Mastering Lecture Overview

This week I had an amazing lecture on mastering. This was probably one of the most insightful things I have learnt this trimester. Mike and I had originally planned to have someone else master the album as we thought that it would be easier. However we have been mastering as we have been mixing any way now things are starting to sound pretty good. We were getting nervous about how we were going to master it. Mixing is the most important thing when it comes to mastering. The difference in pay alone is a good indicator of this (4-5k per song for mixing and $600 for mastering). 

After this lecture we have decided that the easiest way to master it will be to actually do it ourselves. I have taken some notes from this lecture and written an overview of the main things I took away from it. 

I think overall the most important thing I took away from this is that there is no right or wrong way to master. This has been demonstrated over the course of music history. Honestly before this lecture I hadn’t tried to master many songs but now I realise I don't really need to add much more than what I am already doing on my master bus. I have been mixing with a limiter on the master bus on all my songs anyway! This and a little bit of compression is all we really need to do to ‘master’ these songs. In the lecture we learnt that EQ on the master bus is not actually necessary when it comes to making something considered ‘mastered’. In fact, it's better if you don't need to add any eq on the master. This essentially re mixes the balance of the song. Not something that you really want your mastering engineer to do. 

When mastering my own mixes I shouldn’t have to use EQ on the master print because I have access to the stems and therefore if I need to add anything I can do it in the individual tracks rather than with EQ.

Only using EQ when you have to is important. Sometimes there are mixes that need EQ and maybe the artist mixed that track themselves. This is where creative mastering can come into play. However this reiterates that it is subjective. Some people prefer more bass in their tracks for instance. I know anything that I have mastered. I like to add ‘air’ so if someone gave me a super lofi sounding song I'd probably pull up all the highs again unless they told me exactly what they were after, which learning from experience bands don’t do often. 

Moreover, during this lecture we learnt about some actual ratios and numbers that are very im[or not to keep in mind when mastering. If I am just using a limiter and a compressor then maybe a stereo imager then there are a few things to consider when setting it. 

1. Compressor at around 1.5:1 or 2:1 with no more than 3dp of gain reduction. 

2. Attack 2ms -20 (20 for Lana Del Rey vibes 2 for more punkish stuff)

3. Release is set at 1ms (mostly always)

After this is the brick wall limiter. There are some better ones. I usually use the wavves L3 or L1. they are really easy to use and are super punchy. This can be set depending on how ‘crushed’ you want the sound. The use of the brick wall limiter became popular during the loudness wars which ended in 2012. This type of heavy compression is not used as much anymore these days due to the ‘normalisation’ that platforms have inplace to make songs the same volume. 

Sometimes when working with really raw files and especially heavily distorted guitars that sound great by themselves but get in the way of other important elements in a mix. Sometimes another way to make this pop in the mix is to take out mid frequencies from some elements. This on their own makes the tracks sound thinner however when blended in with the rest of the tracks are clear and lush. It also makes the overall mix fuller as there are not too many clashing frequencies which can make a track sound muddy. 

So that is the very basic but overview of the technical things we learnt about mastering. Something else we learnt about was the loudness wars that happened over the 90’s and 2000’s. Essentially in the 80’s when digital audio was created we were able to for the first time visualise audio. This led people to realise that there was a limit to digital audio and that if something had MORE VOLUME that 0 peak db then clipping would occur. This also made people realise that they could make their songs just under that volume and make everything in the track louder so that the overall track was ‘louder’. This was made possible by the brick wall limiter.

Over the loudness wars we lost about 20dp of dynamic range in tracks in the peak of the loudness wars in 2008. However during this time we gained around a decibel per year in the overall loudness of music being played on the radio. This all came to a hult in 2012 when youtube introduced normalise audio which made all the tracks have -14 lufs. No track could have more volume than the other. 

I will do another post soon about the loudness wars because I feel like there is alot to go into!

I think I will leave this post here for today. There is a lot that Mike and I have learnt from this lecture and we have really made a solid plan to get this project finished by December!