperated selection of sounds. S s s. S.
So really what I’m saying is that the notion of a mastering phase when you’re mastering your own tracks is quite old fashioned. It’s a problem solving phase which includes a bit of mastering. We used to go to the mastering studio, put the most important tracks on the huge PMCs and then immediately realise what was wrong with them and give the engineer the interludes while we sat in the office changing the sounds. Quickest way to solve anything is just use a different sound always. It would end in a slightly tense showdown while we auditioned 808s and he sat there irritably twiddling his thumbs so in short taking the idea of a definitive mastering phase out of the equation and replacing it with a correction phase is quite prescient. In other fields such as classical mastering has always been more like that. Isolating a ‘silent but deadly’ in the audience which is audible only to the one reviewer who covers your stuff. And the mixdown in classical is often about finding a church that doesn’t lie under a flight path and standing outside shouting piss off at the jackdaws who are cawing all over your rendition of Ave Maria. ‘Ave that birdface!
Thanks for attending my TED talk. Don’t ban me please lol.
(And if you try all the above and the masters just aren’t sounding that good maybe it’s the track? Write a few more and when you strike gold you won’t need any fx).
@semtek01 Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on the subject, really interesting stuff. One of those posts I will be saving somewhere for future reference.
Very good info!
@semtek01
A very generous post, thank you.
Excellent TED talk. A+++++
Thanks for the lovely feedback! It’s great to connect with likeminded people on here.
OK so here’s the weird German racking of a desk channel which contains that mental shelving compressor.
Here’s what it says:
“The TM215b comes with a LF attack control that works like some kind of low frequency soft knee function. Unlike the well known soft knee, lf attack affects the wave form of the bass signal when the limiter kicks in. The pot determines the frequency where the smoothing takes place. This means that a higher setting is not necessarily the better choice. If attack distortion appears, just find the best setting for the particular problem.”
I don’t have a clue what that means if I’m honest but it sounded great at the time. Like a high pass on the sidechain but somehow more transparent.
@brambos emulation? It sounds cool!
Anyway re stereo and mono: generally clubs come out of a left or a right if they’re in mono, most of them don’t sum to mono. That’s something only a very high end venue would do.
So your main issue is having elements that are panned too far left or right.
As a general rule, personally, if it’s modern music and not deliberately wacky I’ll pan my drums maximum 15 points left or right logic. That’s about 15 left and right for the toms, 7 or 8 left or right for the hats and then on the opposite side the cabasa, 5 each way for the percs like the rim and so on.
Crash cymbals! Use them. The simplest and best way to introduce a new section. And to add some life to the high end along with the ride.
And then maybe a couple of points either way for the synths and so on. The width comes principally from reverbs. Your issue is when you have for example a ping pong delay which is set to max width because then in a mono system which only uses one channel your track suddenly sheds a few elements. So reign in the hard panned L-R effects and that includes phase effects that have a stereo component like a wide chorus, and focus on using quality short reverbs with plenty of depth. Including on the bass. When anyone tells you not to use verb on the bass produce any one of your favourite records. You can get fancy and cut the low on the wet but honestly it’s there for a reason. Just a touch but dry bass is no bueno. Not the same if it’s ‘87 and you’re recording on a 4-track, the noise floor and the crosstalk literally filled in for the lack of fx units.
Finally I was reminded that the speakers they monitor on at the studio where we used to master are the big Genelecs but they barely get a look in because they’re far too loud and the courtyard outside can’t take it. So mainly they monitor on 8010As which I believe are the best possible compromise when it comes to studio grade monitoring and grot box reference. Maybe check your stereo on the cans.
Finally don’t discount the option of bouncing to a good quality cassette deck. There isn’t a plug-in that I’ve come across so far which models the tape compression and the clean sound of a good deck. Tape compression done right js up there with some of the best vca compressors you’ll find. Double dipping where you run in twice on a subtle setting also works well for thickening the sound. And that goes for other gear as well. Again it’s something that digital doesn’t quite permit. Or maybe I just need to try it.
Good luck!