Demo Mastering
Lesson 16 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Demo Mastering
Lesson 16 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Lessons
Introduction and What you're going to Learn
00:20 2Writing a Chord Progression
11:37 3Writing a Bass Part
10:19 4Building a Drum Beat
08:57 5Writing a Melody
17:15 6Arrangement - Part 1
14:23 7Arrangement - Part 2
19:06 8Vocal Demo Melodies
04:31Lesson Info
Demo Mastering
Hi. In this video, I'm gonna show you a quick and easy process that you can do at home for you to master your demos and make sure that you're sending something off to people and, or upload to Soundcloud or wherever at the highest possible quality out of what you've got. Ok. So what I've got here is I've imported the mix that I printed before and imported it into a new session on a completely different day. So my ears are fresh and I'm just gonna start mastering it from here. So here is the mix in stereo. What I'm gonna do is actually load up a couple of uh plugins on the master bus here specifically around metering because there's some things that I like to know um when I'm making these masters. So what I'm gonna do is load up logic pro's multi meter and with multi meter, let's have a look at that. I'm gonna change some settings on here um to what I like. So I'm gonna change this to R MS slow and change this to 31 bands. So it looks like this. Ok? I find this way I get a better idea of...
the distribution of energy amongst the frequencies. So it's easier for me to know if I'm getting a good balance or not. Obviously, my ears are telling me, but it's good to have a visual indicator of that as well. And if it's, and especially if you're at home and you're using less than ideal monitoring, like headphones or whatever, it's good to have a visual confirmation of what's happening. Ok, I'm gonna close that for now and I'm gonna load up a couple of basic plugins. So let's start with an EQ. So I'm just going to use logics, linear phase EQ cos that's generally better for mastering when it comes to mastering popular music. And then I'm going to close that for a moment and then after that, use a limiter. So I go to dynamics and use logic adaptive limiter. There's a few things that I'm gonna do here. OK? So I'm gonna turn on true beat detection. OK? Which is essential to make sure that your master doesn't clip when it's played by someone else on different platforms and stuff like that. And it's recommended that you have an output ceiling of minus one DB and then just click, apply to optimize the look ahead in terms of those settings. That's all you need to do um for that. Now, let's have a listen to the mix. So I started turning it up, um which is necessary to do. Generally speaking, um when you're mastering demos. What I'm gonna do is keep an eye on the multi meter, which I'm just gonna leave here and we'll put that there as well. And I'm gonna try and get the master to a level that is generally gonna be acceptable for popular music demos. Generally speaking, if you looked at the loudness measured by Lufs of popular music tracks, generally, it's gonna be like at least minus 14 Lufs or more, which is roughly the level that Spotify normalized to anyway. So it's generally, it's a good, good place to optimize your masters for. You don't necessarily have to make them exactly minus 14 Lufs because the streaming platforms manage the loudness anyway. But it's good to get a good idea of that and get in that rough ballpark. OK? So what I'm gonna do is just turn up the gain until this figure up here. L Efs I is roughly at minus 14 or above. OK. So what I find happens is that I don't have enough gain on the limiter to reach my goal. So what I'm gonna do is load a gain plug in before the limiter, so I can push extra gain going in because I mixed this one quite quietly. So let's try eight DB. OK. So generally speaking, the goal is to kind of get relatively loud, but without hurting the dynamics because when you use a limiter or something like that and you really, really drive it hard, then um, you can really crush the sound and just kind of make it worse, uh, which isn't ideal. So you have to create a balance when it comes to making the game. But if you are like at minus 14, consistently minus 14 Lufs and upwards, then you're generally gonna be ok. Anyway, so if it sounds good at around that level, that's all that matters. If it's any lower than that, then people might not listen to it cos it's too quiet or whatever, which for a demo recording for someone that's just gonna listen to this once, probably really, really quickly or something that you're just shopping around to your friends and to your peers for feedback. Um, that's not really ideal, especially if they, you know, I'm gonna listen to it on laptop speakers or on a phone or something like that. Such devices might not have the drive to like really, really crank it up if it's too quiet. So bear that in mind. Um, and from here, um, we're just gonna adjust the EQ just to make things a bit clearer and sometimes you're gonna adjust EQ and then adjust again in a limiter and adjust the EQ again. That's always a back and forth thing and you're just gonna keep doing the both of them until you're satisfied with what you're hearing at the end of the day. It just has to sound good. You might wanna also print the master and play it back in your car or in other systems that you trust, maybe some earphones or something like that just to check that it kind of lives up to the expectation that you have when you listen to it on that system. OK. So from there, I just made some like really rough EQ movements to kind of like filter out some of that bottom end, which I think was just impacting uh the limiter a bit too hard and there was a bit of harshness around this area which I brought down as well. Mostly coming from uh the percussion from here. I'm gonna turn up the game a little bit going into the limiter again because I think I've afforded myself the headroom to do that. OK. Cool. So what I've just showed you here is basically the bare minimum that you're gonna have to do in mastering. Try not to do too much if you find yourself doing too much and you're trying to save the mix in the mastering process, you should probably just go back to the mix and, and solve those problems there, the better the mix, the easier the mastering process is gonna be. But once you feel like you've got the levels about right, you've got a good balance of EQ and a good amount of gain in the master, then it's time to print it. You just simply export it. And generally speaking, depending on who you're gonna send it to. If it's DJ S or blogs or whatever, they might want an MP3 or a private soundcloud link. If you're gonna upload it to Soundcloud, just print it as a 44.1 bit wave file and then upload that to Soundcloud. But if you're sending it in emails or whatever, um maybe it's just an MP3, if it's going in a dropbox link or something like that, maybe just an MP3 so that it's easier for them to download, to download on their phone or their devices and have a listen to it and get back to you. So I'm just gonna do that here. Maybe file bounce. And then in logic, it allows me to choose multiple um output files. So for wave, I'm gonna choose bit because that's kind of the most friendly one of the wave ones. Um everyone and everything accepts 16 bit, at least dithering you want on. It doesn't really matter for a demo which dither that you do. Um But it's definitely better than, than not having dither at all. If you don't have dither, there can be a really, really, really minuscule amount of distortion in the file. So you might as well just have it on any of these is better than none. OK? And then MP3 when it comes to MP3, just make sure that your stereo mp3 is the best one possible and just print it from there and make sure that no normalization is being applied as well. Cool. So that's done. That is ready to send off to whoever I'm gonna send it off to for demo purposes. But it's always good to just like play it back on your laptop speakers and stuff like that, you know, maybe put it on your iphone or your smartphone and just listen to it on your earbuds, whatever you normally listen to stuff on, go for a walk, have a listen to it that way and maybe take some notes if you notice something, take some notes, come back to the mastering or the mix process and make those adjustments and then, and then do it again. Hope that was useful and I'll see you again soon.
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