Modern Mastering (Part 1)

Modern music has a mastering style with a very limited dynamic range. Limited dynamic range does not mean the music has limited range. This modern mastering style just means the quiet parts are nearly as loud as the loud parts. Psycho-acoustically, our ears and minds can still tell the difference between the quiet and loud parts. The primary difference is this mastering technique allows the quiet parts to be heard much better.

Plugins used in this tutorial:

• Waves Renaissance EQ 4 band
• Waves Linear Multiband Compressor
• Waves L2.

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A lot of home recordings suffer from three main problems. The first is something I call bass mask. The second is not enough sparkle in the highs. Lastly is a general imbalance across the frequency spectrum. Now for some more specifics.

STEP 1: The Stereo Mix

The first step is to mix your song to the best of your ability. Make a good effort to get the song sounding as good as possible. You would think this should go without saying. No doubt you have heard the phrase, “We’ll fix it in the mix.” Hopefully you have also learned that “fix it in the mix” is usually not a great idea. It is much hard to “fix it in the mix” than it is to just record it right in the first place. Some mix engineers also have an attitude of, “We’ll fix it in the mastering.” This is also not usually a good idea. Strive to mix it correctly in the first place. Mastering is not the time to fix problems in your mix. Mastering is time to take your awesome mix and make it phenomenal. You can’t polish a turd. You can try, but it will still stink.

Render your mix to a stereo file. Don’t be scared by the word “render” if you are not familiar with the term. Some other names in software and the industry for the same process are: mix down, export, and bounce. The goal is to have your whole mix in a single stereo file .Create a new project in your recording software with that stereo file on track 1.

STEP 2: Eliminate Bass Mask

Bass mask is basically what it sounds like. The bass frequencies tend to be overwhelming. In an attempt to get our recordings sounding really phat, we tend to pump up the lows in the kick drum and bass. This has the overall effect of muddying up the mix and making everything sound too bassy. Listen to your favorite CD’s. They sound nothing like that. During the mixing process you should keep this in mind. But lack of punch and muddiness in the low frequencies can still be a problem. Listen critically to your stereo mix. Does it suffer from some bass mask? We’re going to address that now. If you have no idea how to tell, follow this step anyway and do a comparison when we’re done.

We are going to doctor the low frequencies a bit in our mastering process. Add the Waves Renaissance EQ 4 band as the first plugin on the track with your stereo mix. Set up band 1 as a high pass filter at 30Hz (Figure 1). Start playback of your mix. Sweep the frequency up and down (slowly) as the song plays back. Find the frequency where the low instruments (typically kick drum and bass) are just starting to lose their low end punch. Leave band 1 set to that frequency. Yes, leave band 1 set to a point where your low instruments have started to lose their low end punch! This is where band 2 comes in.

Set band two to a typical bell shaped curve at 200Hz, boosted 2.5dB with a Q of 1.5 (Figure 2). You will see it makes a hump in the yellow line (Figure 3). Move the frequency down toward band 1 until the slope of the high pass transitions smoothly into the hump of band 2 (Figure 4). Now play back your mix and massage the gain of band 2 up and down from 2.5dB until you find the setting that gives you back the punch we eliminated with band 1. It is important not to overdo the boost. You want to give your mix back the punch we took out, not add new punch that never existed in the first place. Our mix sounded great before we started mastering, right?

The high pass filter of band 1 eliminates the low sub frequencies that muddy up our mix. Our slight boost just above that restores any missing frequency content and keeps our mix sounding punchy and defined. Your bands 1 and 2 should now look similar to Figure 5 (though your frequencies and boost may differ slightly).

Figure 1	Figure 2	Figure 3	Figure 5
		Figure 4

STEP 3: Add Some Sparkle

Here we are going to bring up the highs to help with sparkle on the cymbals and general brightness of the mix. Turn band 3 of the REQ4 off by clicking the purple light so it becomes grey (Figure 6). Then set up band 4 at 17.5kHz (17500Hz) with a 2.5dB boost and a Q of 1 (Figure 7). Listen back to your mix and focus on how the air sounds. Sweep the frequency down a bit just to the point where you can hear the “air” around the instruments a little better and the cymbals are barely affected at their highest range. Your bands 3 and 4 will now look similar to Figure 8 (though your frequency may differ).

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

STEP 4: Adjust EQ For Hotter Signal

Boosting EQ always has the potential to take a sound that is not clipping and push it hot enough to make it clip. The Waves plugins have a semi-automated way to help us monitor and resolve the situation. Play your track all the way through. Now consult the meters which will be showing some numbers and the red light at the top may be illuminated (Figure 9). If the red light is not on, the number in the box above it will be positive or 0.0 which means you had no clipping in the output signal and should skip to STEP 5. If the light is on the number above it will be negative (in Figure 9 it is showing -3.1). The number represents the amount of available headroom. A negative value means we have clipping in the output stage of the EQ. Click directly on the number in the box. The number will change and the output faders will be auto-adjusted down by the proper amount. Notice the faders are now set to the number that was in the box (in Figure 10 the faders are now set to -3.1). The output faders have been automatically adjust to the perfect amount to prevent clipping in the output stage without unnecessarily lowering the signal too much.

Figure 9

Figure 10

STEP 5: Listen And Assess

Play your track all the way through again. This time, do some critical listening and focus on the interaction of highs and lows within the rest of the mix. Decide if you like the way it’s starting to sound. It’s possible we boosted the highs (band 6) and lows (band 2) by too much. So decide at this point if you want to lower the boost on those two bands. If you do lower the boost and had lowered the output gain in STEP 4, then adjust the output faders back to 0.0 and repeat STEP 4.

Continued in Modern Mastering Part 2