Home Studio Mastering

J.D. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351718998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Home Studio Mastering is a step-by-step manual that gives you all the tools to professionally master your music yourself.

It demystifies the subject in a hands-on way for those working in a home studio and provides comprehensive guidance, from buying equipment and applying acoustical treatment, to using different audio applications and mastering plug-ins.

The book is accompanied by five mastering plug-ins (VST/AU/AAX for Mac and PC), to facilitate your personal mastering sessions from start to finish.

Part I

Setting Up Your Home Studio

In the first part of Home Studio Mastering, you will learn how to turn your bedroom, garage or attic into a home studio suited for mastering. It is very important to create an environment that is optimized for critical listening, because your ability to create great-sounding masters is limited by the accuracy of your playback system. The main factors involved are your studio room, its arrangement, and its acoustic treatment, as well as your choice of software and hardware. It is essential that every component of your playback system is of high quality, for in mastering as in most other disciplines, you are only as strong as your weakest link.

Chapter 1

Mastering

1.1 Can you Master Your Music in a Home Studio?

1.2 What is Mastering?

1.3 A Bit of History

1.4 Managing Expectations

1.1 Can you Master Your Music in a Home Studio?

Mastering music in a home studio can be done. Moreover, if you know what you are doing, it shouldn’t be that difficult. It is true that you probably shouldn’t master a top-10 billboard commercial album in your home studio, and that you might encounter some challenges with genres like Hip-hop or EDM that need an extremely tight low end, but generally speaking, it is just another skill you can learn if you are willing to spend time and effort on it. It might sound contradictory, but mastering is easy once you know how to do it. The difficulty lies in understanding the mastering process and developing a mastering workflow that suits you. The initial challenges are creating a neutral playback system, and becoming aware of certain acoustic and psycho-acoustic principles to compensate for working in a less than perfect home studio. Furthermore, the mastering process itself requires well-developed listening skills, clever decision-making and a creative and musical mind, which fortunately are all traits common to many musicians and producers to begin with. If you are able to produce music up to the point of delivering a finished mix, the chances are you are already familiar with most tools needed for mastering a song. You just need to know how to use these tools in the context of mastering.

“The technical and creative decisions you need to make during the mastering process require a high level of objectivity.”

Although generally speaking it is possible to master music in a home studio, various challenges arise when mastering your own music specifically. The technical and creative decisions you need to make during the mastering process require a high level of objectivity, and usually, after producing a song up to the point of mastering, you will have lost this objectivity completely. Fortunately, with the help of reference tracks and a well-defined mastering workflow, you can work around this problem, especially when you take a few days off between mixing and mastering. Nonetheless, mastering a song you have produced yourself will probably take you a great deal longer than mastering a song you hear for the first time. It is not uncommon to get overly concerned with tiny details in your track, and go back and forth between mix and master many times. This is not only frustrating and time consuming, but it also prevents you from staying in the specific state of mind that is needed for mastering—which is fundamentally different from mixing. Once you get more familiar with the mastering process, though, these issues will become less problematic or even completely disappear. However, for the purpose of learning the art of mastering, it is generally a bad idea to use your own tracks.

FIGURE 1.1 The Author’s Home Studio—Leiderdorp, The Netherlands (1)

1.2 What is Mastering?

It is still somewhat of a mystery, what exactly takes place when an album gets mastered—especially when it comes to the industry veterans who master big commercial releases in studios that seem to resemble the cockpit of an airplane. Not even those who make regular use of their services—like musicians sending off their album to be mastered, or mixing engineers who are often eager to leave the mastering to a dedicated professional—know what the work of a mastering engineer entails exactly. The consensus is, however, that when an album gets back from mastering, it sounds better, even when it is sometimes hard to tell why. The following description is meant to take away any confusion regarding the difference between mixing and mastering, and to provide a carefully defined definition for the purpose of this book:

The post-production process of an album can be divided into two parts: mixing and mastering. During mixing all tracks recorded for a particular song are combined to form a balanced whole, which is done for all songs on the album consecutively. After mixing, every song is carefully saved as a single file in preparation for mastering. During mastering, the overall tonal balance, width and depth, dynamics and loudness of all songs on the album are optimized and matched to create an album that sounds great, translates well to a variety of audio systems and has a natural flow to it when listening to it from start to end. Finally, the songs are prepared for online distribution or replication, either in the form of single releases, or as an official master-CD or a DDP-file (Refer to: 13.4 Creating a Master-CD or DDP-file).

• A song’s tonal balance can be described as the way the song’s frequency content is distributed along the audible frequency spectrum. As a result of this distribution, your track may for instance have a bright or dull timbre, or may sound muddy in the low end or harsh in the high end. Most popular genres of music benefit from a relatively transparent sound with clearly audible vocals.
• A song’s width can be described as the way different elements in the song are placed in the stereo field. A song’s depth can be described as the acoustic information or reverb it contains. Your song may for instance sound narrow or wide, or nearby or distant. The appropriate width and depth vary across different genres of music.
• A song’s dynamics can be described as the differences in loudness and intensity of different sections of the song, and the amount to which a song or particular parts are allowed to vary in loudness. Your song may for instance sound uncontrolled, or lifeless. The appropriate dynamics vary greatly across genres, but in most popular genres of music, the dynamics sound controlled without the liveliness being negatively affected.
• A song’s loudness can be described by the way you acoustically and psycho-acoustically experience its loudness. Because the human experience of loudness is biased in many ways, due to our specific physiology, there are a few techniques to trick the brain into thinking a song is louder, with minimal changes to the amplitude of the actual waveform that makes up the song. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, but in practice optimizing loudness is actually quite an easy thing to do.

Creating a professional-sounding album calls for optimization of all four of these aspects. Besides making your songs sound good, this optimization also ensures that your songs will translate to the broadest possible range of audio equipment, from tiny laptop speakers to huge PA installations. In order to make meaningful adjustments to a song during mastering that accomplish this, it is vital that you know what a professionally produced song sounds like. This might sound obvious, but production conventions can vary greatly depending on genre. In addition, it is often surprising how different a song sounds when recalled in memory as opposed to while critically listening with the ear of an audio engineer—especially songs from the period before you started producing, and that you haven’t heard in a while. The emotional impact of such a song might have greatly influenced the way you perceived its sonic qualities with untrained ears. Critically listening is a true art, and it is easy to fool yourself when chasing a dream instead of working towards a well-defined goal.

“There is no standard approach to mastering music.”

A mastering studio should act like a magnifying glass, because every single detail should be clearly audible, in order for you to make the right adjustments to your song. Mastering is a highly goal-oriented activity. You listen, you detect problems and you solve them. You listen again, you detect points of improvement and you perfect them. Since every song usually requires a unique approach, you should refrain from using standard presets. Don’t be led astray by certain presets that make your tracks sound better, because carefully selected settings almost always lead to better results. Reverting to presets is indicative of insufficient knowledge or experience. Ideally, you need to know the options provided by each individual plug-in, as well as the effects of every control on its interface. So remember, there is no standard approach to mastering music. You are on your own a lot of the time, and you should learn to accurately judge what a song needs by yourself. In that regard it is good to be opinionated when it comes to some controversial mastering related topics, like best practices for samplerate and bitdepth settings and optimizing loudness, and to develop a recognizable mastering style of your own.

1.3 A Bit of History

Originally, music was recorded straight onto vinyl records, but when the first analog tape recorder became commercially available in 1948, this started to change. As tape recorders became more popular, the need arose for a dedicated transfer engineer to carefully transfer the tape recordings onto vinyl records. With the arrival of the multitrack recorder in the late 1950s, the production process changed for good, and the era of the mixing engineer began. Nonetheless, transferring the finished mixes of these mixing engineers was still the job of transfer engineers, who gradually started to optimize the recordings as a whole. As they started to expand their activities, they inadvertently founded the profession of mastering engineer. They became responsible for optimizing and matching the sonic aspects of different songs on a record, as well as correctly delivering the master-disc to the CD-plant for replication or duplication. This is officially called pre-mastering, since the traditional meaning of mastering is producing the actual glass master that is used in CD-plants as the mold to produce retail CDs.

Over time, the music industry became heavily dependent on the mastering engineer. This was caused by a discovery in the late 1980s, when it became evident that listeners favored loud tracks over more quiet ones. This seemingly harmless conclusion led to a fiercely competitive battle between record labels. From that point onwards, all labels strove to produce louder CDs than those of their competitors, or at least equally loud. This is what became known as the Loudness War. As the years progressed, the Loudness War gave rise to a huge increase in the loudness of CDs, which in turn started to negatively affect the dynamics and overall quality of commercial music a great deal. When the first DAW software became commercially available, more and more people started setting up home studios throughout the 1990s. However, the ever increasing loudness of commercial albums mastered by dedicated professionals with access to high end gear, essentially made it impossible for home studio owners to realistically compete with the releases of big record labels. Fortunately, as the Loudness War drove album loudness to an extreme, many mastering engineers became reluctant to go along with this trend. Initially, from a commercial point of view, many big record labels were not prepared to compromise. But then, the Internet changed the rules once more.

Since about a decade or so ago, many people have been listening to music online, using services like Spotify and iTunes. Because these services provide easy interfaces for quickly skipping through countless albums produced in different decades, differences in loudness between songs can create a bumpy listening experience. Therefore, ways of automatically playing every song at the same perceived loudness were developed, referred to as: equal loudness functionality. This is a true game changer, because loud songs that used to sound better at the expense of dynamics and overall quality are now played at the same perceived loudness as songs with far more dynamics and less distortion. The result of this is that songs that are mastered more conservatively sound much better when played through most online services, but still have a disadvantage when played on a stereo, an mp3 player or on many radio stations. This can complicate the decision-making a great deal during a mastering session. However, it is fairly safe to say that in the long term the arrival of the equal loudness functionality will render the Loudness War obsolete.

FIGURE 1.2 Conservative and Competitive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Setting Up Your Home Studio
• Part II Home Studio Mastering Techniques
• Part III One Hour Mastering Workshop