Mastering Clarity In Mastering

Before I start, I just want to apologize for my decreased activity these past couple of days. I've been pretty busy with work on my single, travel to London, normal work work and sleeping but I am now back with some time and I wanted to share this little tip with you.

So I've got two pre-mastering steps for you to take to day that will (certainly for metal music) really increase the clarity of your heavy mixes and add a little extra punch to your master. Now when I say pre-mastering stage, I use Izotope Ozone 7 to do all my mastering. These two steps will be applied to your stereo out buss BEFORE something like Ozone or Limiter No7 to help even out the mix and give you a good sounding input to your final mastering stage.

So as you'll know if you've read my first blog post (you can see it here if you haven't) I'm a Logic Pro X user and one of the plugins I use here is a default Logic plugin. With that said, you should still be able to get the same final point but you may have to make some additional tweaks to firstly match your mix and secondly get that level of clarity we're going for. So without further ado, here are the tips.

Step 1: Linear Phase EQ Curve

This one's that default Logic plugin. To briefly tell you the reason I use Linear Phase over Channel EQ, the Linear Phase EQ is an EQ that's made for mastering as its engineering enables it to alter frequency balances without altering the overall character of the instruments in your song whereas a standard Channel EQ is meant for balancing instruments individually and allowing frequencies to cut through in certain frequency ranges in the mix. Some people can't tell the difference between the two so if you don't have a Linear Phase EQ in your DAW or available to use then a Channel EQ should be alright but I would recommend the Linear Phase.

So the type of shape we're going for is shown below - it's a sort of shallow trough with a cut in the mids and a shelf at the lows and highs. Now if you've ever learned anything to do with sound engineering, you'll know that scooping mids from your music. First rule of sound engineering: there are no rules, only guidelines; it may not be common practice but if it gets you the sound you're going for stick with it. I've used this general curve shape a bunch of times with my mixes and it has consistently improved the final master.

So lets take a closer look at what's going on here. Firstly we've got the shelves - we've got a low shelf at 110Hz, not too heavy boost but a noticeable one. We've then got a high shelf at 4.6kHz with a lower Q than the low shelf and an ever so slightly higher boost. Doing this will brighten up the mix a fair bit by bringing up the volume of the harmonics in the cymbals and adding some air to the top end of the mix. The low shelf will also help to increase the presence of the kick drum in the mix and the bass to help hold a tight low end under the condition that the instruments have been properly high passed in the mixing process. The next step is a mid scoop, about the same amount off as we're adding with the shelves. This scoop is going to move for your mix because the main objective of this is to remove some nasty frequencies without decreasing instrument presence too heavily. Obviously in making cuts you will remove some presence but the aim with this is to add more to the clarity of the mix than you take away from the instrument presence. For my mixes, the general frequency about which to cut will usually be between 300Hz and 1kHz and when positioned correctly this massively assists the clarity of a mix by removing any muddiness from the low mids in the mix.

Step 2: Compression

Second and final step is a compressor. I'm using the Molot compressor which is free and very very good indeed. I found it whilst looking for a free replacement for the Joey Sturgis Gain Reduction plugin because at the time I wasn't in a place to sink next to £100 into a plugin that would only be helpful to my vocal tracks and I've just stuck with it ever since. This part, however, should work fine with your DAW's default compression plugin.

Now usually a compressor wouldn't be so heavily set in a mastering chain however for a few particular cases I've had recently, it really helps to add punch to the drums and increase the clarity of them in the mix. This in turn help to balance the mix and glue all of the instrumental section together.

We aren't going to play with the settings too much here, just focusing on attack, threshold, makeup gain and ratio. My attack will slow (around 40ms). Doing this will, in principle, increase the volume of the initial hit of a note, drum or vocal line which will add more presence to consonants in vocal passes and really bring out the kick and snare drums. Moving on to threshold and makeup gain, the threshold is set low and makeup is high (about 37 and 12dB respectively) so that we can really slam out the dynamics without losing too much extreme volume of the mix. To further aid the increase of punch that this compressor adds, I've set my ratio to be at 2:1. I personally feel this works the best for me in the instance that I have used this technique but as I've said - these are guidelines, not rules - so feel free to play about with this or not do it at all.

Now if you plonk this direct onto your stereo out buss - it's gunna sound terrible. This is because presently we just have the pure compression and none of the original mix left in there so dynamically it'll kinda be a bit all over the place. To fix this, we simply have to take the "mix" knob and set it to be less compression and more dry input. I've got mine set to be about 75% dry and 25% compressed signal because this keeps the majority of the original tone still there but shows of those punchy dynamics all the same.

If you want, you can add a slight bit more mid scoop like I have, however this step is completely subjective so you can disregard it if you like.

So that's about it for my tips. You can go straight ahead and throw an instance of Ozone or whatever you like onto the end of that chain and go about your normal mastering process but these two little tips will really help lift the clarity of the mix before it goes in to this final mastering stage. I hope this article has been helpful. If it was, feel free to share it about or recommend it to someone who might also find it useful.

Thanks very much for joining me, I'll see you tomorrow.

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