On the first post, “Mastering Your Own Songs – Yes You Can Do It, But…” I talk about the general considerations of the mastering process, different mastering approaches you should have in mind while mixing and mastering, and a 20-year mastering engineer’s true and honest opinion about why you shouldn’t master your own songs.
In this post, I will address the same subject but talk in a more detailed way about the mastering process you should apply to your own mastering at home.

MASTERING MULTIPLE SONGS INDIVIDUALLY OR AS A WHOLE?

Mastering a multitrack project in real-time is a fairly new technique; it’s definitely not for everyone, nor is it suitable for all situations.
So let’s look at two traditional approaches to mastering that use your computer more like a standard digital audio editor. The more old-school approach is to take each song, master it, and then, as a separate operation, assemble all the songs into a cohesive whole.

Another approach is to assemble all the songs first and then apply any processing on a more global level. Basically, this combines both mastering and assembly into one operation.

MASTERING PROCESS – INDIVIDUAL SONG APPROACH

Open up a new file and import the mix into a track.
No. Firstly, not all mastering situations require a professional’s touch. Maybe you have a live recording that you want to give to friends or sell at gigs.

If you need to process the right and left channels independently (for example, if there’s an instrument in the left channel that has excessive treble and you want to EQ just that channel a bit without processing the right channel), then use an M/S EQ process only on the side you want to tame those frequencies.

Usual Processing Mastering Processing You Might Want To Do:

REDUCE PEAKS USING AUTOMATION

If some peaks are significantly louder than the rest of the material, this reduces the chance of having a higher average level, as the peaks use up much of the headroom.

One solution is to add limiting, but another option that can affect the sound is to use an automation envelope to reduce the levels of just those peaks.
If the automation works on just a single cycle of the waveform, you probably won’t hear any difference compared to not reducing that peak; but once the major peaks are reduced, you’ll be able to raise the overall level. Furthermore, if you do add any compression, it won’t have to work as hard.

ADD DYNAMICS PROCESSING

Generally, you’ll use a dynamics plug-in for the track holding the file, or possibly for the bus it feeds.

Multi-band dynamics processors are your best option; compared to standard compressors, they’re more transparent, because dynamics control in one frequency band doesn’t affect other frequency bands. However, some people like slamming a stereo compressor, because they can hear some ‘pumping’ and ‘breathing’, which gives more of a vintage sound.

Another popular option is a loudness maximizer plug-in, like the venerable Waves L1, however, in my studio, we use iZotope Maximizer. This type of processor can greatly increase the overall average level, producing a hotter sound.

As a rule of thumb, I advise increasing the amount of maximization until you can hear the effect working. Then reduce the amount so you don’t hear it working. Eventually, you’ll find a sweet spot where you can increase overall loudness while retaining good dynamics.

No matter what form of dynamics control you use, it will affect the mix by reducing peaks and bringing up lower-level sounds. This is equivalent to having a more even mix and might be desirable. But if the mix ends up sounding too uniform, reduce the amount of maximization.

Peaks and valleys are essential to a satisfying listening experience. A really loud cut may seem impressive at first, but it becomes fatiguing after a short period of time.

Your DAW probably already includes EQ, but be careful about using it.
Built-in EQs are usually optimized so you can open lots of instances at the same time, which means they can’t consume too much CPU power. Mastering-oriented plug-ins, on the other hand, tend to eat more power, but it doesn’t matter because you’re using them on a simple stereo file rather than running a bunch of audio tracks and soft synths.

OTHER PROCESSING GOODIES

Some people often use particular plug-ins for mastering, like enhancers, stereo-image widers, and the like. I tend to avoid these because dynamics and EQ cover 99% of what’s needed in most cases.
But I have found situations where a little high-frequency exciter helps add a different kind of sparkle than EQ.
I think if a mix has a certain direction, it’s often best to enhance what you have rather than try to turn it into something completely different.

MASTERING PROCESS – VARIOUS SONGS APPROACH

You can do an album assembly in a multitrack DAW, and once the tracks are in the desired order you render the whole thing to disk as one large file. If needed, you can then import this file into a CD-burning program to add track markers, CD Text, and so forth.

But let’s suppose that not all mixes have the same coloration. In one project I mastered, I had three distinctly different ‘flavors’ of mixes: some were mixed in a studio that probably had bad acoustics because the bass was too heavy; another set of mixes was very neutral; and the third set had compression applied to the master buss, and was already somewhat squashed.

Now what?
I sorted each type onto its own track on my multitrack DAW and applied the same processing to like-sounding files.
The bass-heavy ones needed a different kind of EQ than the neutral-sounding ones, and I also added multi-band compression to both of these tracks.
The songs that were already compressed didn’t get any multi-band compression, but did need a fair amount of EQ — this created a few peaks, so I added a small amount of limiting.
You should create crossfades, for example, either using an automatic crossfade function where overlapping two tracks creates a crossfade or by having the songs on separate tracks and adding fades manually.

WHAT IF YOU NEED SOME SENDS?

The majority of dedicated DAWs don’t have the option to have sends rooting.

If you need to apply a specific delay or reverb to a song you’re mastering, you should do it as a send-return on your DAW. Studio One by Presonus has a Song and Project option to do mixing and/or mastering projects. We usually use the Project option to do our mastering work, but when we need more flexible rooting, such as sending returns, we use the Song project, and all the mastering is done there.

MASTERING FOR VINYL

Although the market for vinyl is now minuscule at best and is still increasing every day, it remains important for DJs and some audio purists who regard CDs and digital audio media such as mp3, wav, aif and flac as an invention of Satan that destined to cause the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Despite what you may have heard, mastering for vinyl is the easiest type of mastering you can do, as it involves only two steps:

• Find a mastering engineer who has mastered a ton of recordings for release on vinyl.
• Present your final mixes to that person and say “Here, you do it.”

Vinyl is an unforgiving medium, and mastering it is extremely difficult. Its dynamic range is a puny 50 dB or so, even with decent vinyl, compared to the 80 dB or more we enjoy with even the most basic digital media.
As a result, compression is essentially mandatory to help music’s wide dynamic range into vinyl’s narrow dynamic range.

But vinyl has other problems. There’s a trade-off between loudness and length. This is because a groove in a record is just a waveform, and a louder waveform will cause the groove to have a wider physical excursion. So, to get a lot of material on an LP, you have to cut the vinyl at a pretty low level.

Bass is also troublesome. Bass waveforms have a very wide excursion and, with stereo, if the left and right channels are even slightly out of phase, the stylus can ‘jump the track’ as it tries in vain to follow different curves for the right and left channels. We take concepts like stereo bass for granted now, but back in the days of vinyl bass had to be mono.

And that’s not all! As the record gets closer to the end, the tone arm hits the groove at more of an angle (except with linear-tracking turntables), causing what’s called inner groove distortion. As a result, song orders often used to be created with the softest songs coming at the end of an album’s side so that the inner grooves would be less subject to distortion.

In the old days, recording engineers were well aware of the limitations of vinyl and took them into account during the recording process. Many of today’s engineers were brought up in an essentially vinyl-less world and don’t consider the problems discussed above. This makes it more important than ever to use a mastering engineer who is an expert in the art. When it comes to mastering for vinyl, the advice is simple: don’t try this at home!

CONCLUSION

I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that following the above techniques in the first post will make you a mastering engineer. However, I believe that if you apply these ideas correctly, you’ll end up with mixes that sound better than before, and that’s the whole point. Besides, if you start working on your mastering chops now, you just might discover a whole new outlet for your creativity.