A guide to home "Mastering" of your own tunes

[0dd]

Yes but the second take should still have the same relation of loudness between peaks and troughs. If it doesn't it shouldn't be called normalization, and if it is we should petition to change it The word normalization and the effect of increasing dynamic range just don't have anything to do together in the same sentence.
EDIT: The only way I could see it increasing dynamic range is if it would increase loudness by multiplying db. eg. peak 9db, trough 3db x 3 = peak 27db, trough 9db. 1st dynamic range 6db, second 18db. But, that again, I think is not normalization.

[Lost to the Void]

So it does fuck all to dynamic range.
Which is good, because it shouldn't.
BUT it does normalise to zero, and as yet we don't know if it accounts for ISP.
Either way, it's not worth doing.

[Mattias]

Yes, not worth doing. Echo echo.

[0dd]

Knife! Machete! Long sword! Scimitar!! Stab dem polite folks!

[Lost to the Void]

Ok, nothing from ableton yet, so I decided to test it today in the mastering room.

Rendered out some audio from a client today in ableton that I was to master.

The tune was peaking at about -10, so did a direct render at the tunes spec - 24/48 and rendered it with Abletons Normalise on render.....
At 24bit there is headroom for overs so any wayward peaks not captured by the normalise engine should not be clipped.

Loaded the Normalised audio and ran it through a TruePeak meter flat (Rated one of the best TP meters and used in broadcast for EBUR128 compliance - NugenVisLM64) and Peaks were registered at the very very loudest parts where the standard Peak meter is registering 0db, going up to around +2 TP.....

So not taking an account for TP ISP........

So, I think I can say - Not Recommended because it is normalising to literal 0db.... If you want your tunes louder just for listening - use this very mastering guide.

If for some reason you still want to normalise your mixdowns..... then use something like soundforge where you can set the normalise level (-0.3 is common, but I always advise errring on the side of caution and going -0.5db)

[Lost to the Void]

Oh, I might add, the dynamic range was not altered in any way, so there is at least that little bit of good news.

[Lost to the Void]

I think I'm going to put in a feature request with Ableton for a "set normalise level".

[Mattias]

Sweet. So then Ableton did not make a weird version of normalization and things were exactly like we predicted. I dunno why they dont provide that info in their manuals.

[Mattias]

It's literally like the difference between scaling up pixel graphics and vector graphics. It's short-sighted to say there's no use in it.

edit: took out the sharp language

Not sure if it was mentioned previously but yeah there is one use for it; to normalize levels. Of course Which is, after Steve's research established, most likely more harmful then good. It's bad practice in the end. A normalize to set levels functions would have had a more legit use.

[rsntr]

Again you don`t want to be ramming your gain reduction here. I try to never let a limiter go beyond 2db of gain reduction. All limiters are different, but I`ve never heard one that goes much beyond 2db without getting gacky.

This guide is really really great! There is only one point I'm not quite sure if I get it right. When you say to not go beyond 2db with the limiter, do you mean that it's ok to have the limiter constantly reducing by 2db or just the occasional peak? I suppose with source material that has still some dynamics left and hasn't been crushed in the mixing stage it's probably only the occasional peak but was just wondering...

[Lost to the Void]

Again you don`t want to be ramming your gain reduction here. I try to never let a limiter go beyond 2db of gain reduction. All limiters are different, but I`ve never heard one that goes much beyond 2db without getting gacky.

This guide is really really great! There is only one point I'm not quite sure if I get it right. When you say to not go beyond 2db with the limiter, do you mean that it's ok to have the limiter constantly reducing by 2db or just the occasional peak? I suppose with source material that has still some dynamics left and hasn't been crushed in the mixing stage it's probably only the occasional peak but was just wondering...

Well these days I barely use a limiter in mastering. It just sits there and occasionally tickles the peaks...
But the context of this guide isn't really focusing on the minutae of proper detailed mastering.
This is about getting a workable home maximisation of your own music.
I wouldn't recommend having a limiter flatlining on 2db of GR, I would be suspicious of a mix that would cause a limiter to do so.
I'm just saying even when going rough and ready I wouldn't push a limiter harder than that personally.

Outside of this guide I would encourage people interested in mastering to find a couple of limiters and really get comfortable with them. Push them hard and work out what their limitations are, where they excel etc. Go for massive gain reduction, get there incrementally, listen to what happens, play with the time domain settings etc.
There are creative lessons to be learned in doing so that will feed back into your production arsenal, and you'll learn a bit about mastering in the process.
Limiting is one of those knife edge effects.
The same limiter can be ninja transparent, or add tonality, sweetness or grit to a mix, or utterly fucking ruin a mix, all within a narrow window of change, depending on how the settings interact and behave.
It's worth learning a bit about that window.

[Mslwte]

I've been playing with the ableton limiter a bit more recently and pushing it quite hard playing with the release time (I think you mentioned it before, steve) and have been getting some nice fuckedupness.

[Barfunkel]

With what limited experience I have with pro mastering vs home "mastering" I don't think the former automatically beats the latter. Mastering is such a buzzword nowadays, so it naturally attracts some, let's say, less than professionally skilled individuals. Some of them are straight up snake oil selling conmen to be honest. I know people who use expensive analog gear + good monitoring, get great results consistently and charge surprisingly little. Then again, I know people who charge double that and more or less use some Ozone presets, with small Genelecs in an untreated room and the results aren't always so hot... Even some of the big boys don't always succeed, I've heard cases where reputable masterers like Dubplates + Mastering have completely fucked it up, and others as well who charge like 100€ or more per track and don't always deliver the goods.

I've personally had, hmm, 8 tracks mastered by people who charge money and I've been satisfied twice (in the sense that they sounded noticeably better than the home "mastered" versions). Others have basically sounded like the original files, just with a limiter on them to make them slightly louder. At least one of them had a mix issue that might've been able to be at least partially fixed in the mastering, I was a bit disappointed it wasn't addressed at all.

Regarding this, would you be interested in a double blind test? I have this track I made last year that came out on a label and was pro mastered. I did homemaster it then too, but I have better monitoring now so I thought I'd re homemaster it and see how it sounds like vs. the pro master one.

There's also another track (made by a friend) that was going to be stem mastered by a pro last year but the guy got ill or something so the friend asked me to do it,just for fun. The track got the pro stem mastering at some point, but many people preferred my version. I thought I'd redo that as well and compare the results.

If you want I can start a topic where you can both rate the mastering (or "mastering") jobs and try to guess which is which? I'll give them unanonymous names and otherwise try to make the test as blind as possible as well.

Just for fun of course and I don't claim to be good at it at all. The point being that some of the people who charge money for it aren't always worth it either...

[Lost to the Void]

With what limited experience I have with pro mastering vs home "mastering" I don't think the former automatically beats the latter. Mastering is such a buzzword nowadays, so it naturally attracts some, let's say, less than professionally skilled individuals. Some of them are straight up snake oil selling conmen to be honest. I know people who use expensive analog gear + good monitoring, get great results consistently and charge surprisingly little. Then again, I know people who charge double that and more or less use some Ozone presets, with small Genelecs in an untreated room and the results aren't always so hot... Even some of the big boys don't always succeed, I've heard cases where reputable masterers like Dubplates + Mastering have completely fucked it up, and others as well who charge like 100€ or more per track and don't always deliver the goods.

I've personally had, hmm, 8 tracks mastered by people who charge money and I've been satisfied twice (in the sense that they sounded noticeably better than the home "mastered" versions). Others have basically sounded like the original files, just with a limiter on them to make them slightly louder. At least one of them had a mix issue that might've been able to be at least partially fixed in the mastering, I was a bit disappointed it wasn't addressed at all.

Regarding this, would you be interested in a double blind test? I have this track I made last year that came out on a label and was pro mastered. I did homemaster it then too, but I have better monitoring now so I thought I'd re homemaster it and see how it sounds like vs. the pro master one.

There's also another track (made by a friend) that was going to be stem mastered by a pro last year but the guy got ill or something so the friend asked me to do it,just for fun. The track got the pro stem mastering at some point, but many people preferred my version. I thought I'd redo that as well and compare the results.

If you want I can start a topic where you can both rate the mastering (or "mastering") jobs and try to guess which is which? I'll give them unanonymous names and otherwise try to make the test as blind as possible as well.

Just for fun of course and I don't claim to be good at it at all. The point being that some of the people who charge money for it aren't always worth it either...

I`ve never had a bad experience with a mastering engineer once in all my time putting out records... over 20 years (I`ve had problems with pressing plants though).
I`ve had stuff done in a range of mastering houses, the exchange, air, alchemy, loud, Fluid, curved pressings and more
If I have ever had an issue for tweaks I talked to the engineer and it got sorted out.
If you walk away unhappy, like in your examples, then it`s partly your fault for not talking to the engineer.
In the case of Dubplates and MAstering fucking up, sure, everyone fucks up, but it`s rare an engineer that experience will fuck up as massively as you describe, might have been a pressing issue, (I`ve never heard anyone complain about mastering from D&M, in fact the few times I`ve heard people complain and ask me to A-B their master to the place they were complaining about, the proper master sounds better, and the person is usually of ill experience and is feeling a little ego burn from their music coming back altered, highlighting that their mixes were less than perfect), but even so, the client in question should have sorted it out with the mastering/pressing place.
Sure there are some sheisters out there, I`ve gotten remastering work from people who went to "I graduated from an audio degree this year and now I am a mastering engineer" type places, and ended up with bad masters, but a lot of this comes from poor understanding of what mastering is, both from clients/producers etc and people getting in to mastering.

" At least one of them had a mix issue that might've been able to be at least partially fixed in the mastering, I was a bit disappointed it wasn't addressed at all."
Your fault..... You shouldn`t send something to an engineer knowing there are problems - "We`ll fix it in the master" is the wrong attitude to have as the engineer might be one who`s philosophy is "do no harm" in which case they will assume the problem is an artistic intention, and leave it.

I might also point out, if you get your music professionally mastered, and then play it back on the monitors it was produced on, then all the problems you have with monitoring that the engineer may have corrected will sound "wrong" on your system... But that is an asside.


It`s clear from the way you post on this forum that you don`t think technique is needed for anything, and also apparently now, mastering.

That`s good, go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do, master with potatoes, but this thread is about helping people to get workable home maximised versions of their music, through the use of practical mastering techniques. If you want to start another topic about mastering, then please start one, rather than cluttering this thread with non contributory stuff, as it has been derailed way too much. At some point I am going to have to go back and clean this thread up as it`s full of off topic bollocks..

[Mattias]

Yes there are many shady actors in the market charging for mastering that just slams on Ozone presets or multiband snake oil with the mentioned small Genelecs and untreated rooms.

It's worth to mention that in a lot of cases where there have been professional mastering engineers involved that have been "unsatisfying" or "fucked up" it have often boiled down to five things;

- lack of communication (before AND after)
- unrealistic expectation of what mastering can provide to poor mixes
- poor mixes that is not truly "ready" to undergo a mastering process as well as bad recording / tracking / arrangement you name it
- the mastering engineer didn't understand the artists intention and vision
- the artist have a tunnel vision based listening system and thinks the music only got treated by limiting or massive removal of bass etc

I think it's very important for the artist to see which engineer can provide what they want. By default, most mastering engineers aim is to keep the original mix as intact as possible and going to great length at doing so. Which in many cases can baffle artists when they get the music back for approval. To them it appears to sound like only a limiter was added when in reality the engineer made tonal correction and tonal balancing with a variety of tools to sort of get the mix to where it was supposed to be in balance & coherency. In those cases it can be that artists don't realize that things were done until they A/B listen on more playback systems then their own (at the same perceived loudness). Or perhaps the artist wanted no compromise loudness out of their track so things had to be sacrificed in the process to reach that goal.

It can be tricky for both artist and engineer if no communication is established and or if the artist just accept the mastering they get back without expressing if they want a revision to suit their taste / need. Generally half of all artists want their music as transparent as possible after leaving the mastering stage and the other half wishes for a slightly more "changed" sound. It's tough to nail that without doing some talk about the music. Sometimes it works out great other times not so much. Some artists like Skudge makes it a thing to set a lot of sound and detail at the mastering process.

Personally I'm the kind of guy that wants the engineer to do what they think is necessary for a coherent och great sounding record, If that means they impose their will slightly on the material then so be it. However I don't really send my own tunes and expect them to come back altered sound-wise. Often they return as how I expect them to sound, roughly.

I can understand the dilemma of artists that suffers uncertainly (well we all do to be fair but...) and isn't as used to getting their tracks where they want, sound wise, at the mixing process.

TLDR; read what the fuck I wrote!

[ZenoSupreme]

After a lot of trails and errors i'm starting to get the hang of the mastering process. I'm using the master buss now, but I wan't to experiment using different busses for the mastering process.

So let's say I want to have 3 busses (1)kicks+bass, 2) mids+leads+vocals, 3) highs like hats and snares). has anyone got experience with this, and if so, is this a good way to start and what are some useful tips?

Thanks guys!

[Mattias]

I'd dare say it's better to go with traditional mastering. Meaning go over the 2bus, not over several buses (which basically is stem mastering).
Once you gain some knowledge about the basics of working over the stereo file you'll be better at identifying potential problems with your mixes (for you to go back and adjust).

It sounds like you do your home mastering / finalization inside your track project? Render your audio and dedicate a new project in your DAW to mastering the track for a more authentic feel.

[Lost to the Void]

After a lot of trails and errors i'm starting to get the hang of the mastering process. I'm using the master buss now, but I wan't to experiment using different busses for the mastering process.

So let's say I want to have 3 busses (1)kicks+bass, 2) mids+leads+vocals, 3) highs like hats and snares). has anyone got experience with this, and if so, is this a good way to start and what are some useful tips?

Thanks guys!

That`s essentially stem mastering, which is a process generally used by mastering engineers when the mix has problems, but not enough to warrant a complete remix.

I so no reason why you would want to do this on your own music other than to completely confuse yourself and the process.

Get your mix right and all you need is to work on the master bus.

If you feel you need to use multiple busses, I would say your mix is not right.


Also, what Mat said, if you are running stuff on the 2bus whilst also mixing the tune, you are confusing things.
Get your mix right
render it
"master" the rendered music.

[ZenoSupreme]

Tnx for the clear up guys!

@Mattias: Yess, I do this part in my track project, this way it's far more easy to go back to the mix if there are any problems...

@Lost: I was thinking about this idea because I have different instruments that cross the border of different frequencies. So let's say I want tape saturation on my low end (bass+kicks+toms+etc.), but I also have a lead + vocal that has some (not much, but still..) frequencies in the low end and I don't want to give them the same tape saturation in the mastering proces. or let's say I want it the other way around, give the lead + vocals + snare some tape saturation, within certain frequencies without giving the rest of the track the same vibe.

I see how it can be confusing, but I thought of it as an experiment as to create a different kind of vibe within my music during mastering.

[0dd]

Tnx for the clear up guys!

@Mattias: Yess, I do this part in my track project, this way it's far more easy to go back to the mix if there are any problems...

@Lost: I was thinking about this idea because I have different instruments that cross the border of different frequencies. So let's say I want tape saturation on my low end (bass+kicks+toms+etc.), but I also have a lead + vocal that has some (not much, but still..) frequencies in the low end and I don't want to give them the same tape saturation in the mastering proces. or let's say I want it the other way around, give the lead + vocals + snare some tape saturation, within certain frequencies without giving the rest of the track the same vibe.

I see how it can be confusing, but I thought of it as an experiment as to create a different kind of vibe within my music during mastering.

Well then I'd just buss the channels and create a paralel chain on the buss separating frequencies into bass/the rest and just put what I want on the bass chain. Why wait for mastering to do that?