Now comes the time for the finishing touches, the glue that binds the song together, the process of making your music sound polished and professional. Mastering is the final process of the practical side of my audio project and as discussed in my previous post, must undergo careful consideration. My choice was to master my songs with dynamics in mind rather than loudness as the Reserve Lounges music system, Kaleidovision, features automatic gain control, in which all songs are played back at a similar consistent volume. However at the same time I must bare in mind that these songs could end up being used in a commercial environment, meaning that although they must be dynamic, they cant be too quiet either. In this post I shall explain my personal mastering process and the techniques I have employed to help achieve a dynamic and professional sounding product. Below is the original final mix of my 3rd song without any additional  processing, basically the song at the stage where its ready to be mastered and finalised:

So at first listen you can tell there were some equalisation issues, it lacks top end and the bass isn’t as deep and defined as it is intended to be for music of this style. To combat this issue I began by using the Waves Q-Clone EQ plug-in, the reason for this choice is that it has a fantastic visual representation of the frequency spectrum and what you are doing to edit this. I began by adding a shelf at 15 kHz by a few decibels to try and bring out the top end a little more, however any more than 5 decibels it started to make the track sound thin and weak, I made the concious decision to try to avoid that happening and moved onto the bass. For this I boosted around 70 Hz to 140 Hz in an attempt to enhance the 909 kick and the bass frequencies that filled out the track. Although this did help i still wasn’t happy with how the bass line was coming through, it still sounded too thin and powerless. Based on this I decided to utilise the MaxxBass plug-in by Waves which works by adding artificial bass frequencies to your current bass tone to thicken it up and make it sound more powerful. The ‘medium’ pre-set worked perfectly for this as any more would have caused the bass to sound too prominent when played on club speakers. As a final stage of the ‘fixing section’ of the mastering process, I decided to add some tape emulation using the Krammer Tape plug-in from Waves. The subtle use of tape emulation helped bring some warmth and low end saturation to my track, a desirable trait in typical Down-Tempo music. Most processes so far remain as subtle adjustments that only a trained musical ear can register. However it’s lots of little changes that make a big difference.

The next stage of my mastering chain was the enhancement process, the stage where the track is made to sound polished and professional. To achieve this I began by using a stereo enhancement plug-in by Waves which allowed me to widen the stereo field in which the track sat. By adding some subtle stereo widening, the track was able to reach the far sides of the left and right stereo field, making the track sound bigger and more lively. This was the first technique that really made a big difference to the sound of the track. Next came this use of multi-band compression, which allowed me to lightly compress each frequency band individually. Bass and treble frequencies tend to stand out more in any track and therefore tend to require slightly more compression, whereas too much compression on the mid-range can make the track sound flat and dull, making multi-band compression a popular choice among mastering engineers. Once again I used a Waves version of a multi-band compressor, set the ratio’s at a gentle 2:1 and then adjusted the threshold to taste. It was important that I did not over-compress the track as the dynamics played an important role in effecting the songs listeners in a positive way, and therefore shouldn’t be squashed. Finally I used the L3 Multi-maximiser to adjust the level to an appropriate commercial standard in comparison to the reference material given at the beginning of the project. This was to ensure that my work wasn’t considerably quieter than other commercially released material should it be played outside of the Reserve Lounge.

After I felt the mastering stage was near completion I ran the track through the TT dynamic meter plug-in by the Pleasurize Music Foundation as a way of measuring dynamic range in music. I found that its highest DR (Dynamic Range) value was DR18 and its lowest was DR7, which by today’s standards makes for an extremely dynamic piece of music. Upon completion of the song, the dynamic range meter calculated an average DR value of 10, which is considered by many audio professionals as the ideal balance between wide dynamics and loudness. Below you can hear the final mastered and completed track:

I felt this was the best example to use as an example of mastering practice as it showed the largest difference between the original mix and the final master. A similar approach was adopted to the other two songs produced but obviously certain parameters of the plug-ins were adjusted to suit the particular song. My personal feelings on how I think the mastering stage went can be seen on the ‘Personal Reflection’ page of this blog.