Master Any Song Loud & Professional — Full Breakdown & Trans

[00:00] If you've ever wondered how your favorite songs on louder, clearer, and just more professional than yours, chances are, problems in your master.

[00:18] So to make this easy, I simplify mastering into three core steps, and I only use stock plugins so anybody can follow along at home. You guys have been asking, so I've finally delivered, and if you guys want to see the full mix for this as well, also using stock plugins, just let me know down below.

[00:31] Alright, let's get into the master. We're gonna be mixing an alternate version of Day Javu by Geo Mafia, it's an old, unreleased song. And normally with traditional mastering, you're not using stems, this is not stem mastering, this is mastering. Play the most loud part of your track that's gonna be the hook for me right here, where the drop is.

[00:47] First thing you're gonna want to start with is a parametric EQ. We're gonna use this to shape the tonal balance of the entire track. Let me explain. So generally audio is made up of your lows down here, your mids right here, and then your highs up here.

[01:00] Tonal balance just means having the right amount of each. Think of it as adjusting the shadows and the highlights like with your photo app editor. Right before that, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna add a low cut. Come up to this purple band right here, drag until it looks just like that.

[01:14] And then this right here, you're gonna pull that down until you see four squares. That's as sharp as it's gonna get. And then you're gonna come over here, last up, use your scroll wheel, and go one notch down. Play your track.

[01:32] We're gonna cut off up to about 25 hertz right here. You can do up to 30, because then you're gonna cut out the actual sub itself. This keeps your sub clean. Sometimes when you do this on a track beats like this, it does have some weird artifacts just because of the way the parametric EQ works. It's a wide bell right here, and we're gonna pull down just a little bit.

[01:48] And correct any weird volume changes at the low end. You can see how much you're reducing by looking up in the top left hand corner.

[02:00] We're gonna move it down like, I don't know, maybe a DB and a half. Right next. Let's move on to the mid range. If your track sounds unclear or muddy, it's living in this range right here, from about right here, all the way to about right here. So just to enhance this clarity, we'll take band number four, and we're gonna do a couple DB reduction there as well.

[02:15] Make sure you use really wide bells, some nice broad reduction. If you boost it, you can kind of hear what you're reducing. So that's that boxy, you know, muddy sound that I was talking about earlier. Next, we're gonna grab band number five. Ultimately, the end go with mastering is you want to be able to turn it up really loud and it shouldn't hurt your ears.

[02:41] If it does hurt your ears, probably because you have some really harsh topping. And generally, that's gonna live right around here in the high mid to the present section. This track does have a lot of that.

[02:56] And then let's bring down those high highs just a bit, just to clean up the top end some so it's not too busy. Remember, these changes are gonna be very minimal and they're gonna add up a lot over time.

[03:11] You'll see how drastic of a change it's gonna be as we finish up. Next thing we're gonna need to do here is at a surgical EQ. Now this is where you get to go crazy. We're gonna be doing exactly what we just did except with tighter notches and a lot more of them. So you want to do the bulk work and then fine tune. I put a massive cheat sheet on the screen that has pretty much every single frequency range defined as a term.

[03:29] But the main things I'm hearing here are just a little bit of boxiness and some harshness up in the top end. So my strategy here, take a really narrow band with your scroll wheel and boost any frequencies that are really loud and volume, turn it down a little bit.

[03:41] Don't go too crazy with this because you might actually turn down a frequency that's helping the track if you can try to hear out which frequencies you like and which ones you don't like. Just go with your gut. Alright, you hear that?

[03:53] 650. I hate that frequency so much. So what I'm gonna do is notch that, turn it down some. Alright, let's do it again. I generally don't like that frequency too. There's a bunch of them here that are just kinda right next to each other.

[04:13] 650. 1112.50.

[04:32] Alright, perfect. Find some low mids now.

[04:44] Alright, last one. Let's do one more up here in the top end.

[04:57] Yeah, there's a whistle right there, so let's turn that down some. I'm not gonna do too much. Just like I said, maybe a DBA reduction max. This is all gonna be amplified as we move on here, but try not to do anything crazy. Maybe four DBA max every year if you're in a really bad shape.

[05:11] Generally, if you're having to do stuff like this right here, you're gonna want to go back and re-evaluate your mix. Is it really ready for mastering or do you need to work on some more? Alright, now the final step, the cleanup process, mid-side EQ. In general, this is what a mid-side EQ is. Editor, flash it up on the screen for him, man, because it's too lazy to explain it.

[05:26] But yeah, we're gonna use this to add a little bit of width, clean up some muddiness or, you know, make everything clearer. Open up patcher. I love patchers so much, dude. There's so much stuff you could do with this plugin, man. I swear to god. I really advise everybody to check out the presets in here. I mean, you're gonna find some really awesome shit.

[05:39] And we're gonna head straight over to the filter section and click mid-side EQ. Just gonna open up two EQs right here. One of them's the side and one of them's mid. Close those out for now. Grab onto this little yellow dot and unlink the side. So this way, we're only hearing the mid frequencies for now. Get rid of a little bit more that harshness that I was telling you guys about earlier.

[05:57] It's gonna live right up here. Alright, and then we're gonna do the same thing we did earlier and scan for boxy frequencies. Alright, once I found two like that and a trick I like to do is just take another band on top of it and do it like a wide sweep.

[06:21] Just to kind of reduce both of those. Like, they're too little teeth sticking out. Okay, so let's re-link the side and then we're gonna unlink the mid.

[06:33] A good trick to add wit to your track is to add some shimmer to the side. And then we're gonna knock all of those lows. Use your scroll wheel to make a less harsh slope there. We're just gonna roll them off.

[06:46] Alright, re-link it. Nice. Okay, now before we move on to the next step, it's always a good idea to reference. Now, what's the reference?

[06:58] In the most simple terms possible, it's basically a track that you're comparing to your own when mastering or mix. This could be a Spotify song you downloaded. This could be one of your own tracks that you already love to mix on. Dragon and your DAW and you swap back and forth until the one you're working on sounds as good as the one that your reference.

[07:13] And now that AI is becoming really sophisticated, there's a platform called Masterchannel that I've been using that has two great AI-powered engines. AI Mastering used to be a horrible man. It's gotten so good, so I actually use it as a reference point to see if what I've done or what I'm doing was actually good.

[07:27] Let me show you exactly how I do this. We're gonna go to masterchannel.ai and you can see I've already run a master on it right here. But we have the AI Mastering and the Wes Clark AI. The Wes Clark AI is exactly what it sounds like. It's modeled after the famous engineer Wes Clark.

[07:40] And then you have the AI Mastering over here, which is obviously the original Mastering Engine. So we're gonna do both. Grab our mix file and as soon as you upload this thing, it'll give you a finished sounding master in under a minute. So if there's any blaring issues that I'm not hearing, this will expose that for me.

[07:53] So let's also upload the Wes Clark just to have that processing in the background as well. All right, they both finished, so click play and then go to Wes Clark, click play. Here's the standard engine master.

[08:14] And then let's take a listen to the Wes Clark AI.

[08:30] Personally, the Wes Clark AI is the best. So I recommend that model the most. Download that one. Drag it in and turn the gain down just a bit. And we're gonna listen to what we have here and compare it to our master just to see if there's anything that sticks out that I missed.

[08:42] Okay, so there's definitely a little bit more body in here. So what we can do is go back to our patcher and we'll go to the mid section.

[08:59] And we're gonna boost some of the low mids just to add a little bit more body back into this focal.

[09:12] Awesome, yet that is perfect. And hey, if I already got your check sounded better than it was, it always helps to push the video if you subscribe and leave a comment down below. Especially if it's a question you have to ask me. I'm always very happy to answer those.

[09:26] Appreciate it, man. All right, now onto the cool stuff. Next step is peak control. To briefly explain, peaks are these things right here. You see how it's a bit higher right here, right here, right here. How there's a spike right there in the waveform. If you have anything sticking out like that, it's gonna stop the track from getting as loud as it can be.

[09:41] Most of your 808 should kicks and just your base in general. And the goal here is to tame those and push those down just a little bit. All right, let's break out fruity limiter. I'm so serious. Fruity limiter is the goat if you know how to use it. Let me very quickly explain this. We have the attack, release and sustain. Here's what those do.

[09:55] Just so I don't have to explain them anymore. So let's start by setting the attack to between 10 and 20 milliseconds. You can see how many milliseconds you're at by looking at the top left corner over here. I'm gonna do probably about 10 milliseconds just to start out with. The release time should be between 100 and 200 milliseconds.

[10:09] So let's move that to about 150 right in the middle. No need to really mess with the sustain for now. And then we're gonna use a compression ratio of three to one. Okay, now let's pull the threshold knob down just enough to catch those peaks and you'll see it start to work right here.

[10:32] And mostly 10 to 808 there. Just make sure you have the envelope setting set up right and we'll go over to imaging and stereo enhancements. The method we're gonna go with here is just some simple stereo enhancements. Stereo width in this case is referring to how wide your tracks feel.

[10:45] You know how much it fills up your headsets. Let's add stereo enhancer. It's the easiest way to do it. No more than about 25% and 25% is a lot.

[11:00] Yeah, so right about 18% sounds the best. If you've made it this far in the video, let's confuse everybody else in the comments by commenting the word llama as much earlier. It's also a funny way to help push the algorithm. So yeah, okay, now we've reached the final stage. At this point, the goal is to get the track as loud as humanly possible.

[11:15] First thing to do here is control a little bit more this low and this master reference right here. It has way less bass and low end than ours does. And there's a reason for that. This master is very, very loud.

[11:29] Usually when you're struggling to get your track loud enough, it's because there's too much low end. So what we're going to do is we're going to roll a lot of that off.

[11:43] I think that's perfect. Mine still does have a little bit more. But like I said, I want to hang on to some of that open up a maximum. This is going to be the last plugin. We're going to want to navigate to the clean master preset right here. This is a lot to look at. I know. But the first thing you're going to want to do is click on the bands tab right here.

[11:56] And you can see your lows, your mids and your highs are split into three different sections. And you can view them each individually right here. Don't even worry about all this other stuff. It already does a relatively good job at dividing the low mids and highs.

[12:09] So we won't even need to adjust any of this right here. Click on the low tab right here. And you're going to mess with this knob right here. This is our stereo separation knob. This works with the stereo field. Now lows on a track should always generally be in the dead center.

[12:21] Just so it sounds cleaner on all speaker systems. So to the right is going to be more center and to the left is going to be more wide. Make sure to click solo so you can just hear the lows. Alright next we're going to spread the mids out a little bit.

[12:35] I'm down to slow to 100 more and I can't see the final low. Generally no more than about 50%. But do what sounds good to you. It's your master. And we're going to leave the highs as they are unless you want to spread that out a little bit too. But okay now the master all you're going to want to do is click on that enables all this stuff right here.

[12:49] Only two knobs you're going to want to mess with are the attack. I would lower the attack just a little bit and then just raise this knob up as high as you can go before it starts sounding like this. Alright cool it's normal to have just a little bit of pumping but try not to overdo it.

[13:04] So this is this is too much. It's just a little bit too compressed.

[13:18] And like I said if you're not happy with how loud it got reduce your lows until you can get it loud enough. And then as always you can always go back and cross reference this to this just to see if you're on the right path. If you see anything that sounds too off make sure to go and correct it in your original mix as well.

[13:32] So yeah once you're happy with your master just go to file export as way file and make sure to copy these settings right here. And start. So yeah there's a full in-depth matching process. Start to finish using only stock plugins. I think it turned out pretty good. Let me know what you think in the comments and let me know what you guys want next.

[13:45] So yeah until next time.