Part 16 - Finishing or Mastering-for-cheapskates

Hang in there buddy, we're nearly at the end, but I have had to split this into two parts. We'll get to copyright and distribution next time.

Mastering

On the wider internet there is a fair bit of nonsense spoken about what mastering is and why it is, or isn't, important. Let's unpack some of that now (in a somewhat simplified way) so we can get to our goal of finishing and releasing our song.

In the Good* Old Days(TM) a mastering engineer's primary job was to take a recording and make sure it was in good shape to be transferred to the physical medium it was going to be distributed on. With vinyl this meant understanding a great deal about the physical limitations of the medium and how that affected things like low frequency extension, loudness and even where on the record certain songs needed to go because of the difference between the edge and centre of the record. They would also, therefore, need to understand how to work within these limitations without ruining the artistic vision and still making the sound work on other media. 

With CDs a lot of these physical restrictions disappear but then there are things like preparing the DDP file for the manufacturers and a load of other stuff. 

If you are still intending to release something via a physical medium, especially vinyl, then I cannot stress enough how much I would recommend finding a decent mastering engineer and paying them their worth.

But many of us here will only ever release our music digitally, do we still need a mastering engineer, or mastering at all?

Well, technically no. You can take the stereo file straight from your DAW and upload it to the world. Maybe it'll be fine. 

But a good mastering engineer nowadays does a lot more than just prepare your music for a physical medium. They'll have a decent, full-range monitoring set-up and expert ears. They can spot things you've missed or make suggestions for improvements. They can advise on track running order, genre norms, overall tonal balance and portability to other systems (will it work in a club, on an iphone speaker etc.)

A good mastering engineer has a huge amount of skill and experience and, digital or physical media aside, can help make your track sound better.

But a good mastering engineer expects to be paid according to that skill and expertise, which means they're not cheap. So for a bunch of folks reading this blog that's just not an option.

Sorry mastering engineers.

Finishing

So let's talk about mastering your own music or, to be a bit more accurate about, a process I like to call 'Finishing'. It's like mastering but for cheapskate amateurs.

We're going to assume that physical media are not involved. And we're going to assume that you only have the standard set of audio tools that came with your DAW. 

So we're going to focus on three things: EQ, dynamic range and loudness. And we're only going to lightly touch on all of them because, spoiler alert, there's a book recommendation for this too: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Mastering-Guide-Modern-Studio/dp/0240523709

Firstly I'd recommend bouncing your mixed track down to a stereo file (or files if you're doing an album or EP) and making sure you've got 3-6 dB of headroom**. This will help you focus on the task in hand and not get stuck in an endless loop of tweakery.

EQ. A useful guide here is to find a pink noise generator (or file) and use that as your starting point. Set your track to be as loud as the pink noise track and then listen for parts of the spectrum that are either poking above or hidden by the noise; then tweak accordingly. In my limited experience you may often find that a small low end boost, a low-mid cut and a high-shelf boost will get you in the ballpark. Again, it's useful to have an EQ with a nice graphical interface here to see what's going on. One thing you will notice is that when EQing a mix, rather than a track, small movements can make a huge difference - so play carefully.

Dynamic range. Real life has a staggeringly large dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and loudest sound), and live music also has a huge dynamic range; far louder than we can, or would want to, capture on a recording. We want to be able to comfortably hear the quiet bits without deafening ourselves on the loud bits and vice versa. Typically dynamic range varies by genre: classical music may have a 20-30dB range, jazz or folk can be 13-20dB, rock, pop and RnB are typically around 10dB and EDM will frequently be around 6dB. Your tools to manage this are automation, compression and limiting. And I'd generally use them in that order.

So I might bring up a quiet intro by a couple of dB using automation, I might take a couple of dB off the peaks of a loud bit using compression, and I might get the overall loudness and true peak levels in the right place using a limiter. I might do more, less or none of that depending on what the track needs, there is no template to apply here.

Loudness. Loudness is how loud the track is, generally measured in LUFS (of some variant). It's a measure of how loud a sound is perceived to be. We don't need to delve into the technicalities here but it is important to understand how it's used and what that means for your track. Most streaming services and TV broadcasts use loudness normalisation. In short this means that if you chop and change between tracks on a service (by listening to a playlist perhaps) then you won't need to be constantly reaching for the volume control because things will be the same 'loudness'. 

This is A GOOD THING. Personally I don't think the loudness wars are over yet, but things have backed off a bit from the craziness of a few years ago.

As with dynamic range, different genres typically have different loudness ranges. EDM and mainstream pop, RnB and hip-hop may have an integrated loudness (LUFSi, measured over the whole track) of -7 to 10LUFSi; Rock will often be around -10 to -14 LUFSi; country, indie, singer-songwriter type genres will frequently be around -12 to -16; jazz, folk and classical will typically have lower levels. You may have gathered from this that loudness and dynamic range are connected. This is because there is an upper limit on the signal, and as you increase the loudness of your track the dynamic range gets squeezed. Those 'loud' tracks of -6 or -7 LUFSi have very little dynamic range. Everything is loud all the time.

Or is it? Well, it might be on CD or the radio, but when you stick that track onto a streaming service that uses loudness normalisation (pretty much all of them) then it will turn it down until it's as loud as everything else. Here are some approximate numbers for the loudness normalisation levels of different platforms: iTunes -16LUFSi; Spotify, Youtube***, Tidal and SoundCloud -14LUFSi; Amazon -13LUFSi.

So what does this mean for your track? Well the first and most important thing is that these numbers are not targets. Mix the track as it needs to be. But understand that if your track ends up being louder than these numbers, it will get turned down. So if your mix ends up at -12LUFSi then it'll get turned down fractionally on Amazon, but a bit more noticeably on iTunes. If it's at -10LUFSi then it'll get turned down on everything and you're sacrificing a chunk of dynamic range (that you could be using to add impact and emotion) for the sake of the tiny number of people who listen with loudness normalisation turned off. As you increase the loudness past these typical normalisation levels there is a real risk that your material ends up sounding flat and stale. It won't be loud all the time, it'll be, well, average, normal, humdrum... forgettable even?

There's quite a lot to take in here, so here's a link to a series of videos from mastering engineer Ian Shepherd and Sound On Sound that give you a bit more to work with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIOIi9G1ClI 

Dragging us back to the purpose of this blog series... for us, the purpose of this finishing process is to make sure that our track is going to sit comfortably with other, similar tracks on streaming services. Mastering is a huge subject, there are many rabbit holes you can go down, but we're just about getting our stuff done and out there. So focus on the prize.

Next week: distribution.

* "Good" not guaranteed. Or likely.

** Headroom is the gap between the peak signal and the 0dB full scale mark. 

*** Youtube Music, for reasons known only to them, has a different loudness normalisation limit of -7LUFSi. That's right, not -17, -7. So basically it's only going to turn down the most ridiculously loud of tracks. So if you do use this service regularly you can expect to be reaching for the volume control on a frequent basis.