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T i p s o n H o m e M a s t e r i n g
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Tips on Home Mastering
Paul White the editor of the UK magazine Sound On Sound offers a few pointers on mastering your own
mixes at home.
T
here’s a world of difference between what goes on in a professional mastering suite and
what the average home studio owner can do at home, but as more lower cost
mastering tools become available, it’s quite possible to achieve very impressive results in
the project studio using relatively inexpensive equipment. Certainly there’s a lot more to
mastering than simply compressing everything, though compression can play an important role
in mastering. However, the most important tool is the ear of the person doing the job, because
successful mastering is all about treating each and every project individually. There is no
standard blanket treatment that you can apply to everything to make it sound more produced.
Every mastering engineer has his or her own preference as to what are the best tools for the
job, but if you’re just getting started, I’d recommend a good parametric equaliser, a nice
compressor/limiter and perhaps an enhancer. You also need an accurate monitoring
environment using speakers that have a reasonable bass extension, and some form of computer
editor that can handle stereo files. The latter should ideally have digital inputs and outputs,
though if you’re using external analogue processors, you’ll probably be going into it via the
analogue inputs, in which case these need to be of good quality too. A professional may want
to start off with a 20 or 24-bit master tape or to work from a half-inch analogue master, but in
the home studio, most recording is done to 16-bit DAT. This shouldn’t be a problem for most
pop music providing you proceed carefully.
Most mistakes are due to over-processing, and the old adage ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,
applies perfectly to mastering. Don’t feel that you have to process a piece of music, just because
you can, otherwise you might find your master sounds worse than the original material you
started out with.
And now for the tips:
1
As a rule, endings should be faded out rather than silenced as most instruments end
with a natural decay. When the last note or beat has decayed to around 5% of its
maximum level, start your fade and make it around 1 second long so that the song finishes in
complete silence. You can also try this if the song already has a fade out, though you may want
to set a slightly longer fade time. Listen carefully to make sure you aren’t shortening any long
reverb tails or making an existing fade sound unnatural.
2
Once you have decided on a running order for the tracks on the album, you’ll
need to get the levels to match
. This doesn’t simply mean making everything the same
level though as this will make any ballads seem very loud compared to more meaty songs. The
vocals often give you the best idea of how well matched songs are, but ultimately your ears are
the best judges.If using disc based storage and editing programs, use the computers ability to
access any part of the album at random to compare the subjective levels of different songs and
pay particular attention to the levels of the songs either side of the one you’re working on. It’s
in the transition of one song to the next that bad level matching shows up most.
3
If the tracks were recorded at different times or in different studios, they may
not sound consistent enough
to sit together comfortably on the album without further
processing. Often a little careful EQ will improve matters, but you need a good parametric
equaliser if you’re not to make matters worse. Listen to the bass end of each song to see how
that differs and use the EQ to try to even things out. For example, one song might have all the
bass energy bunched up at around 80 or 90Hz while another might have an extended deep bass
that goes right down to 40Hz or below. By rolling off the sub-bass and peaking up the 80Hz
area slightly, you may be able to bring the bass end back into focus.
Similarly, the track with the bunched up bass could be treated by adding a gentle 40Hz boost
combined with a little cut at around 120Hz. Every equalizer behaves differently so there are no
hard and fast figures you’ll need to experiment. At the mid and high end, use gentle boost at
between 6 and 15kHz to add air and presence to a mix while cutting at between 1 and 3kHz to
reduce harshness. Boxiness tends to occur between 150 and 400Hz. If you need to add top to
a track that doesn’t have any, try a harmonic enhancer,high end EQ boost will simply increase
the hiss.
4
To make a track sound louder
when it’s already peaking close to full scale, use a
limiter. In most cases, you can increase the overall level by up to 6dB or even more before
your ears notice that the peaks have been processed in any way. It’s always good practice to
normalize the loudest track on an album to peak at around -0.5dB and then balance the others
to that one. Normalising or other level matching changes should always be the last thing you
do as all EQ, dynamics or enhancement involves some degree of level change. Proper re-
dithering at the 16-bit level is also recommended if going direct via a digital output to the
production master tape as it preserves the best possible dynamic range. Analogue outputs will
be redithered by the A-D of the recorder.
5
If a mix sounds too middly or a little lacking in definition
, I suggest using an
enhancer though , you have to be very careful not to overuse it, otherwise the mix might
sound too harsh. Keep switching the process in and out so as to preserve your sense of
perspective. The same applies to EQ and dynamics too - make regular checks against the
untreated version to make sure you haven’t actually made things worse.
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