# 10 Critical Mastering Mistakes You Should Avoid | Are You Listening? Season 6, EP 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3tvexD7qvQ

[00:00] Hi, I'm Jonathan Wyner and welcome to season six of ‘Are you listening?’
[00:19] In this episode, I'm talking to you about mistakes that you might make in mastering.
[00:25] The word mistakes is a little bit thorny.
[00:30] When we're talking about creativity, we're talking about music, and we're talking about art, and we're talking about artistic intent, you can do anything you want.
[00:35] You can add distortion, you can make things extremely loud, you can make things extremely quiet.
[00:40] The ideas that I'm offering you I think will help you set yourself up for a better result while mastering.
[00:46] So these are mostly not technical mistakes, although there will be a couple in here that I would argue are kind of like rules that you don't want to violate.
[00:52] When we're mastering, we're usually trying to take what a mix gives us.
[01:03] Listen, we're thinking about can we make the soundstage a little bit wider?
[01:08] Do we need to adjust something about the tone?
[01:13] Is there something we can do to enhance the vibe?
[01:13] But everything about the mix should present in the mix.
[01:20] The dynamics in a single instrument really don't work from one section to another.
[01:25] You're better off addressing that in mixing.
[01:25] It's not to say that we don't sometimes have to try to fix things in mastering, but you'll always get a better result if you fix it in the mix and don't lean into that idea of we're going to fix it in mastering.
[01:37] It can be very helpful to have references that you use while you're doing your mastering work.
[01:43] In other episodes I've talked a little bit about your listening environment, how to think about compensating for it.
[01:49] Needless to say, unless you're in a perfect room you might be making some guesses, especially in the low end, and so references can sometimes help you navigate the challenges in the low end in a master, or just if you want to make your song sound something like another song.
[02:07] In the desired genre, or a song by your favorite artist.
[02:13] The problem comes in when you try to match one song to another literally.
[02:20] And I'm going to show you using the EQ Match tool in Ozone what this would look like, and I think when you see the EQ curve, you look at it and say, okay, that's not a good idea.
[02:25] Unless you're going for a sound alike, unless somebody said to you, can you make my songs out exactly like this other song.
[02:30] But a lot of that really has to be done in the mixing stage and the production stage anyway.
[02:35] Every song, every mix has its own intention, its own vibe, its own feeling.
[02:42] Even if you're in a slightly different tonal center, if you're working in a different key, the EQ from one example to another might be slightly different.
[02:47] So you don't want to make something sound exactly like something else.
[02:54] Use references to help inform a general sense of tone, a general sense of dynamics, a general sense of level.
[02:59] Just don't try to follow them exactly.
[03:06] So let me show you what I'm talking about.
[03:06] Let's take a look at the Match EQ in Ozone.
[03:11] So I'm going to walk you through the process of setting up Match EQ so that you can learn something about your track comparing it to a reference.
[03:16] I'm going to pull up the Match EQ module in Ozone.
[03:20] The first thing I want to do is take my mix file, hit play.
[03:28] Once I'm playing the track I'm going to hit the capture button and capture the tonal profile or the tonal balance of this track.
[03:33] I'm going to choose a section that's got the full, sort of most dense part of the track so that I'm getting the track and all of its glory.
[04:00] So this blue line represents the tonal balance of that track.
[04:10] I could do the same thing with the reference track.
[04:10] In the interest of speed, I'm going to use one of the presets here in the
[04:14] Match EQ to illustrate the point.
[04:19] And now on the right side down below you have a couple of controls that can allow us to determine how much of a match we want.
[04:26] We can go to all the way up to match it 100 percent, and you can already begin to recognize that that's kind of a crazy EQ curve.
[04:31] That's a lot more EQ than you would ever expect to see in mastering unless something was terribly broken.
[04:36] Then I'm going to go even crazier and turn off the smoothing, and this is what it would look like if you're trying to match one track exactly to another.
[04:46] Visually it's frightening.
[04:46] From the standpoint of the audio, equally frightening.
[04:53] I'm not going to scare you by playing it for you.
[04:58] Suffice it to say that if I wanted to match one track to another I would implement the smoothing so I saw the general difference between the two tracks and then I would reduce the amount if I was listening to the A/B so I have a subtle shift that works for my track, but doesn't make it sound exactly like the reference track.
[05:11] So now you have a little bit
[05:17] of a sense of not only what the Match EQ can tell you but also how you can take it and use it as a way to get a starting point when thinking about the tone of the track that you're working on.
[05:28] Connected to the idea of using references is the idea of using targets.
[05:34] We sometimes use the word target when we describe tone related to genre or we talk about level.
[05:41] You may have heard people use the phrase loudness normalization in the context of streaming services and how the level gets set to a certain playback target by the streaming services.
[05:52] That's great for the streaming services, it makes a ton of sense.
[05:59] It's interesting to look at tonal balance targets.
[05:59] But targets as a sort of an overarching idea I think can be dangerous.
[06:04] Certainly you don't want to match level targets.
[06:11] You don't want to set all of your Masters to -14 integrated LUFS because you don't know exactly what the level is that the consumer that the listener is going to be using when they play back the level.
[06:16] And I can guarantee you your artist if you're working for somebody else
[06:21] On their music probably won't be a hot enough master for them in every instance.
[06:27] The same can be said for tonal balance.
[06:33] When we look at the tonal balance curves they help inform us about a range of what's typical.
[06:38] But don't let that scare you from trying things and trying unusual and different things.
[06:44] If I called out the first Billy Eilish record that blew up and you took a look at the tonal balance targets against that record, it wouldn't fit and if they had used the targets to make that record that record would not have been made in the way that it was.
[06:54] Undeniably that was a very successful and very cool sounding record.
[07:01] So targets are guidelines or some helpful boundaries that you can use to understand what's best practices.
[07:09] In previous episodes I've talked to you about mix levels and mastering levels and loudness normalization, check the notes underneath this episode and you'll find a link to them.
[07:14] Is gain staging stupid?
[07:22] Stupid question.
[07:22] It's actually kind of a serious and interesting question.
[07:27] Most modern DAWs use something called floating point math, and when you are doing the signal processing inside a plug-in on your DSP, it's almost impossible to clip, it's almost impossible to find the noise floor.
[07:40] So in a modern workflow gain staging is almost irrelevant except you have to know for a fact that your EQ and compression, that all of the single processing you're using isn't doing any kind of interesting nonlinear something or other to your audio based on a level.
[08:01] So if you're working on a plug-in that's an emulation of some vintage device or got some kind of soft clip, in that case it does make sense to pay attention to gain staging.
[08:16] Couple of things to consider when you are adjusting your gain staging, when you're using any kind of signal processor that is an emulation.
[08:16] When you
[08:22] Look at a meter such as this, and we're thinking in terms of gain staging as it relates to analog gear back in the day with a fixed zero with the point of distortion and a gradual implementation of either soft clipping or excitation as we get closer and closer to zero dBFS.
[08:44] If we didn't want too much color and too much of the effect of the emulation we'd probably want to be looking at something in the order of minus 16 RMS for the level and a peak level of somewhere close to zero.
[09:08] All right, so that's already a little bit hot.
[09:20] I'm going to turn the level down.
[09:20] So that's kind of the sweet spot for most analog signal processing.
[09:24] Higher and higher the level gets, the more of the coloration and the non-linear processing you're going to get as the signal approaches zero dBFS.
[09:34] So make sure when you're starting with a mix to allow for the possibility that you might want to impart something that's got some color that does absolutely refer to the level of your mix.
[09:46] Make sure you have some headroom.
[09:51] If you're working on a mix that has peaks all the way up at zero dBFS you're going to have to turn it down, give yourself some headroom to do the work, and then you can bring it back up at the end of the signal chain.
[09:59] As we begin to learn we become more and more sophisticated in interpreting meters, interpreting graphs, using our gear in a certain way and setting things up in a way that worked last time.
[10:14] Always start by listening, always start by trying to interpret what's interesting and unusual about a track before you start paying attention to all of the visualizations and all of the goodies.
[10:27] I know that sounds like a very basic premise, but as I said, when we become smarter about using the technology, it's really easy to forget to listen.
[10:39] One of the things that we learned at the very beginning as music engineers, audio engineers, music producers, is relying on adding high frequency to get clarity.
[10:46] It's kind of like the sugar, the candy of uh audio coming from a speaker.
[10:54] You add a little bit of top end, you get a little bit of detail and clarity.
[10:59] You add a little more, you get even a little bit more.
[11:04] The reason that that's problematic is that there is such a thing as too much top end.
[11:10] The perspective that I want to offer you is that there are ways to get clarity in a mix by leaning into other strategies, not necessarily just adding top end.
[11:18] And in fact, where clarity often comes from is in managing proper balance, having things land in different parts of the spectrum in good proportion.
[11:24] Sometimes you can hear things more clearly by removing high-end.
[11:31] Sometimes you can hear things more clearly by removing low end as well.
[11:37] Taking out a little bit of upper mid-range sometimes means that you hear a little bit of warmth in a track overall.
[11:43] So this idea of always adding a little bit more on the top of a track in order to make things sound better and clearer is a common mistake that I see people make.
[11:55] The other thing that you should always pay attention to is that you will accumulate high frequency information as you do more and more signal processing.
[12:05] There's always a little bit of distortion whether it's phase distortion, or some other tiny little bit of grit or noise that gets added with pretty much every single process along the way except for very gentle EQ moves or gain changes.
[12:19] Once you're done working on a track after 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes even if you haven't been adding top end listen to see if you've got more top end than you had before.
[12:24] That should tell you that maybe you don't need to add more, you might need to actually take some away.
[12:29] If you catch yourself always making the same moves in mastering especially with regard to EQ,
[12:34] Adding top end all the time in order to make a track sound more impressive and better to you,
[12:40] Take a step back, think about it, and maybe challenge yourself to leave the high frequency shelf alone for a moment and is there some other way you can achieve the clarity that you're after.
[12:59] That's maybe a sign that you are working to your room as opposed to working to the music.
[13:07] That's kind of counter-intuitive.
[13:12] If you're dealing with music that's in at different levels, music at different tempos, with different tonal centers, different genres, it doesn't make sense so you would always pull out 185 Hertz and always pull up 3K for instance.
[13:25] Every piece of music will require its own approach.
[13:30] What that may be indicating is there's something in your listening environment that is causing you to do those same things over and over again.
[13:35] See that happening and there's a little bit of an invitation to sort of look at your own behavior
[13:40] And say, I wonder if there's something about my monitoring that's leading me down this path.
[13:45] Let me step back and think about is there a way that I can either augment my monitoring by checking with headphones to make sure those moves really make sense, or is there some simple thing I can do by changing my speaker position to make what I'm hearing sound a little bit flatter.
[14:02] We have a tendency to fall in love with our gear.
[14:09] And there's no denying that a well-crafted piece of hardware or a beautifully rendered user interface and software that you enjoy working is part of the joy, it's part of the pleasure.
[14:21] That doesn't mean that you have to use it every single time.
[14:28] Not every piece of music, not every mix, not every master, wants the same approach especially when it comes to using colorful I should say “colorful” and air quotes equipment.
[14:34] A Pultec or a Massive Passive or any of the purposefully colorful devices that just
[14:43] By instantiating them, change pretty noticeably the relationship between different parts of the spectrum.
[14:50] It's unlikely that that's going to work for every mix that you ever encounter.
[14:54] So if you catch yourself mastering by rote, always using the same sequence of equipment every single time, change things up.
[15:00] Challenge yourself to not use the piece of gear that you always use or to change the order around.
[15:05] Break yourself out of the habits and the doldrums, and I think by doing that you will learn something from it and your work will get better.
[15:17] If people think about only one thing in mastering, they think about loudness.
[15:24] We've done an entire episode about loudness; look in the description under this episode for a link to it.
[15:29] The thing I want to call out is leaning in to limiters to achieve the loudness that you're after.
[15:36] If you rely exclusively on limiters, you can usually get level to a point, but beyond that point you probably end up having to dig in and work a little bit harder unless a mix has been set up properly.
[15:48] To get you all the way there.
[15:55] The problem is that limiters aren't really designed to be a device to make musical signals sound clearer, or more impactful, or louder, they're really there as for the most part protection circuits so that when we drive the level up we have a ceiling that keeps us out of going up into the red.
[16:14] They can be very helpful at helping us get more level, but it's not the only way that we can make try tracks sound as apparently loud as we might need them to, and in fact if we rely on them too much, usually we don't do a very good job making a good clear, impactful master.
[16:31] There are other strategies that we can use thinking about shaping the tone and the spectral distribution across a track to achieve loudness or using dynamic range compression even parallel compression to help bolster the RMS level as opposed to just smashing a track against the threshold of a limiter.
[16:44] Certainly a mix will set you up for a certain amount of
[16:53] Loudness, but not every mix can be as loud as every other mix.
[16:58] So don't just look to the limiter to get you all the way there.
[17:03] Think about what's not making this track sound loud, what's not making it sound clear, and investigate some of the other tools and strategies.
[17:09] On the subject of limiters.
[17:09] The limiter's job, if you will, among all of its jobs is to make sure that we're not over modulating, we're not going into distortion.
[17:20] We've got an absolute cap on the level to maintain the quality of the sound and the fidelity of what we're working on.
[17:25] Don't do any processing after your limiter.
[17:25] Sometimes having two limiters in series to get the level that you want, it's fine.
[17:31] So you might have a primary and a secondary limiter.
[17:38] But after that final stage limiter, any signal processing after will undoubtedly produce new peaks after the fact, and you may end up with distortion that is unwanted and causes a problem when your master goes out into the world.
[17:51] So the limiter may be the first thing that you instantiate.
[17:57] To get an initial level set of your master, but then all of the signal processing that you implement should be before the limiter in the signal chain.
[18:07] So let me show you what it looks like when we have the limiter last and have signal processing after, and then I'll show you a signal chain that is more typical in the order that it occurs.
[18:17] So now let's take a look at what happens when we ignore the principle of having the limiter last.
[18:23] First thing I'll do is crank up the level so that I am peaking somewhere around zero dBFS.
[18:32] So if you look at the output here in Ozone, you can see that the peak level is now hitting zero, the ceiling is set to zero so it's not going over.
[18:46] Now I'm going to pull up an equalizer afterwards and do that thing that I suggest you don't do, I'm just going to roll off a little low end down around 30 Hertz.
[18:58] And if you take a look at the output we are now half a dB into distortion.
[19:04] Surprised?
[19:04] I bet you are.
[19:04] The reason that's happening is we get a little phase shift, we get new peaks in new places, we've driven the signal into distortion.
[19:17] That's generally not good.
[19:17] So in order to avoid that make sure that your Maximizer is the very last thing in the chain.
[19:22] Even though you might want to have your maximizer be the first thing you set up, or the limiter be the first thing you set up, make sure it's at the very end so that the ceiling at the output will keep you at or preferably slightly below zero dBFS.
[19:43] So there's a variety of strategies and tips that hopefully will keep you from making mistakes in mastering as you do your work and give you something to practice.
[19:49] Check the show notes for links to other episodes and other resources to help you level up your skills when you're learning about music production and audio mastering.