Great video! So sad that now days, people think that Mastering is just a default chain of plugins provided by some random youtuber that quotes.."This is what the pros do"
Duuuuuuuuuude, my biggest problem was always being like "YES!! WIDER SOUNDS BETTER!!" Then after a while I downloaded all my favorite Rap songs, threw them into my DAW and analyzed the width... to find out they're ALL basically Mono. Made me rethink fkn EVERYTHING
I spent $249 on this dual action retrol signal bigtamaster and you can bet your buttocks that I’m going to put it on every master that I do in my bathroom studio.
I'm making sure to avoid all these mistakes. For any struggling amateurs, I'd like to share some tips that stopped me from giving up completely. A form of parallel. Duplicate your kick, snare and bass tracks. (Easier than dealing with send track latency) Reduce the gain by 3-6 db on original tracks. Solo duplicates, then gently eq, saturate, clip kicks and compress. Gain them all the way down, unsolo, then slowly bring up until you hear things fill out properly. This allows more gain in mix and limiter before peaks hit ceiling and pump/distort. Bonus add transient shaper to original kick/snare to make it cut through. I struggled to hit -12 lufs before, now getting clean -9 to -8 lufs integrated consistently on bassy chillhop. Dave covered saturation and peak reduction years ago, it works. Doubt pros resort to this, but for a lost amateur it worked, hope this helps someone.
You don't need to parallel everything, and most often than not, simple beats complex unnecessary processes to do the same thing that could be achieved with simple, straightforward workflow
Thank you for raising point #4. Too many amateur home studio producers started dishing out all this advice about having to align your mixes frequency spectrum to some preset analyser curve and it's just cringe to see that shit being spread over the internet. I can imagine that, as a guideline, sure, that's what we want (hence we have plugins like Izotope Tonal Balance Control), but these guys probably heard such things and assumed it to be a set golden rule or some crap like that.
I know I'm not suppose to master myself but I don't have the budget right now to send the mix off, I'm so glad you dropped this because I really only have one chance using analog access's mastering chain. thanks for tips David
As always, thanks for the video. I’ve learned so much from you over the past 3-4 years, that I paused the video and tried to list the 10 that I thought you’re going to speak about. I got 6 out of 10. 3-4 years ago, I would’ve gotten 0 out of 10. Thank you for all you do 🙏🏾
That's why I mix into my limiter, cause I wanna manipulate stuff with the end result in front of me, and that way I can't skip the hard work of getting everything perfect without any other plugin rather than some licking compression, lite Eq and getting the loudness right with 0 distortion 0 squashing. But everything else should be done affecting individual elements and stems
All excellent points David. Platinum level information and perspectives that overlap into the mixing stage as well (even tracking to some extent). I agree with every single thing you said...particulaly the various ways the human ear/brain perceives music (i.e. sound).
On one of your Short videos, you mentioned processing and compressing effects. I understand the EQ portion of effect sends but I've never seen anyone compress them. I'd like to see how that topic is tackled.
Is it better to sacrifice -6 lufs For to be -7 Lufs But much better quality and clean master/mixing? Ps. following you for over a year and you have changed and still are, my whole perspective and skills! Lots of myths breaker 🤙🏼
Well if the difference is gonna be "much better" then probably yes. But the difference shouldn't be THAT much between the two unless the mix is not that great and you're already pushing by going to -7
Great video! What's your take on high passing and low passing in your master? I've heard people say you should high pass around 20Hz and low pass around 19Khz to remove unwanted energy and give more headroom for more processing.
Quick question about Mistake #3 - do you level match based on RMS, True Peak oder LUFs? Sometimes especially with saturation and clipping you end up with a much louder sounding sound which is the same TP. 🤔
This comment isn't specific to this video but has anyone noticed that RU-vid videos seem to be louder than they were a couple of months ago? Most of the time I listen/watch videos in my studio so I know the sound and levels. NOt changed anything but lately I've had to lower the levels on the videos using the YT volume control. Like with this one - instead of having the control all the way full I had to drop it to less than half to keep sane.
I think one of the reasons the widening is abused so badly is not only the availability of the tools but also the fact that so many mix on headphones these days. The wideners sound deceptively good on headphones because of the way the channels are isolated, one per each ear. On monitors/speakers, wideners don't create as powerful/convincing of a stereo illusion, if that makes sense. Conversely, mono-ish sounds have a lot more dimension when using monitors or even monitor simulation software like VSX. With speakers, I feel that it's more obvious that a convincing illusion of space seems to be more concerned with clever panning of "mostly" mono-compatible sounds rather than widening.
Plug-ins, Weiss, both eq and compressor; Unisum for sure. Acustica don't remember which one (tiger has everything so); Kirshkoff EQ. Smart Limit is the most transparent yet not the loudest. There's more but I can't think of anything else I'd need for transparent. Hardware SPL PQ, maselec both eq and comp,, Alpha compressor, crane song Titans.
14:13 are you talking for example reducing the subs on the sides? Anyway I agree with all your points (especially on the too much limiting one, man does it sound horrible!) I would have made one more point that you just touched briefly: trying to make a sh1t mix sound good in mastering. Mastering in not the place to fix mixing, as well as mixing is not the place to fix production. Mastering (and mixing) engineers are not Albus Dumbledore 😂
What do you think about Izotope 11 that does 1 mio things on the master track. I think it gives a good starting point but mostly it sounded worse than the mix itself.
Who has made the biggest mastering mistake on a plugin here? Who can top this one of mine? Try slapping Ozone Dynamics on the Master Bus in the postmixdown/postproduction stage and turn the HF band all the way up 28dBs and then try a DAW stock deesser to tame the transients down LoL
@@alessandrosummer Correct. I thought sheen was better when I was mixing ITB digitally. Now that plugins have gotten better in the JUCE Framework SDKs, HYPER Technology, etc. - I have retrained my ears to "think" analogue in the box/digital.
