This may be the topic I get asked most about. How do I get my tracks loud? Well today my friends… you will learn. Im giving you all a look at what I call my mastering chain. Now keep in mind most of you are better off leaving anything considered to be mastering to a professional mastering engineer. For those who don’t know, mastering is the final process your track goes through before its ready for radio or for CD replication. Mastering will add the final extra shine to your track. It gets the overall volume of the track competitive to modern releases as well as using the mastering engineers techniques and ears to make your track sound great on all systems. Mastering is an art and it takes years to learn. Nothing can mess your mixes up worse then bad mastering. I do realize though that we’re living in a different day and age and people want to get a great sounding track mixed and ready to go quickly. When thats the case this mastering chain will give you a good starting point as to how to get your mixes loud, clear and crisp.
I use 3 extra plugins on top of the ones used in my “Mix Buss Settings” article. These 3 plugins are a multiband compressor, a soft-clipper and a brick wall limiter.
– Multiband Compressor -
Multiband Compressor (Click To Enlarge)
Certain times I’ll use this as my kind of finalizer/sweetener plugin. My settings constantly change with it and a lot of the time a may not use it at all. I almost wasn’t even going to mention this plugin due to the damage it could cause but I figured I wouldn’t be giving the whole story if I didn’t mention it. I’ll usually start with the “Adaptive Multi Electro Mastering” preset. I’ll bring the threshold down a bit until the compression line starts moving and then tweak the threshold for each band individually to determine the amount of compression each band will receive. Please please I stress extreme caution using this plugin as it can drastically alter the sound of your mixes. Also keep in mind I don’t use this all the time so its not a “must use” plugin.
– Soft-Clipper -
Ive been loving the T-Racks clipper, I also like Slate FG-X Virtual Mastering Processor very much. If you are unsure what soft-clipping is please read my article to have a better understanding. With this plugin I am just adding gain to the mix. This is the secret plugin to getting your mixes louder. It retains the transient impact much better then a limiter will so you can get a mix a lot louder while retaining the punch. If you try to get a mix loud with just a limiter you’re usually left with very little punch and your mixing sound flat and flabby. This plugin is the key to loudness.
– Limiter -
Limiter (Click to enlarge)
I always use the Waves L2 limiter. Its an easy to use plugin and sounds great. I usually set the threshold to -2.0 and the output ceiling to -0.1. I then use the soft clipper to feed the gain into the L2. Depending on the style of music and the clients desire for loudness will determine how loud I go. The L2 is basically just there to make sure nothing clips the master fader. It ensures everything maxes out at -0.1 and it usually adds a touch of that “limiting” sound which I like. Although I like to retain the punch of the mix with the soft clipper, I do like the sound of when a limiter is just crushing those peaks ever so slightly.
So there you have it, a little sneak peak at ITB mastering. Now that you know the secret to getting your mixes loud please please please don’t overdo it! With that said Even if you don’t use this as your final mastering chain its always good to run your mixes through before sending off to a mastering engineer in order to get an idea of how your mix will hold up to mastering. It never hurts to understand each process of audio production.
