Mastering "Corleone"

I recently composed a "Godfather"-inspired track in 6/4, which had instruments such as: live drums mixed with midi drums, bass, and a lot of layered guitars with a lot of effects as well. I recorded, edited, mixed and mastered this track (along with my two other compositions) by myself to challenge and improve my skills with composing, recording, mixing, and mastering. In this blog post, I'll be going through how I mastered my track "Corleone" (really basic mastering) and will be showing a comparison between the original mix with the mastered version of the mix.

For those who don't know what mastering is, it is known as the "process of taking an audio mix and preparing it for distribution," and it helps to unify and maintain the consistency across an album, all to prepare for distribution, (iZotope, 2014). The goal for mastering is to "correct mix balance issues and to enhance particular sync characteristics, and putting the final touches on it," (iZotope, 2014).

Setup

So in my lectures, I've been taught this workflow which I have taken on and it seems to work really well. I'll first import the mix and have it at the top of chain, then have it's output to bus 1-2. then I'll create a stereo auxiliary track (where all the magic happens) and have the input off that track coming from bus 1-2 and going out to bus 3-4. I'll also name that aux track SRC MST (Source Master). I'll then create a stereo audio track and have the input coming from bus 3-4 and it's output routed to my main outs. I'l name this audio track PRINT as I'll be printing the mastered version onto that track.

After that, I'll insert iZotope's Insight plugin, which is a LUFs monitoring metre on last row of my inserts, and I'll insert the Maxim limiter plugin above it. For these compositions, I've set my loudness levels to -13, which is the loudness level of the YouTube, just in case I'd like to upload my tracks there one day. Before I get into EQing and compressing and other stuff, I'll just roughly set my level to not play above -13, by going into the Maxim plugin, setting the ceiling to -0.3 (to avoid clipping/distortion at 0.0) then raising the threshold to around -13, just so that my ears can adjust to that level before beginning to add more things to the mix.

Process

First I'll start with EQ, as I'd like to EQ my mix to make it sound clean and it also helps me to find out which frequencies need compression or any other things.

With this track, I found the mix sounded really muddy not really open in terms of space. First, I gained around 6kHz by 3.5dB as the track needed more high frequencies to cut through the muddiness.

Around 2kHz, I gained it by about 3dB as that was the frequency range where all the guitars lived which were hidden in the mix. I also applied a wide Q when I gained the 6kHz and 2kHz area so that those frequencies weren't cutting through sharply.

I cut around the 940Hz area by about -4.5dB as that was the frequency range that was occupied by all of the instruments' mid-ranges, which contributed to making the mix sound muddy, and by reducing that, it made the mix sound more open or spacious.

I also reduced around the 285Hz range by -3.4 as that was where the muddiness of the bass was.

I brought out the kick and bass more by boosting the 94Hz range by 1dB just to add more punch in that low end.

I did very very little compression as I felt like the track didn't need any more compressing as it was sounding pretty tight and nothing was jumping out that needed compressing, but I added a little anyway. I tried out different compressors and tried different settings but it ruined the mix by unbalancing the whole mix by reducing certain frequencies here and there, which is why I chose to go light with compression with not only this track, but with my other two compositions as well. I also wanted to keep the mix as dynamic as possible.

With compression I applied, I compressed a bit of the low/sub frequency range as well as the low-mid range, which I found were overpowering the mix a tad. I left the high-mids and high frequencies as they were, listened back to the mix, and found that all the frequencies seemed to fit each other better, so I just left it at that and made no other changes.

After compressing, I couldn't find anything else to add as the track was sounding pretty good. Nothing was sticking out that I needed to fix so I moved onto the final step of gaining the track to match the LUFs level of -13dB.

I went back to the Maxim plugin and regained the threshold as the EQ and compression changes that I applied affected the levels so I set the threshold level so that it didn't go louder than -13dB.

The level at the loudest part of the song came to -13.3 and the quietest part of the song was at about -15.5. After setting the levels, I switched on the Dither button in the Maxim plugin as it's used to stop quantisation errors and generates noise, which I still don't quite understand and will need to do more research on that.

I then exported the track, then re-imported the mastered track to check the levels and it was all good, with nothing going over -0.3dB and the waveform still looked pretty dynamic too.

Listen to the tracks before and after being mastered:

Before

After

I've really enjoyed doing mastering and wish I did more things to the mix. It now makes me look at all my compositions that I've only mixed and has made me more critical of what I could change with them in the mastering stage. I'd really like to do more research on mastering as I know there is a whole lot to mastering and it'd definitely help improve the quality of my compositions for sure.

Bibliography

iZotope (20140). What is Mastering? Why Is It Important | Audio Mastering. Retrieved from https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mastering/what-is-mastering.html