My friend told me that if you're making drastic changes with EQ, you might just need to redo or not use the sound you're working with.

I think that philosophy holds true when mastering.

I have been trying to get a nice balance of loud masters and good mixes for about six year now (literally ever since i started;more or less). The conclusion i've come to that works for mes, is to just process things dynamically and now mess with frequency content so much.

That being said, i am relying heavily on the fact that i have a good mix. My self masters usually just involve a clipper, RMS compression, maximizer, and limiter.

Any thing else would cause my mix to be out of balance, and i don't want that. Plus if my goal is to make things louder, i don't need an EQ to do that.


There's no dark art to mastering, it's literally just taking into the account of how the music sounds in the bigger picture. You can base things off of a reference track and see what needs to change. You can also make sure the overall vibe of an album is there and decide what songs need to louder or softer than the others.

It's sort of a niche process with niche tools that give the sound you want, and that's why you go to professional mastering services.

You need to decide for yourself what tools you need to get the job done, and then learn them.

I'd do some research on basic mastering principles, as to what you might need to get you started. Then consider looking up different techniques that are associated with the way of  the sounded desired that you seek.

I wrote a free ebook quite some time ago about how I approach mastering dance music. Although I wrote it a few years back now and do things slightly differently, most of the stuff is still similar an perhaps the stuff in there can be applied to your music making:

http://www.midgeofficial.com/ebooks-and-guides.html

don't worry its not too in depth and confusing. kinda stripped it down and kept things simple. it basically offers a simple little 'starting template' for your mastering sessions.

Everything I've grown to understand about mastering is deceptively simple, it's just a bit tedious and repetitive.

A good master is more about the songs you reference than it is the processing chain you use to master the project. Take two or three songs that sonically hit your ears in a way that you want the song you're mastering to sound, and bring them all into a separate project with your premaster bounce. With your mastering chain running on your premaster instead of your master bus, you can now A/B between your own track and your references without coloring the references at all with your processing chain.

From there, it's all a matter of EQ, stereo imaging, compression, and clipping/limiting to bring the song up to commercial loudness.

EQ: If you're really lucky and have a stunning mixdown, you really only need a steep (4pole or -48 dB slope) low cut at 20-30 Hz and high cut at 20 kHz to remove any signal that resides outside the range of human hearing (if any is left inside your track - you can do this at the end of your premaster). Beyond that, this can help push your song just a little bit closer to the frequency curve of your reference tracks - though if you're trying to make changes more than +/- 2 dB, you should probably go back and fix it in the mix. Mostly try to use your ears and figure out if their different frequency ranges are louder or softer than yours, and EQ to compensate. You can use a spectral analyzer to get an even better idea after you've honed in on where you might need to go.

Stereo Imaging: this is gonna be very light touch, if touched at all. Ideally, you have all your stereo imaging sorted out by the time you're getting bouncing a premaster. All you're doing is trying to help spread out a little bit of the higher frequencies, and make sure you're not having too much phase cancellation from the stereo image when you collapse to mono.

Compression, Clipping, Limiting, Maximizing, et al.: These are all working with the same goal in mind - Make Things Loud. That being said, you want to be gentle here too, and really pay attention to your references. Each one of the things listed has a different effect, and you should take your time reading up on what they do and experiment with them in different orders. This is also an area where stacking multiple is often better than relying on just one - a pair of limiters with different attack and release settings (one fairly fast to focus on the transients and really grab those peaks and valleys, one slow and steady to work on the rest of the track as a whole) each getting pushed by 4 dB will give you about 8 dB of loudness while essentially imparting the fingerprint of a 4 dB boost, because you're spreading the workload between the two.

If you're A/Bing the entire time you're going through each of these steps, by the time you're done you should be able to jump between the references and your now-mastered track without any apparent change in the loudness or frequency profile. From there, you start testing out your master (and your reference tracks) on as many different speakers as you can get your hands on, and use a notebook to keep track of everything that you notice is different. Listen on your laptop speakers, on your headphones, on your studio monitors, on your earbuds, on your phone speaker, in your car, in a club or at a festival (if you're actually lucky enough to get that opportunity), or wherever else you have the opportunity. Listen to it at low volume, at medium volume, and at high volume. Go back to your DAW, make some adjustments, then rinse and repeat until you don't hear any differences at all. Take a week off of the song, then come back and give it another listen through all the same channels, hopefully one last time to verify that it's all good.

Congrats! You're done mastering this song, and can now do the entire process over again with your next song.

Everything I've grown to understand about mastering is deceptively simple, it's just a bit tedious and repetitive.

A good master is more about the songs you reference than it is the processing chain you use to master the project. Take two or three songs that sonically hit your ears in a way that you want the song you're mastering to sound, and bring them all into a separate project with your premaster bounce. With your mastering chain running on your premaster instead of your master bus, you can now A/B between your own track and your references without coloring the references at all with your processing chain.

From there, it's all a matter of EQ, stereo imaging, compression, and clipping/limiting to bring the song up to commercial loudness.

EQ: If you're really lucky and have a stunning mixdown, you really only need a steep (4pole or -48 dB slope) low cut at 20-30 Hz and high cut at 20 kHz to remove any signal that resides outside the range of human hearing (if any is left inside your track - you can do this at the end of your premaster). Beyond that, this can help push your song just a little bit closer to the frequency curve of your reference tracks - though if you're trying to make changes more than +/- 2 dB, you should probably go back and fix it in the mix. Mostly try to use your ears and figure out if their different frequency ranges are louder or softer than yours, and EQ to compensate. You can use a spectral analyzer to get an even better idea after you've honed in on where you might need to go.

Stereo Imaging: this is gonna be very light touch, if touched at all. Ideally, you have all your stereo imaging sorted out by the time you're getting bouncing a premaster. All you're doing is trying to help spread out a little bit of the higher frequencies, and make sure you're not having too much phase cancellation from the stereo image when you collapse to mono.

Compression, Clipping, Limiting, Maximizing, et al.: These are all working with the same goal in mind - Make Things Loud. That being said, you want to be gentle here too, and really pay attention to your references. Each one of the things listed has a different effect, and you should take your time reading up on what they do and experiment with them in different orders. This is also an area where stacking multiple is often better than relying on just one - a pair of limiters with different attack and release settings (one fairly fast to focus on the transients and really grab those peaks and valleys, one slow and steady to work on the rest of the track as a whole) each getting pushed by 4 dB will give you about 8 dB of loudness while essentially imparting the fingerprint of a 4 dB boost, because you're spreading the workload between the two.

If you're A/Bing the entire time you're going through each of these steps, by the time you're done you should be able to jump between the references and your now-mastered track without any apparent change in the loudness or frequency profile. From there, you start testing out your master (and your reference tracks) on as many different speakers as you can get your hands on, and use a notebook to keep track of everything that you notice is different. Listen on your laptop speakers, on your headphones, on your studio monitors, on your earbuds, on your phone speaker, in your car, in a club or at a festival (if you're actually lucky enough to get that opportunity), or wherever else you have the opportunity. Listen to it at low volume, at medium volume, and at high volume. Go back to your DAW, make some adjustments, then rinse and repeat until you don't hear any differences at all. Take a week off of the song, then come back and give it another listen through all the same channels, hopefully one last time to verify that it's all good.

Congrats! You're done mastering this song, and can now do the entire process over again with your next song.

Thank you! Very, very grateful for your help and advice.

Much love.