Mastering tracks

[acewhistle]

Hi peepz,

I'm trying to follow some of Mike's tutorial (Creative Sauce) mastering tips.

In using Reference trax as your guiding point, I've noticed that a song goes beyond the -3 level in the master bus and I have to match the volume level with my mixed track.

Can I ask if this is ok to follow this tip as I thought your final mastered track should not be clipping?

Many thanks.

[Lord Tim]

I haven't seen that video of Mike's but mastering with reference tracks can be a little fiddly to get right.

My process is this:

Set up whatever tracks I want to be mastered in my CbB project. Send them to a Master bus.

Set up a second bus called Meters and strap on any analysers for checking level, phase, etc. Set the output of that bus to your hardware outputs. Set the output of your Master bus to go to Meters.

For all of the tracks you want to be mastered, set their outputs to the Master bus.

Then make a new track and call it REFERENCE. Set the output of that track to the Meters bus.

Import in whatever song you want to use as your reference and put it on the REFERENCE track and solo it. That will be sending the output of that track directly to your metering so you can see what it's doing.

Add whatever effects you want to your Master bus, the last of which should be your brickwall limiter. You want to solo toggle between your REFERENCE track and your regular tracks and use that as the comparison.

CbB won't clip internally, so the levels are mostly irrelevant as to how loud everything is hitting the Master, so long as it's not clipping the output. The HUGE caveat to that is that how hard you hit your mastering effects will dramatically change how they respond to that signal. It's generally a good idea to leave yourself a bit of headroom and aim for about -6dB before any mastering effects, but honestly, so long as it all sounds good and doesn't clip at the end, it doesn't matter a whole lot if you're doing the entire process yourself. (This does not apply to any external hardware effects or sending out stems to other engineers though - you definitely need to get your levels right with those scenarios!)

If you're going down to CD, set your maximum peak at -0.1dB. For online stuff, set it to -1dB. You'll generally want to aim for about -14dB LUFS for your master but... well, does it sound good? The online places who recommend that volume will simply just turn your music down anyway (and it's better for them to turn it down than to guess how to turn it up) so master for the material, basically. The loudness wars are over, so slam it if it sounds good, let it breathe if it doesn't. Just keep those peak numbers in mind.

[Bill Phillips]

7 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Import in whatever song you want to use as your reference and put it on the REFERENCE track and solo it. That will be sending the output of that track directly to your metering so you can see what it's doing.

I think if you mute all tracks being mastered except for the one you're currently working on, you can use Exclusive Solo to toggle between the Master Bus and Reference Track to compare them.

[Lord Tim]

1 minute ago, Bill Phillips said:

I think if you mute all tracks being mastered except for the one you're currently working on, you can use Exclusive Solo to toggle between the Master Bus and Reference Track to compare them.

Yep, Exclusive Solo is a great way to do this.