Mastering

After mixing all of my songs I then had to master them. I used a total of 3 different mastering techniques, I varied different techniques depending on the song, so I shall explain these techniques.

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Mid-Side Mastering:

The first technique I will explain is mid side mastering. Before I explain I am going to insert to screenshots to help me explain:

As you can see here, I have created 4 stereo aux tracks, on each aux track I used the plug in 'trim' this plug in is used to switch the polarity of a waveform. To get this to work, I sent the song to bus 1-2, and accepted that into the first two aux channels. With these first aux channels I swapped the polarity of the left side only, and the next I switched the right side only. The next two tracks are then used to re-swap back the polarity and send to the master. The point of this technique is if you are handled a mix that you do not like in terms of how loud the vocals are for example, you can now increase either the mid band, or the side band of the panning depending on how you would like to master the track. Since vocals are usually panned right in the middle, by changing the faders you can bring the instruments that are panned in the middle up in volume. This is the same for the side panned instruments.

After adding mid-side mastering, I then placed Maxim on the master fader, this will be explained at the bottom of this blog.

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Parallel Compression:

Parallel compression is where you use 2 aux channels and place compressions of different harshness and as they come together at the end you will get a well compressed master. To explain this, I will add a couple of screenshots:

I created two aux tracks and sent my mix to the separate aux tracks where it will undergo 'gentle compression' and 'fatten' compression, then join again in the master fader. This type of mastering maintains the dynamic life of the higher amplitude parts of the mix. This technique also compressed the track by compressing the peak and RMS. Peak is where the compression just lowers the peaks of the tracks, and RMS is where the peaks are reduced, and the rest is increased in amplitude. These two mix together to form a more secure compression, the best of both.

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Multiband Compression:

Multiband compression is where you take your mix and divide it into its low, mid, and high frequencies. By doing this you are able to compress these frequencies different to each other, this enables you to have a kick drum to be present by giving the low frequencies a longer attack time, whilst having a shorter attack for the high frequencies to keep the guitar in control. Here is how I did this method:

Here you can see that I separated the frequencies into low, mid, and high frequencies. This allowed me to add different levels of compression to each frequency range.

As I have said above, I gave the lower frequencies a longer attack time so that the kick drum could be more present in my master and have more emphasis. However, on the higher frequencies I gave the attack a shorter time to control my guitar.

All three of these methods are very good mastering methods, I picked different techniques depending on how I felt the track needed to be treated.

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After all of these methods, you need to add the final touch to the master. This is by using maxim. I placed maxim on my master fader as the last thing I did. Maxim is used to set ceiling and thresholds to your songs. Here is a picture to help explain:

The point of maxim is to greedy up all of your left over headroom from mixing so that all your tracks will be around the same amplitude. I set my ceiling at -0.1dB which makes the audio cut off before it clips. I allow all amplitude up until this point, this means that my tracks will not clip when playing back. The threshold is set depending on how loud or quiet the song is, you can bring the amplitude higher or lower so that your volume levels will be the same throughout your album. These features together set you up for a well mastered song/album.