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@semtek01
Please, sir, I want some more.
Hahaha ok let’s go again one last time before a swat team of mods turn up at my house.
I’ll try to stick to the topic because it has drifted somewhat.
Other ways in which you can help your premaster to prepare itself for a trouble free mastering.
One reason MPCs and similar samplers were so effective is that they generated a lot of artefacts in the decay phase of the sounds which made for the interesting textures you hear on those records. The key thing is that whether or not you’re working in iOS or analogue the decay is where the action is on a hit. So enabling one shot in your sampler or making your notes ‘legato’ by having them occupy the entire space in the sequence linked together, teamed with using samples that have some interesting stuff in the decay phase will fill in the gaps between the hits. Because if you’re making electronic music it’s easy to end up with quite a sparse track and the high peaks with nothing in between make for a very difficult mastering job. The limiter won’t breathe as it should and the more you try to raise the sounds in the background the more you enter distortion with your main elements. So make sure you’ve got stuff going on in between and wherever possible use sounds with texture and evolution in the decay phase.
One common problem: the producer only used one hi hat and it’s not got much shine to it. The mastering is forced to push the highs up significantly, note this is about the tone of the high elements as well as the level. If you want a fancy shmancy subtle but also razor sharp high use a few elements layered with a bit of counterpoint. You know, a cabasa, maybe two hi hat lines panned a little differently, some hi mid percussion like a rim if it’s an 808 or if it’s a 909 you’re either using the clap as a fill and the snare as a main or vice versa, and bin the 909 rim it’s pony.
The effect of this is the engineer and or you can pick and choose from which elements to elevate on which side and in which part of the stereo split (m / s).
Doesn’t have to be much just something here or there so you’re not stuck with a single hi hat line supporting the entire top end.
As a general principle if you want the mastering engineer, including yourself in Matt Colton mode, to have the option to pick out a particular part then shifting it slightly to the left or right or putting it in stereo phase-wise, although as before not with the phase delayed elements stretched too far either way, will allow the mastering to access the element via some m-s and isolate it. By the same token if you place an element so it peaks at a level unique to itself a vac compressor, no need for multi- band, can get at it a little.
Stem Mastering, whereby you prepare 4-8 stems (and take out a new mortgage on your house although your a musician, you don’t own a house) in stereo and present them to the mastering or to your own mastering phase is occasionally very effective. It means you would just sum the final stems in your daw and go direct into the mastering chain, or even better sum them in analogue so they get a trip out of the box. You then get to adjust the balance in real time while tweaking the mastering chain to suit, but having committed to a mix of some sort in the first place. We had some great results with sparse techno records that needed some special attention to the kick this way and also some disappointing results with records that were almost entirely in mono and couldn’t be salvaged.
Although, spoiler, nobody who listened to them ever noticed apart from us. The question of how something sounds on a system loud is moot in some ways - everyone’s off their nut they couldn’t give a toss as long as it’s loud. The system will also have its own limiters, eqs and crossovers which can do all manner of harm or good to your record. Mostly if it’s good and the mastering phase succeeds in bringing out some presence and groove it’ll do well, assuming Gilles Jérôme Moehrle (‘Peterson’), Quentin (‘Norman’) Cook and all the rest get behind it. (Usually the version they play on the radio is the one you gave them in a demo zip months before which is unmixed and unmastered anyway.
Which brings us nearly to names. What are words for? Rapped Wordyrappinghood in the 80’s. The answer is for selling records! Firstly aim for an odd number of syllables, someone in advertising told me this and the Madmen are often right so go with it. Secondly in the Information age our entire language has been bootstrapped by the ability of your os to read a file name. Avoid punctuation at all costs in your metadata, it’s like pouring oil on a fire. Your apostrophe will guaranteed show up as a clown emoji on some filesharing site. Misspellings and misnomers are built into the foundations of music, use them to your advantage. ‘Tenko’ is obviously meant to be well you know but a misordering of the letters will confuse the search engine and bring up your 128bpm houser with the Mayday lift. Long names are out of the question - after the dl site has added its own formatting you can easily hit a ceiling above which iOS won’t be able to load your file without some fumbling,
At the beginning of Lolita, Nabokov writes “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” The way the word feels to say absolutely obsesses him, and the sound of the three syllables deconstructed has a sort of retrograde perfection. So your title should be the same, say it out loud again and again, find out how it feels to say it. This is your masterpiece, champ, so give it a good slogan, although don’t call it Lolita unless you want the entire Internet to call you a nonce. You’ll get burning water and sugar (do the math, no bueno) hurled at you by some over-zealous activist, but then on the other hand your track has 3 million listens on Splatify. £3.50’s worth at least. Ever hear the one about the Loch Ness Monster.
Talking of haram, 96k is a very compelling strategy in today’s world of M25 orbital rave chips and solid state storage. The limit of human hearing varies according to the type of information it receives but we have evolved to be especially attuned to the attack portion of a sound. It’s what we need to be able to hear the nature and placement of the twig that just broke in the jungle to our left signifying the arrival of a predator in our midst. And like the jungle, you’re about to come alive and take him (your listener). So in short we can perceive information well above 20k in the attack portion of the sound. 96 also means the anti-aliasing filter which occurs at the Nyquist can be located at 48k and it’s a very shallow filter so if it’s located at 22k (for a sample rate of 44.1) it will also lop off some high end across the board in an audible way. The extra high you get gives you more detail and that is very useful for fostering separation between parts. You’ll also find that most of your au’, auv3’s and so on are coded to work at 96k taking advantage of the half-size cycle length. When it comes to detecting transients at the side chain of a comp or dialling in fast attack times it pays dividends. When you master you want to return to 44.1k as the stores don’t like other sample rates but from experience the benefits of mixing and summing at the higher rate remain intact for the most part.
Noise - desirable at around -59.9db pre compressor or similar. But the right noise. If you’ve got a 60hz hum in there you’ll find it’s impossible to shift and any attempts to zap it with Izotope or a bazooka or whatever will leave the harmonics in place. Once the limiting sets in the tone becomes more audible. Ideally bin the element that’s got the hum on or try zapping before the mix, once it’s there it’s there. Might not be mains hum though, for example the MPC60 picks up a high range signal from the lcd display which can only be removed by a character called Jazz Cat at the price of around £1000. So just use the RX950 instead and tell your friends it came off the 60. Just like all those sample packs do… not naming names but that’s not a 60 on them no way.
Everything’s for sale as a wav now if you get that far so that makes the mastering somewhat easier in that you don’t have to accommodate the impact of someone playing your track loud at 192kbps. You can rely a bit more on detail and less on level to get your music across on a system. As for the level you want your masters at, our guy used to come out at -0.3db on the daw to the files. It’s a good safety catch for making sure that no matter how hard some over-eager dj who ripper your jam off YouTube is pushing it you’ll still not go too far into the territory of pure noise and distortion, although sometimes that’s desirable. (From running raves I can tell you this for certain and I don’t know why but the worse the system the more the dancing. Audiophile sound just ends in everyone standing and nodding their heads. But a pair of Mackie tops and some good Gary Abletts can go a long way.)
Oh and finally distortion. Use it as follows: you want one portion of the sound to saturate and the other not, to create a contrast. So if you’re pushing your drums through whatever the magicians at Caelum are about to produce on Friday, you want to see the transient hitting the red but the decay just venturing back into the blue (?) we really need a colour for the ‘not red’. Which takes a bit of watching of the meters but it’s the truth, Ruth.
And finally finally. Bass enhancers: I’m suspicious, the Unfiltered one does sound good, admittedly. But the effect on the sound worries me a bit. If you’re synthesising a subharmonic at 60hz, which is a high-ish note for your booming bass to hit at, then your sub harmonic will appear at 30 and 30 is not a frequency you want a note to appear at. The og bass instrument is the double bass which hits bottom E on an open string, and so when sound systems were developed they aimed to accommodate a bottom E at the bottom. That’s 41hz I believe. Even that’s low though, a double bass has a lot more going on up top than a synth, like string noise and so on. You can even hit the instrument between plucks to create a snare drum. So really 30hz is just eating headroom and there’s not much a mastering engineer can do with that.
So instead write your music in F or G where you can be guaranteed a loud blast of the root note to come rushing out of the woofer at the right frequency thus negating the need for the bass enhancer. And we all know what happens to subs that go too low… ⚓️
And finally. Finally. Bpm: makes a huge difference to the mastering. Even eqs are sometimes described as ‘fast’ or ‘slow’, usually by people trying to sell them to you. You’ve seen all the readouts on the limiters. In short - fast track, not too busy, slow track, not too sparse. And if it’s at 118 but it feels like it’s at 128 then you probably have something amiss. Or vice versa. It should sound roughly the speed it’s at, if that makes sense.
Coda: as a litmus test load up H-Street Hokus Pokus on YouTube, mute the sound, and run your track with it. If it works you’re on the right path. If not, maybe not? It’s never failed for me. Enjoy!
@semtek01 DAMN!!! Epic Post! Thanks for that. As a newbe to mastering I’ll be trying to understand that for quite some time. I like the idea of mastering inside my DAW out of a fear of sounding too different when playing live as opposed to the sound heard on media (like CD/download/streaming/etc.) which may be unfounded. Fabfilter’s apps look really professional, but how do musicians doing DIY mastering avoid making things worse? I like the idea of Trinity having a reference track to compare to. Does using Fabfilter apps in DAW to create a master track and then doing an A/B comparison with subsequent attempts in Trinity sound like a reasonable workflow? Should one stick to just one or the other when mastering on iPad?
Thanks for this,. Great video, learned a lot. Kept reading about aliasing but hadn’t quite grasped it.
Specially loved the end where he says “don’t stress about it”!.
This is the best "I watched the video so you don't have to" comment in a long time, thanks for your service 🤝
Glad to be of assistance 🤣
The narrator in the video has a very soothing voice, very relaxed. I like that. I don’t need an over-excited narrator trying to get me hyped and sell me the stuff, I’m already a nerd if I’m watching a video about aliasing and Nyquist.
The video was super helpful in understanding the importance of the frequencies you can’t hear. I’ve assimilated cutting the very low end but not so much on the high end (anything above 20khz). Those frequencies, when they go on a date with distortion or compression, have little children and grandchildren in the audible spectrum area, mean and scary little bastards.
>
I’m buying you a beer for this analogy.
I can sense some trepidation about the whole process in your voice and that’s understandable.
Referencing against other tracks - doing it by ear is useful for sure. The automated eq matching is a bit of a quagmire (giggity) because you can easily find yourself with a some clear differences in the tracks that are down to your creative choices. ie after a few attempts to match the spectrums you may well end up taking backwards steps changing sounds and so on because you can’t get them to lineup. So in short don’t do it as way of finalising the master but perhaps use it if you’re aware that there’s something that’s not working in your premaster and you want to know why.
On the other hand what I do like to do is get my track in the cans and then put it in the mix with another track I like. Firstly it’s a good way to check the stereo width. Especially in cans. Secondly it does tell you if you’re a little light in the bass or heavy in the highs.
But ultimately here’s the thing: the best mastering is none at all. There are musicians who mix with a mastering in mind, leaving a bit of headroom and not overdoing the widening or the high shelf at the bottom so the mastering engineer can do it with their higher grade gear. But that’s no longer really relevant because the highest paid mastering guy I know uses DMG plugins and a Dr. MS on the master bus. They’re available for less than the cost of a single track from him. So you might as well just do those things that you know he’s going to do anyway yourself.
Or you slam it so far into the red on a desk or a decent saturator, I would recommend SIR for this purpose which is a hard clipper with the emphasis on hard, that the needle doesn’t move on the meter and the only thing left to do is cut at a 6db curve at 33hz, widen a little in the mids and notch around 200 if there’s some muddies, and then ping a little boost at 1k so the top of the kicks come through and a touch at 3k and 6k so the highs sparkle. Finish with a tweak of the m-s - I find about 66% stereo usually does it and then watch as Richie Hawtin plays it on his Boiler Room to 5m people. None of them know it’s your track and you don’t get any royalties because Boiler register all their audio with YouTube so if you try try to claim you’ll find they already own it.
Welcome to hell lol
aka the music business
Thank you for this! Fascinating! Very well presented and absolutely on point.
Is anyone using Grand Finale 2? I have Trinity so I haven’t looked into it much but I’m wondering it how it does with throwing it on a master bus or individual tracks in AUM. I typically use TB/FAC or other assorted apps but it looks like GF2 could be cool.
Move over Mrs Ghost, @semtek01 is my new favourite person.
@HotStrange I'm using GF2 - it's very good for a mastering idiot like me as I can turn it on and off to hear what I need to change in the mix, and the "Medium Master" preset does a 90% job so you (well, I) only need to tweak it a little. The metering on it is kinda bad though so use your own lufs meter after it, and it doesn't give the sparkle that Trinity does.
Okay, but what if the content creator doesn't just speak like a 7-year-old on speed but also gesticulates like one? Hmm?
I do swear by TB. FAC make some great apps too. Maxima is a 10/10. Thanks, I figured I was probably already covered.
Thanks, I may wait until a sale and then potentially grab it. I’m mostly doing more experimental stuff so I don’t need insane clarity or anything. I mostly using limiters to reel things in a bit lol
@semtek01 Thanks for that response! I’ll reference your tips as I proceed into Mastering (instead of just Mixing which is generally all I do). So what I’m hearing you say, filtered by my brain’s desire to see things the way I want them to be, is that matching to a reference track should be more of getting a song “into the ballpark” and not to try for an exact match. I lean toward this because I know I’m ignorant about mastering and want to avoid completely screwing up, and I don’t trust my ears to sense what is not working in my mix. I’m making music for myself and kinda think if it sounds good to me coming out of my DAW, why mess with it? It is highly unlikely that my melodic electronic music will ever prduce a hit, but IF that were to happen I could just have the piece re-mastered and move on.
How important is mastering (other than getting all tracks in an album to sound about the same loudness level) if one isn’t doing pop music? I’m gonna give it a go none-the-less, but if I take an “F it” approach and release whatever I like, what’s the worst that can happen? I suspect that one of the best benefits of getting some mastering chops is that I will compose just a little bit better and not create muddy messes that need fixing. One thing that would be useful (other than listening to artists I like) is getting an overview of what is done and/or expected in each genre. Such a reference would never be 100% accurate, but as a guide it could get the ball rolling. Anyone know of such a thing? Am I just dreaming?
-Mr. Trepidation
OK Mr. T (when you open Mr. T’s Mastering House and start boasting artists with questionable sex lives and platinum record sales as your clientele I want a free track, done by you not the intern ok?) you’re on the money in terms of getting it right for the genre you’re working in.
We chose our mastering engineers based on who had done a good job on music like ours or had a name in the same genre. So we went with people we thought could make our tracks sound like other people’s tracks. It’s not a terrible way of thinking but sadly it doesn’t really work.
Personally I would argue the mastering can only really transform a record every once in a blue moon. That is to say that whether as above you’ve prepared your premaster properly for the processors they’re about to encounter, ideally such that they can receive a kiss on the cheek as opposed to a full on headbutt from the processing. Or you more or less master the track before it hits the mastering with bus processors at the mix stage.
Personally I think that a staged approach even if you’re working solo is preferable because it helps you to commit to a mix which you then shape and chafe away at with the mastering implements. The danger of the bus processing all in one mix and master is that as mentioned previously you can end up regressing and trying to undo the complex web of sin you have created by using fifteen instances of reverb set to model the inside of the sarlac pit (looking at you @CaelumAudio same time next year?) on the same channel.
But for better or worse you made those mistakes along the way for the right reasons and they probably sound good so instead of questioning them or thinking of the mastering as a kind of sonic ejector seat where you sacrifice all personality to try and get that Dark Side sound (it’s not the caretaker it’s War Of The Worlds, those liars!) and end up with something closer to the mating call of a jellied eel @CaelumAudio etc…
What the mastering can do and should do is adopt a different angle and approach than that adopted at the mix stage. The emphasis being somewhat more on the overall result instead of those tasty parts which we all get stuck into at the mixdown with all those fancy @CaelumAudio plugins. (Although you won’t need any plugins on SUBscription it really does sound like the mating call of a jellied eel in the best possible way, go grab it! Then grab Beef and the rest.)
What the mastering can’t do is any of the following: fix your kick if it’s too low in the mix, make a mono mix stereo or a stereo mix mono, notch out any mains hum - I know I know Izotope Schmizotope but you’ll rarely see a mastering engineer deploy that because as described above a good one will be more concerned with the inevitable phase cancellation than the hum, which they may consider to be a badge of shame you must wear on your first record forever.
It can only very occasionally hit the jackpot when it comes to analogue saturation having a positive effect on the track. Usually the results people spend a fortune on, if they want that kind of thing, could be better achieved with some decent cassette drive on a Dolby enabled well thought of late 80’s unit. There are guides.
Having fought with mastering engineers in the past I have come to the conclusion that they are mostly a waste of Herman Miller chairs, but not entirely and here why. If you find one you trust they give you the confidence that your track is ready to go to battle with all the other covers of Smoke On The Water in a drum & bass style. And that is why you end up writing your track for their mastering style because you know that if you have to tell them the kick is too quiet they’ll deliberately place a 96db-o shelf on your low end so it sounds like a tortoise sucking itself off (@CaelumAudio?) just because you chose to question their decisions. So eventually you just submit your track with the kick 3db too high knowing they’ll crush the life out of it on purpose and you make sure you attend the session where you tell them Berlin are a great football team and you don’t think Bayern will do it again this year. That sometimes persuades them to press the ‘turbo’ button on the Suicidal Porpoise MK IVIV I V I MK 2 Irish Mode @CaelumAudio limiter they have in the rack. But not always. Sometimes they’ll just reach for the Focusrite Trakmaster and switch the Orban inline like they do for everyone else. But while you’re there you bump into DJ Camel Camel who loves the track and takes a wav (the unmastered one - he couldn’t give a damn) and plays it on his show that night.
So when you say should you reference with another song in a similar genre my answer is yes. Listen to the reference, hear how they differ and try to understand whether you feel confident about your own work despite the differences. The same is true of feedback - ask someone what they think so you can find out whether you actually feel compelled to make the changes they suggest. If you do it’s a sign that you don’t feel confident about the work so change what is neeeded to be changed such that you do.
With the exception of using narcotics. Although if you’ve got any I’d love a bump.
I thought at first you were referring to me with your Mr T's mastering house 😂
I was like, hey now! Although that Aeron chair comment hits a little close to home. 🤨
Oh my!!
I had so much fun reading that - I laughed so much - Thank you
Dear god please tell me you @semtek01 have a YouTube channel or a reality TV show because I could listen to this for hours. I’m trying to soak in some tips, but like a good musician you’re def a good hang and fun to just listen to. At Mr. Trepidation’s Mastering House & F-Off Emporium - free tracks for Mr. Semtek01. If you didn’t F up the track beforehand, I certainly will. But I’ll try not to. Just don’t hire me as the producer or I’ll spooge some JMJ-style synth appreggios all over everything until you can’t look your mates in the eye anymore. My interns can’t be bothered to help, but they make great coffee, so I keep them around anyway.
I’d hate to be performing live and have fans thinking how it sounds crap compared to the streaming version. I think if a track has the magic, it won’t need much mastering, unless it’s a pop track and then that has to have that pop sparkle to fit in with all the other cool pop tracks. A track that really moves you will be awesome just in a demo. Sure, it will sound even better with just the right mix of tweaking the composing, mixing and mastering, but those stages won’t make a boring track suddenly have magic. As far as I know that is (and insert other mealy-mouthed trepidation here).
A kiss on the cheek sounds about right. After I have listened to one of my tracks a hundred times and don’t hate it, then I think it is safe to release into the wild of its intended genre. Mastering should just be a bit of polish, not a complete fix it in post approach. So what you’re saying is make sure it is just about “there” in the mixing stage, and in the mastering stage it will be much easier to achieve the desired results, whatever those are. That makes a lot of sense.
I love me some Sarlac Pit reverb, but I never know when I’m creating “distortion and compression grandchildren” (nice one @tahiche!) without some serious hardware or software and even then what am I looking at? Squigly lines. But I rarely go hog wild on FX either, so maybe there’ll be less nastiness to worry about. My tortoise can’t do that but then I again I’m pretty sure he’s a she so what do I know? I guess I shouldn’t expect the mastering stage to fix my problems, and I can’t afford that limiter anyway for my emporium, so I will just tweak my sound choices and remix the premaster until I think I hear that it sounds the way I want it to. Basically make the track sound good enough that it doesn’t need anything special in mastering and it’ll be ready for mastering.
My interns might be able to give you a bump - I can’t afford that but I’m pretty sure the interns are stealing from me to buy their fix, which I guess works out since I don’t pay them.
Thanks for the tips!
hahahaha amazing response
At first, reading this thread, I was starting to build towards a rationalization to get Grand Finale 2 at the current sale, but then of course people had to start complicate things with mentions of Trinity and the like.
Because gas isn't just about losing money and piling up gear, it's also about the indecision and anxiety preceeding the inevitable purchase. 🎭