Hi there, my name is Jonathan Wyner.
I'm here at iZotope in our
critical listening room at the Cambridge campus.
Welcome to Episode 1 of our masterclass we're calling
Are You Listening?
and this first week we're gonna be talking about audio mastering basics.
I'm gonna spend a little time kind of laying out a little bit about what mastering is
what the discipline is and hopefully we'll provide a little context for what
we'll be talking about in subsequent episodes.
I invite you to look at our website take a look at all of our blogs, other educational materials
I expect everybody's here because they want to understand either how to make
their stuff sound better or how to get it out into the world in good shape
which is maybe a lead into what mastering is in the first place
so I hope you find it interesting let's dive right into audio mastering basics
Before I start spinning out lots and lots of words about mastering let's do a
little listening.
We've got some examples for you to listen to.
When you're engaged in mastering
ultimately you're trying to make decisions
about whether to change something
whether it needs to sound different in one way or another so
listen to these examples and see what you notice
So what did you just hear?
if you listened to the first version of the
song and the second version of the song they sound different.
In what way?
Obviously one's louder than the other but which one is set to the right level?
and is the louder one better?
and in what way are they different?
these are some of the things that we always need to be thinking about in mastering
The third version you heard was the mastered version.
I'd like you to go back and compare the unmastered to the mastered version
and see what you notice that's different about it
Ultimately your goal I assume is to get better at doing this,
or at least understanding what mastering does for a track,
so that we can really get into the subtle nuances and make a song sing if you will
you know make it sound as good as possible
and communicate whatever it is that you or the artist is trying to communicate.
However you've got to start somewhere so listen to these next two
examples and I bet that every person who's listening no matter what platform
you're listening on will hear that something needs to change
One of those tracks had way too much low end
or at least it didn't have any top end
and the other track was way too bright
and everybody out there can recognize it
so this is one of the most basic things
that we think about when we're adjusting in mastering
I assume that everybody out there has some
experience mixing and you know how hard it is dealing with balance and the color
of the snare drum and the collision between the snare drum and the vocal and
all of that's mixing.
that's what mixing is.
It's really hard to focus on that and
at the same time be thinking about the tone the shape the tonal balance if you will.
that's what we think about as mastering.
So while you're listening to that track that we just heard you can immediately tell
that's got too much bass
or that's got too much treble.
it's really much harder to do that when you're mixing.
so this leads us to separate a little bit the mindset
between the mixing engineer and the mastering engineer and why we need to
approach mastering in some ways as a separate discipline just so that you're
zoomed out and looking at the forest instead of the individual trees.
What ismastering?
In some ways it's a very familiar activity.
It uses a lot of the same tools that you use in mixing.
We EQ, we compress we use limiters we change the level of things,
but that really doesn't capture the entire activity.
To me, order to do a good job mastering we really need to define what mastering is
the classic definition that you've probably heard is that it is the last
chance to change anything about the sound of a track but that's really only
half of the activity the second half is getting it ready to go out into the
world and that's the part of mastering that involves making sure that the level
is set right making sure there's nothing wrong with the audio making sure that
it's not too bright or too dark compared to every other recording that's been
made out there and keeping in in mind the different contexts where people
might be listening to the tracks that you're going to be creating you know
it's not just about the creativity it's not just about the sexier part of the
gig which is the EQ and compression and maybe you're adding a little flavor or
color to a track that second half about getting it ready so that your listener
is going to be able to get the experience you want them to have that's
an essential and important part of mastering so when we start talking
about mastering I think you'll hear both sides of that show up in how I talk
about the the work that we're going to do.
When we talk about mastering it's
tempting to confuse the tools for the activity.
it's entirely possible to make
use of mastering technology
iZotope makes Ozone, a fantastic suite of mastering tools.
You can put them on your 2 mix when you're mixing and you can
certainly adjust level and overall tone while you're in the activity in the
mindset of mixing
That is mixing
When you're mastering you are thinking about
all of the mix decisions that you've already made and the way that they're
contributing to the song.
you're now thinking about the finished product and
'is there one more thing I need to do?'
is there something I need to do to change the overall result that I've gotten
to get it out into the world in good shape
so that's a way of kind of differentiating between the mixing part
of the process and the mastering part of the process and I think the mindset that
you inhabit when you're doing each so while it's possible to try to master
your own mixes it's really really hard to do them both at once.
I often use the analogy that it's very difficult to produce your own vocals
you know, imagine being the vocalist
and also having that presence of mind to understand what it is that you actually just did
and could I do it better and is it in tune and
is it the way I want it to sound?
so I think it's it's very much the same to try to master and mix simultaneously
all right so level let's talk about level and loudness
When we talk about level it is how high is the peak
or the average that you see on a meter in your DAW.
loudness happens here, entirely happens in your ears and in your brain.
It does not happen in your DAW
Now of course a lot of people are concerned about
'is my track going to be loud enough?'
and we'll spend some time talking about that,
but it's not just about what happens in the DAW
It's about making sure that it's at the right level for the distribution format.
so we might set level differently for streaming services or for just playback from your hard disk
it's really important to keep those two ideas separate if you do it will keep
you away from this idea that I just have to make something loud or louder for
loudness sake
Not every genre obviously needs to be loud and the way that we think about loud.
When we think about loud tracks what immediately comes to mind is
something that's got a lot of distortion and edge and a lot of density in the
arrangement whether it's EDM or punk rock or something that's got some
aggression.
Other genres, acoustic music of any sort, but especially classical, acoustic jazz singer songwriter,
music that stripped-down doesn't need to be as loud comparatively speaking as other
tracks and other genres need to be.
So we think about genre in helping us
establish a context for level and ultimately how something's going to
translate out into the world compared to other genres and other tracks but let me
take it one step further every recording in my way of thinking has a what I call
loudness potential to it
what is loudness potential? if you make a
recording that's got a very very strong mono component to it compared to stereo
thinking about mid versus side
correlated versus uncorrelated that will
change the loudness potential of your track
a mono recording by definition will sound louder than
than a very diffuse recording that's largely out of phase
or has uncorrelated information if you make a recording that has a lot of a very
very strong mid-range component like a recording of a solo piccolo and compare
that to a recording of something that's got a lot of low-end like a tuba
recording or solo bass solo tuba I'm sure that that's the record that you're
all aspiring to make but anyway the piccolo recording is by definition all
levels being equal by definition is going to sound louder because of the
nature of our perception and how we hear
so we need to understand something about
the tone of what we're working with the mono versus stereo width
in order to understand the loudness potential.
at some point in your work you've probably
run into a scenario where you feel like a track doesn't have
as much loudness as what you would like it to have.
Some of that has to do with your arranging,
some of it has to do with your mixing,
and then once you get it as good as you can
going through that entire process mastering can try to
get you across the finish line to get it as loud as a track can be without
destroying it but I guess what I'm trying to do is
encourage you to start to understand the limitations or the loudness potential of
the audio that you're producing and know when you've crossed the line you don't
want to go over what some people like to call the sonic cliff and push something
so far that it just sounds distorted and crushed and no longer good and loud.
One of the things we all hunger for is rules like always do this and never do that
and there are certain rules in mastering down the road so to speak we'll get into
things like dithering you probably all understand that you don't want to go
over 0 dbfs without some kind of modifier or something like that to stay
away from Distortion.
there are some physical realities also that we have to
respect like there is such a thing as making a recording with too much bass
that won't translate well to lots of speaker systems or too much top-end but
there's a lot of room for creativity as well so long as you're staying within
bounds and observing good hygiene there's a lot that we do to think about
is there a little bit more color to add is there something that we can do to
sweeten the recording can we make a chord chorus jump out a little bit more
compared to the verse so that's where the creative decisions lay in mastering
mastering really is a game of inches and sort of gentle nudges in a mixing
context you might find yourself taking 10 DB out in the low end in an
instrument to get it to fit into the mix mastering moves if you look at a
mastering session you'll notice that most of the moves were a half a DB a
DB maybe 2 DB at a time 2 DB is a lot in mastering it's a little hard to sort of
get used to that.
but here's a thought maybe to
help you understand why that is.
imagine taking an EQ and making half a DB move on a single track in your mix
doesn't sound like very much right
but in mastering if we take an EQ and put it on the stereo out and make a half
a DB move it's like taking an EQ and putting it on every single channel in
your mix and making that same half a DB move and so you're in essence applying
that same change across everything in your mix so it has a lot more weight and
carries a lot more meaning if you will in the difference that you're making in your mix.
In order to get better and learn how to get better at mastering
I would encourage you to you know go ahead and experiment try making a 10 DB change
and listen to what happens.
But at the end of the day eventually you come to
the point where you begin to understand what the scale of your changes should be
in mastering and most of the time if you've got a good mix a little bit goes a long way.
Thanks for watching 'Are You Listening?'
If you want to be notified
about other episodes when they come out subscribe to the YouTube channel and
then you use the little bell icon.
feel free to go to the iZotope.com website
there are lots of educational materials there free product manuals there's the
ISO sessions where you can download sound samples and experiment within
yourself and I look forward to seeing you next.
I hope you find this useful
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