Lessons
Day 1
1Introduction
10:08 2What is Mastering
25:18 3Dynamics and Loudness
24:10 4Compression, Clipping, and Distortion
17:39 5Compression & Distortion Demo
35:29 6Headroom and Gain Structure
24:54 7Bit Depth and Sampling Rate
13:14What is Objectivity
14:09 9Proper Monitoring Volumes with Q&A
28:53 10Sequencing and Track Spacing
16:28 11Individual Track Volumes and Demo
18:39 122:30 pm - Metadata and Key Points of Mastering
14:49Day 2
13Audio Interface
13:52 14Speakers
25:10 15Headphones
21:49 16Room and Acoustics
16:22 17DAW & Meters
18:13 18EQs
13:34 19Bus Compressor
29:08 20Multiband Compressor and Brickwall Limiter
17:33 21Clipping and Distortion
26:44 22Dithering
12:29 23Common Problems and Solutions
35:42 24Example Masters
29:38 25Demo: Mastering a Dance Track
22:17 26Demo: Mastering an Acoustic Track
21:43Lesson Info
Introduction
All right, everyone welcome to could've live jesse cannon how are you doing today, sir? I'm great. Thanks so much for the kind introduction is guys yeah, he didn't think you did a great job of that. So how are you doing today? I'm feel great and I'm really excited to talk about master suite you know a lot about this subject so do you want to go ahead and dive right in? I'm gonna dive right in let's do it awesome so as been just said I've been involved with records from groups like the cure of the misfits animal collective man overboard dillinger escape plan hawthorne heights transit saves the day when biscuit enough a ton of other bands worked out about fifteen hundred records by last count in the last fifteen plus years force with alan dodges a west west side matt mastering ross robinson who worked on glass draw at the drive in slipknot korn since his fail and I also own my own cabin found sound ation recording studios out in union city, new jersey which is right outside new york and ...
uh we're two room facility and so my day's air usually divided between two things where I get up early in the morning and trick a little coffee I start bastard about one two three records a day and uh after that I start producing and mixing beds every day so every day I have the challenge of I have to master stuff that I mix and I record and uh, in the fifteen years I've been producing full time, I really, really feared mastering for a long time and uh eventually I learned not fear it. I learned all these techniques and that's kind of why I'm here today is I'm gonna teach you howto not fear it and get on with it thea other thing that I think helps give me a lot of perspective is I also managed and overboard in transit, and then I wrote a book on the music business, which it's called I'd get more fans, the d I y guide to the new music business it's seven hundred pages of what um I tried to make the most complete guide to how to promote your music for any genre um and ice took in what I saw a lot of new knowledge in the music business and a lot of any specifically applies to your recording quality and how you get good recordings, good master egg and how that makes you competitive enough to get a head the new basics business today because as anyone who's read a common in a reading room or on gear slots, it is a great song that makes you go forth and a great recording and a great production and a great master that makes people want to share your music, so that helps a lot for this process. So where you gonna warn in this class is probably a question that's on your mind? Um, the first thing is we wanted to be practical, tangible benefits, we want you to know how to make yourself song some polished professional if you're making heavier music, obviously you want them loud and full and full of energy. Um, I wantto I think what the biggest problems people have with mastering is you get confused during the process. I know I oftentimes lose perspective, and we're going to talk a good amount about how you get that perspective back, so you're not just like after you've the mixing this song and recording it for two and a half months, you're not going well, I don't know if it needs three more devi of ted kay or not, because, wow, I've heard this one a million times, so we're going to show you howto get through that process and clear your head all the songs in this course, our songs I produced, engineered and mixed on dh, then master so everything here, I had to go through the process, you probably are if you're doing d I y mastering, um, we're going to also discuss the loudness for debate, um if you fall into my opinion, I don't feel I don't fall in the side of the people who say record shouldn't be loud I think loudness is an emotion that you sometimes want and there's a lot of old codgers who are really mad that I'm going to say that and they're gonna waive their cane and try to beat me with it and tell me to get off their water but the fact of the matter is loudness is an emotion and sometimes an emotion we want but there's also times I don't want it loud and we want it nice and pretty and to find a happy medium um we're going to discuss how you do both of those things and you can make the choice for your own music and not worry about the guy with the cane hitting you. Um, so what we're going to also wear this class's mastering is not as scary as it seems if you understand some basic principles and realize that there's really you know, a finite amount of parameters in here you don't, um, it's not really that scary at the end of the day. Um, most importantly, we don't want you to get scared that because you don't have five thousand dollars beacuse that a doubt, poor gear and to hear that does not mean you can't make great bastards which awesome about today's technology is we've hit a point where you can make great citing music that ends up you know, there's seventeen year old kids from france today producing number one dad's tracks on really minimal gear and really minimal plug it and said in the rock world there's people making records that go really high in their bedrooms and doing drum trucks in their houses so there's no reason to let the gear room a naughty scare you into thinking that you need five thousand dollar plug ins to be able to make something that everybody's going to want to hear just like if you have a three thousand dollar prs guitar doesn't mean you can play it I'm the worst guitarist in the world you give me a great guitar sound terrible you hand jimi hendrix a two hundred dollar guitar I mean if we resurrect him um I'm sure he'd sound amazing on that two hundred dollar guitar it's about you're practicing your knowledge and applying that and the reaction your ears have to hearing things um there's so many tools out there today that can get the job done that are totally affordable and we're goingto obviously go through those show you some of those tools and show you what you can do with them so I don't want to play gotcha but when you guys think of mastering what would you define mastering us? Someone wants to grab the mike let's let's just go down the line because I want to hear from each of you guys were coming from different places so let's just go down the line and here everybody's answer the question no full from back in the day like I always you know, we saw my old hardcore bands like we always just paid people to mass our stuff a spins out earlier and so it was just like a way to make our really crappy recording sound pretty yes but you know, like over the last few years I realized, well, I could probably do that myself I just had to have the patients like you every kickin snare like reno really well, yeah um I think I've mostly just thought of mastering as making it loud I have never really approached mastering any of the tracks that I've personally done with a nuanced approach to thinking like okay, you know, the the ten like he said the ten k range needs two more d b I just haven't I guess I don't haven't developed in year for that. So to me it's always been more about the perception of um the dynamics yeah making it sound loud is the first thing I think of that goes back to one of his recording in my garage years ago and finally getting a cd burner and burning stuff on the cd and playing it on the stereo and do you have to crank the volume up to kind of hear it and uh that was before I knew anything about mastering so the first thing is making it sound lab and also getting your sequencing your tracks and getting them all to sound relatively the same with each other that's fine program when I first started I thought it fell into the category of make the base not clip as far as music goes yeah that's whatthe don't make the base clip that stuff with the worst part of dance today is you scroll through soundcloud you're like oh jeez you know tear that exactly hear what I'm hearing but but now more so it's how to make everything fit within its range without bumping into each other so it's kind of what I think about it it's great answer actually go with the previous answer I guess preserving but also enhancing the original tracks getting them to play nice with each other that all this is totally right and it on I'm psyched you guys had not some of the really terrible answers I've heard that question before I like to think of it as a concise answer a lot of time out like louder, clearer, more consistent and then you know what the best thing like if I master my own stuff or if I said my stuff because I also will sudden some stuff away toe our doctor said west west side I love nothing more than getting it back and going. Wow, I did that that's, a great detail of that production. I can finally hear that reverb tail does that, and it should be better. And you should be pleasantly surprised. That's. One of the things I like to see. But another great point is to is that, you know, not everything's, a single and there's, a big compromise between getting tracks more consistent and getting everything to work together, especially if you do very diverse programme material.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Michael Pena
This class was awesome. Jesse goes into detail about the mastering process and best practices for mastering in an easy to understand way. The live mastering session was very informative and educational.
Bruce Wayne Rash
Excellent class. I watched the free broadcast and bought it right away so I can reference it anytime. Full of great information to all a project studio to do good mastering work.
Dylan Schiavone
It's good. There's a lot of knowledge contained within the course. I think because we live in a digital age, and this is a slightly older video, there are a lot of new tools that I'm sure would be shown if the same course were presented today, but I think all the principles behind using them are more or less the same. I learned some new tricks and ways of thinking about things and validated some things that I already had been doing. My only gripe is the fact that the audio examples appear to be taken from the ambient mic? Or a combination? And so when you're supposed to be listening to subtle changes in multiband compression, it's kind of impossible when you're hearing phasing and other artifacts that aren't part of the original source material. That being said, you can still learn the concepts anyway just by watching and hearing him as he makes changes and talks about it. I definitely learned from this course.
Student Work
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