Humod
02-11-2003, 11:16 PM
Here's some tips on mastering a tune!
Mastering is a very important part of producing. It's allmost impossible to reach the quality of a track wich is mastered while composing. This means that if you want your tracks to sound great. You will need to do a little polishing after composing/recording.
While mastering you need some sort of refference material to compare with. This can be just a track of your own wich you really think is mastered great, or just a piece of music found in the cd shop. Listen to it and try to hear how they do it. Listen to the compression, the eq-ing, the levels. This can really help you to understand better how to master your tracks yourself.
When you think you got your track finished from A to Z. And then i mean really finished. Finished involves the effekts, the stereofield nicely enhanced, Frequency's nicely seperated. (Read the EQ-Tutorial for info about eq) When you got this covered it's time to master your track.
What you might want to do is export each channel individually. Using Reason you do this the following way:
-Mute all channels except channel 1
-Now export it to wav
Now you have 1 channel exported ready to be loaded in into cubase or a similar program wich supports the use of (DX) Plugins. Repeat the proces for each channel but don't forget to mute the right channels
When you have done this you load all the channels into audio channels in Cubase (or similar program). After loading in all the channels you will have you'r arrangement in cubase in audio.
Now you can apply effekts such as the Mastering Compressor from Steinberg . This is a very good and professional plugin with a very high quality alghorythm. You could also apply some HQ reverb's to some channels. Or a nice vocoder on a vocal line wich you can record a long side you'r arrangement.
For mastering you don't want to use severe compressor settings because you probably allready have enough compressors in your mix when you composed the song. So only use compression when needed. The mastering compressor lends itself perfectly to compress certain frequency's.
It's also wise to make each sound (channel) as loud as possible using a limiter/compressor.
Also a well known studiotrick is to apply a certain amount of reverb to the total mix. Really just a little bit. You don't have to hear it but it will make all the sounds blend with each other nicer. What i allways do is i export the final track and then i load it into a soundeditor (Soundforge v5.0 in my case) and i look at the wavform. And usually there will be a few peaks wich are noticably higher then the rest. What i do then is, i select the portion of the sound (size depends on the sound, i usually select a complete sound) and i lower the volume. After i straightend the track out and all the levels are even. I will normalize it and maybe add some more compression.
Also a good thing to do is to check if the mix is also right in mono. To achieve this create an extra mixer and route the outputs of your main mixer to the first 2 channels of the new mixer. Connect the left output to the first channel's left input. And the right channel in the 2nd channel of the mixer also in the left input of that channel.
Now you will have your mix in mono. (Not really cos it's still 2 channels but they will be playing the same thing both :) But now you can check if there are any phase cancelations or other things that you might not hear so clearly when the mix is in stereo.
After doing all that, the track will be smooth sounding and will be playable on most systems.
I Hope this helps some of you out on mastering your tracks. It really is worth the effort and your music will sound better when you do it. It's even required to master and make the track mono-compatible when releasing commercial tracks.
Mastering is a very important part of producing. It's allmost impossible to reach the quality of a track wich is mastered while composing. This means that if you want your tracks to sound great. You will need to do a little polishing after composing/recording.
While mastering you need some sort of refference material to compare with. This can be just a track of your own wich you really think is mastered great, or just a piece of music found in the cd shop. Listen to it and try to hear how they do it. Listen to the compression, the eq-ing, the levels. This can really help you to understand better how to master your tracks yourself.
When you think you got your track finished from A to Z. And then i mean really finished. Finished involves the effekts, the stereofield nicely enhanced, Frequency's nicely seperated. (Read the EQ-Tutorial for info about eq) When you got this covered it's time to master your track.
What you might want to do is export each channel individually. Using Reason you do this the following way:
-Mute all channels except channel 1
-Now export it to wav
Now you have 1 channel exported ready to be loaded in into cubase or a similar program wich supports the use of (DX) Plugins. Repeat the proces for each channel but don't forget to mute the right channels
When you have done this you load all the channels into audio channels in Cubase (or similar program). After loading in all the channels you will have you'r arrangement in cubase in audio.
Now you can apply effekts such as the Mastering Compressor from Steinberg . This is a very good and professional plugin with a very high quality alghorythm. You could also apply some HQ reverb's to some channels. Or a nice vocoder on a vocal line wich you can record a long side you'r arrangement.
For mastering you don't want to use severe compressor settings because you probably allready have enough compressors in your mix when you composed the song. So only use compression when needed. The mastering compressor lends itself perfectly to compress certain frequency's.
It's also wise to make each sound (channel) as loud as possible using a limiter/compressor.
Also a well known studiotrick is to apply a certain amount of reverb to the total mix. Really just a little bit. You don't have to hear it but it will make all the sounds blend with each other nicer. What i allways do is i export the final track and then i load it into a soundeditor (Soundforge v5.0 in my case) and i look at the wavform. And usually there will be a few peaks wich are noticably higher then the rest. What i do then is, i select the portion of the sound (size depends on the sound, i usually select a complete sound) and i lower the volume. After i straightend the track out and all the levels are even. I will normalize it and maybe add some more compression.
Also a good thing to do is to check if the mix is also right in mono. To achieve this create an extra mixer and route the outputs of your main mixer to the first 2 channels of the new mixer. Connect the left output to the first channel's left input. And the right channel in the 2nd channel of the mixer also in the left input of that channel.
Now you will have your mix in mono. (Not really cos it's still 2 channels but they will be playing the same thing both :) But now you can check if there are any phase cancelations or other things that you might not hear so clearly when the mix is in stereo.
After doing all that, the track will be smooth sounding and will be playable on most systems.
I Hope this helps some of you out on mastering your tracks. It really is worth the effort and your music will sound better when you do it. It's even required to master and make the track mono-compatible when releasing commercial tracks.