 In this video we're going to talk about how to master in Studio One. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So we are going to be talking about how to master in Studio One or more specifically how I master in Studio One because we probably each do it a little bit differently. But before I do get stuck in, I want to just ask this question quickly in case it's not clear to you. What is mastering? So unfortunately a lot of people seem to think that mastering is just about making things louder and whilst that is a part of the mastering process there's a bit more to it than that. Really mastering is the final stage in the production process before we release our music out to the world and we're making sure that for example we're meeting technical specifications that we're going to do some final adjustments to the overall sonic properties of the music and also of course making sure it's loud enough, that kind of thing. Now years and years ago mastering engineers had to know about different platforms like vinyl or tape for example or for radio where there had to be differences in the sonic properties depending on those platforms. Now the different platforms are things like whether you're releasing to a streaming service or whether it's for download or perhaps if you're still burning to CD. So those are considerations during mastering as well. So we're going to be looking at all of that. The next question is should you master? Because an awful lot of people in forums are going to tell you don't master your own tracks. Well I think that if you can afford it and if it's practical yeah send it off to a mastering engineer. A mastering engineer is more experienced, deals specifically with that task, has better equipment all that kind of stuff and that's fine. But I think in a lot of occasions it's not really practical or affordable for people. So say for example you may cover songs for YouTube and you're releasing a song every single day. It's not really practical to send that off to a mastering engineer and it's probably not economically viable for you either. So those are a couple of considerations. Now there is a half way house, there's some automated mastering services like Lander. But what I think is what you'll learn in today's video will get you a better result if you practice it a little than those automated services like Lander. I mean if nothing else it's going to give you a bit more flexibility. It's probably not going to be as good as if you send it off to a really professional and qualified and experienced mastering engineer. So that's all about mastering. Let's see how we can do it in Studio One. Okay so I've already done some basic preparation for mastering my song. I've loaded it here into the project page of Studio One. I've given it a title. I've updated things like the artist's name and other information there. I've even added some artwork. The other thing I like to do at this stage is make sure that I've trimmed the beginning and the ends of the song to get rid of any unwanted silence. Now if you don't know how to do any of those things at all then I highly recommend you watch another video I've made which is all about the project page. I'll put a link for that down in the description and just up above here now. If you go and watch that you'll get familiar with how you can do those kinds of things. Then come back here and watch how we can actually do some mastering. Now the other thing I like to do at this stage is check my loudness information. I can do that if I've got my song selected by going up here to where it says loudness information. Now if there is some information I try and open up this area with the arrow. It will show. If not then it's going to detect the loudness here as it's doing for me now. It doesn't take very long at all. Now what I'm looking for here is first of all to make sure that it's not clipping at all. So it shouldn't be going up above 0 dB. It's going to tell you if that's the case. Apart from that there's no real rules. I do like to have mine sort of peaking at around about between minus 3 and minus 6 dB. But that's not a rule. You could have it as high as 0 dB as long as it's not clipping. But I do like to check that at this point. The other thing I like to do now is load in my reference track. So what is a reference track? Why are we going to load it in? A reference track is going to be generally a commercially produced track which has already been mastered and has the same kind of sonic properties that you want to have in your final result. I highly suggest you use something of the same genre and a similar kind of arrangement as well. There's not much point if yours is a piano ballad and using a heavy metal song as a reference track. They're very very different in terms of sound and sonic properties. So for example with my song here it's mostly dominated with vocal and acoustic guitar and a few other instruments at the beginning and then there's a big crescendo at the end where sort of an orchestra and everything else comes in. I've chosen a reference track which is very very similar to that indeed. Now I'm not going to tell you what that reference track is. I'm not going to give you the name nor am I going to play it in this video because I'll get into all kinds of issues with copyright. It's important to make sure that the reference track is similar to your song and what you want the final outcome to be for that song. Now something very important with the reference track is to do some volume matching. We have a problem with reference tracks in that they're already mastered so they naturally sound much much louder and we're not going to make our song louder until the end. So when we're comparing our song to our reference track as we go along it's going to naturally sound better because it's louder. That's just a little trick which happens with the human brain. Louder things equals better things. We don't want that trick to happen so we're going to volume match it. We're going to make it sound about the same volume. It's very easy to do. So what we're going to do is I'm going for the loudest part of my song towards the end here. I'm going to play it in a moment and I'll be looking at the metering especially at the values that I see here for the RMS. The numbers are going to appear where my mouse is just there right now and I'm going to be looking to see what kind of values I've got with my song there. So you can see that it's hovering around about minus 13 to minus 14 dB. That's absolutely fine. Let's go ahead and I'll go to a similar position in my reference track as I say I'm not going to play it for you guys but what I know from looking at it already is that it was actually around about minus 8 dB which is significantly louder in volume. So what I did was I went to the reference track I selected it over here and I just adjusted that fader down until its RMS was around about minus 13, minus 14. That means that when I switch between the two songs and I'm listening to similar passages they are a similar volume. Now if you're finding the numbers are the same but to you one sounds louder than the other then trust your ears above the numbers. That's the most important thing. So it's normally at this stage that I start to think about any metering plugins which I'd like to add. Now if we were in any other door at all I'd be saying download and get this or that plugin but in Studio One the metering is so good I really don't think you need a plugin for this. It dominates most of the screen as you can see here there's lots and lots of options for visualising it in different ways as well as different standards that you can view the metering in down the bottom here. So I really don't think you need anything else unless there's some very specific metering you think you need. However there is a plugin which I do use quite often which falls into this category and I'm going to show it to you now even though it's a commercial plugin I'm kind of recommending it because I do use it all the time but it is optional you don't have to have it. It's called a Tonal Balance Control. It's by Isotope. Now I insert any metering plugins into this master section down here and that's where I've inserted this one. This means it's always at the end of the chain so it's doing its metering based upon any changes I've made so far. So I'll open up this plugin here just to quickly show you what it's all about. It's got four bands which you can see here the low, the low mids, the high mids and the highs and some lines are going to appear when I play the song and it's going to indicate whether I'm falling roughly where I should be within those sort of ranges for the style that I've chosen. Now I've chosen pop up here but there's a few different ones to choose from. Now that's just going to give me a rough guideline to tell me whether I'm in the right ballpark or not. So let's just have a quick listen to the song. So obviously I've got nothing to worry about in the top three bands. The lines are sitting nicely in there. I may be a bit heavy on the low end of things at the moment. I may want to take a look at that. Now I don't follow this religiously. There's been occasions where I've gone and I'm going to ignore the advice here. I think the low end or the high end, whatever it is, sounds fine to me. But I do find it very, very useful, especially when my ears are getting fatigued when I've been working on a project for a while. I can't necessarily trust my ears that much anymore to have this visual guide. I find it very, very useful or at least a great starting point. As I say, completely optional. You don't have to get this to do mastering, okay? So the next thing I do is add in an EQ plug-in and it's got one solitary task here and that's to act as a high pass filter or a low cut filter. Those two pieces of terminology relate to exactly the same thing, by the way, just different terminology. So I've inserted the Pro EQ2 a stock plug-in in Studio 15 here and I'm going to switch on that low cut filter. So I'll do that now. Now let's talk briefly about why we're doing this. We want to get rid of some low end information which we can't actually hear. Human hearing only has certain limits and it extends in the low end down to around about 20 hertz or so but there may be some low end information which is still there. Now you may be asking, well, why get rid of it if we can't hear it? What difference does it make? Well, the thing is although we can't hear it the computer can hear it. So that information will be going through further down the chain into other plug-ins and it will affect those plug-ins especially things like compressors and limiters. So for example, in theory you could have a low end sound in isolation right down there say at minus 25 hertz which you can't hear at all which could entirely cause your compressor to kick in and start compressing everything else. So we don't want that to happen so we're going to tame that low end. So I've switched that on. I'm going to change the slope here to 48 dBs here and then I'm just going to initially adjust it to that number I was talking about which is 20 hertz. Now what I normally like to do here is start listening to the music I'll listen to it over and over again and I'll start pushing that up, pushing it up I'll get to a certain point maybe it's something like 30 hertz and I'll start to A, B so I'll switch the plug-in off and on and I'm going to start to see if I hear any difference. Now so I get to this point here 25 dBs or so and when I'm switching between the two I start to hear a slight difference then I go back down a little bit again just gradually to a point where I can hear no difference when I'm bypassing the plug-in in and out, okay? So that's the only thing you need to do with this particular plug-in. Now I will say that there are some alternatives that I could suggest to the ProEQ plug-in which you get a stock here. This is absolutely fine but some people find that they like to use a much more aggressive ramp here. Now the low cut on here has a limit of 48 dBs. This one that I'm going to suggest which is TDR Nova by Tokyo Dawn Records this is a free plug-in. I'll put a link for this down in the description and the high pass filter on this as you can see is much more aggressive so I've set it at 20 Hz there and I've got it going up to 72 dBs there in terms of my slope. Very, very aggressive slope indeed. You don't really have to do that but sometimes I do like it to be a little more aggressive. So just a suggestion there if you don't want to download any extra plug-ins then definitely go ahead and use the ProEQ plug-in which comes as stock with Studio One. By the way, have you learnt something from this video so far? If you are and you're enjoying it could you do me a little favour and make sure you hit the like button? That lets YouTube know that other people should see this video as well. Now if you are enjoying this kind of content from me, especially the Studio One tutorials could you also make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you're notified about my future videos. Now, back to this video. Now I think saturation is highly optional in terms of mastering. You really don't have to add it but if you are going to add it I normally add it at this stage. Now I don't really think that the stock plug-ins that come with Studio One have great saturation options for mastering. There's a few more saturation options in Studio One version 5 but I still think they're good for mixing rather than mastering. But one thing you could get hold of from the Prisonis site is this free saturation knob which I'll just pull up here. Just go to their site, look for that, download it for free. It's very very easy to use as you can see because it's dominated by this one knob here which you would just push up as you're listening to the track until you hear a nice amount of saturation. That kind of organic distortion and harmonics that we got from old equipment which we don't get in the digital realm. So this is a nice easy way to add it and it is a free solution. The only issue I've got with this plug-in is that things definitely get louder as you push this knob up and again we can be tricking our ears a little bit into thinking it just sounds better because it's louder. If I'm honest with you I don't normally use this as an option. I normally use these days a commercial option for that. It's one from IK Multimedia and I like to use one of their tape machine plug-ins. This adds some nice natural saturation. I've pulled it up here. I'll switch off the saturation knob so that it's not going through and this really sort of gives you a similar type of saturation that you would get from an old tape machine. Now there are four different models I think to choose from. I'll put a link for those in the description. I particularly like this tape machine 80. Now I have done something here apart from just plonk this plug-in on there. I've done a little bit of an increase to the high frequencies. You can see just up here I've just added a little bit in terms of the high frequency. Down here I've added a little bit with the high frequency on the playhead just to give it a little bit of sparkle on the top end. Now you could get that with an EQ of course but I've chosen to do it here. I like to do EQ moves with saturation plug-ins in mastering when I can. I find that it just sounds a little bit sort of more organic than using an actual EQ plug-in. But highly optional as I say and if you can't afford or don't want to get hold of this plug-in or any other commercial plug-in then perhaps try a combination of that saturation knob and just an EQ plug-in here. So another optional option in my opinion is compression during mastering. Now I think most of the time in my productions I do use compression but I don't want you to feel like you have to. Definitely use it when you have a purpose for it. Now the purpose for it for me on this occasion is just to tame some of the peaks towards the end of the song or I've got some sort of transients which just poke up above a certain level. I just want to tame them a little bit and that's going to enable me later on in the limiting stage just to push the overall loudness of the song up that little bit more which is something that I'll be aiming to do. But the main thing I want to stress here with the compressor is be very gentle with it in this case. So I'm using the stock compressor here from Prisonis. I've got the ratio on 2 to 1 that's a pretty good starting point nothing too drastic is going to happen in terms of compression with a 2 to 1 ratio. I've got my attack set to around about 6.5 milliseconds here this is just so I can make sure that I do grab those transients but I'm not sort of crushing over a longer period of time it's just dealing with things that are poking up for a moment and also my release time I normally start off at around about 60 milliseconds and see where I go from there but it's highly dependent on your song on your particular track what you don't want to get is any kind of pumping effects well that's not absolutely true sometimes in some genres of music you do want that pumping effect but for most of us we don't want that pumping effect in fact we just don't want to be aware of the compressor there and things are happening so we don't want that to attack too hard on those transients so it's very obvious to listen to and we don't want it to hold on too long and kind of crush the rest of the track. Now with this particular compressor I think it's okay for mastering but I'm actually going to use a different compressor which is not a stock plugin but you'll be happy to hear it is free it's another plugin from Tokyo Dawn Records and it's called Katelnikov I like to use this because it is rather tailored for master compression okay that's exactly what it's tailored for. The thing I like about this more than anything else is the control over the release because we've got two controls we've got a release which is based upon the peaks and we've also got a release which is based upon the RMS or the average value or the average level of the song. Now of the music at that point I should say now we can use them in combination with each other or we can use one or the other I really like this feature and this plugin I'll put a link for this in the description and if you want to find out a little bit more about it I've done a whole video on Tokyo Dawn Records free and paid plugins I'll put a link for that in the description as well. So another option or option at this point is stereo imaging now stereo imaging can really help your track by making it sound much wider or it can destroy your track by making it sound much wider you have to make a choice with this depending on your music and whether it's going to suit it or not now there's no stereo imaging plugins which come with Studio One but I'm going to suggest a free one to you now which I reckon is really good it's from Isotope and it's called Ozone Imager you can see it on the screen here now and it's really just got one control for you to change the sound and that's this slider here ok there's other controls we won't get into that this is your main one ok so I'm going to play this end section of the song again here and I'm going to gradually push that up so that you can hear the difference ok I really like that now one thing I have to warn about with stereo imaging is make sure that you do check your mix quite often in mono because this can play havoc with mono mixes in terms of causing phase issues now you may think that mono is not important you're wrong mono is important there's many many occasions when people are listening to things in mono maybe you're listening in mono now on your phone you should really be listening to tutorials like this with headphones on or with studio monitors but we'll move past that so that's a nice plug in which you could use there is a commercial option as well also from Isotope the Ozone 9 Imager is the one that I'm going to pull up now in fact this is one I'm going to leave on my track one difference with this is that I get control over different frequencies so I like to keep the low end intact and not make that very wide at all I just really like it when that's nice and solidly in the middle but perhaps with the mid and higher ranges I like to add a little bit of width so that's what I've done here and that's what I'm going to be running with on this occasion so normally at this stage I think about finally kind of crafting the sound which I want and I'm going to be using this stock EQ which comes with Studio 1 for this it's really very capable in terms of this particular task now what I'll be doing at this point is often going between my track and the reference track so I can really hear the differences in tone between the two and I'm broadly listening to that low, mid and high ends and as such I generally am only making fairly wide ranging and gentle changes here. You can see the change I've already made and it's just one here and this is just in the high mids where I've just pushed it up a little bit to add a little bit more clarity especially to some of the vocal parts now I didn't feel the need to do anything to the low end here but you may feel that and quite often if I hadn't done it already in that tape machine plug in which I used earlier for saturation I may be doing a little bit of sparkliness with a high shelf in the EQ here but I already really did that with that saturation plug in so I don't need to do it here in my opinion. Now if you find yourself sort of adjusting things in this kind of way where you're ending up sort of microscopically with little notches adjusting things here that may be fine but it may also suggest that there's something very specific in the mix maybe a particular instrument where those frequencies are not living in quite the right kind of way that's a good way to put it so that may be an indication that you want to re-address the mix I don't really like to suggest going back to the mix again usually you've spent way too long on that already but I don't generally personally find that I'm doing sort of my new detail with the EQ at this stage it's more like broad sweeps that's just my opinion and that's the stage which I think you should be crafting the overall sound here so now we come to the final and probably most talked about phase of mastering and that's dealing with the loudness now before we do deal with the loudness I'd quickly like to take stock of what we've achieved so far because it may seem as if we've just made tiny tiny changes which don't add up to much but I think you'll find that they do add up to quite a big difference when you combine them all together so I'm going to play this section at the end of the song again first of all without any plugins applied whatsoever then after a couple of bars or so I'm going to switch on those plugins so that you can hear the difference so I think you should be able to hear quite a significant difference there it's almost if the whole thing just came to life once we had those plugins applied making it sound a little bit dead before although it sounded fine to me when I was actually mixing it so we've achieved something significant there without changing the loudness at all I don't think we've really changed the loudness at all we'll check that in a moment so now we need to deal with the loudness now we need to deal with it for some different scenarios while I'm going to deal with a couple of different scenarios the first one is releasing to streaming services such as Spotify, iTunes, YouTube that kind of thing where there are specific requirements now most of them are in line with each other these days but you need to double check with a particular streaming platform as you're releasing to the other scenario is if we're burning to CD or we're releasing something where people can download a whole mp3 and then they're not going to be streaming it they'll just be playing it on their device some different things to consider in those different two scenarios so first of all what tools are we going to use well we could use the limiter which comes with studio one I'll just open that up it has the controls that we need it has the ceiling control and the threshold control which are going to be the main controls that I'll be using except I don't really like to use this plugin I'm not exactly sure why I think it's an awesome plugin in terms of mixing but I just don't find it's that great in terms of mastering but if you do want to use it if you do turn to use it that's absolutely fine the controls that we're going to be using in the other plug-in are exactly the same controls as you'll see here so you can still follow along so I'm not going to use that plugin I'm going to suggest you if you don't want to be spending any money that this plugin is really good it's called loudmax make sure it's switched on and it just has really two controls one to control the peak which is this slider here and the other one which is to control the threshold which is going to change the kind of average level of our music and it's really the average level that people hear when they're perceiving loudness it's not so much the peaks when the average level of the music comes up then people feel like it has become louder now for our streaming platforms we have specific requirements to meet for that so I'll be showing you how to do that in a moment first of all let's just have a quick listen to the track and see what values we have without applying any limiting at all again I'm just going to check this so I'm going to switch off all those plugins again and what I want you to do is look at the metering over on this side where we can see something called LUFS LUFS however you pronounce it I don't know I just want to make sure that that is reset at the moment and then we're going to have a listen to that section again at the end and see what kind of values we're getting for LUFS music music music okay it's about minus 16 at the moment our target is minus 14 also for the streaming platforms I'll reset that again I'll move back I'll just switch on our plugins again let's see if we did make any difference with all those plugins music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music music we're never actually peaking when that conversion happens. So we've set that to minus one as is required by Spotify. I'm gonna go back and play the song again, and then I'm gonna gradually adjust this slider, this second slider down here. Things are gonna start to sound louder, and I just wanna make sure we push up those extra couple of decibels so we get up to around about minus 14. Let's see how we go. You could have held me from the start. I never thought I'd need to. Let's drop the part. It's you. We could have thought, we could have loved. Okay, and that's about right. Now I should mention at this point, I'm not doing this exactly right. This is just for demonstration purposes. What you really wanna do is meet to this over a long period of time, probably over most of the song, rather than just focus on small sections like this, and try and get the lowest value for the whole song to be in the right ballpark. But that would be fine there, around this minus 13.8, it doesn't have to be exactly minus 14. So that's how I would use this plugin to achieve the loudness that I want. Now, the other thing that I like to do, in fact, the thing I almost always do is use a commercial plugin, which I'm gonna show you very, very quickly now. It's not the cheapest of plugins, so I'm not gonna push it too much, because I think you can achieve your results with this loud max, or as I say, using the stock plugin with Prasonic Studio One. But the one I actually use more often than not is Ozone 9's Maximizer. And the reason for it is this. I can set my true peak here, which I've already done to minus one. And then I can, in here, set my target loss value. I can switch this to learn threshold. Then I can set that target to minus 14 as I have, and let's just reset this here. Now, what I'm gonna do is play the song. And what this plugin is gonna do is adjust that threshold for me until I get near my target. So let's have a look and see how it does. Shoot a hill me from the start. I never thought I'd need to. So it's done its job, I'll switch off learn, and then that's locked in. The reason I like to use this is because I think it has some slightly nicer algorithms here in terms of the limiting. And also, I do like that feature. Now, again, I would normally do that pretty much over the course of the whole song. Just let it play and see what it calculates automatically by itself. As I say, you don't have to use that commercial plugin, but definitely worth a look. So I'll close that down. I'm gonna go back to my loud max plugin now. Now, let's say our scenario is a little bit different. Let's say we're releasing as a downloadable MP3. Well, now things are quite different. We can really push things to the limit now because we're not restricted by any requirements. In fact, I can make my song sound much, much louder by pushing this threshold down even further. However, it's gonna come to a point where it really doesn't sound good, where we're gonna get kind of pumping effects and all of that kind of thing that we don't wanna hear in our music. It's not gonna be transparent anymore. So don't go crazy on this. You still wanna retain, in my opinion, especially in this type of music, some dynamics in the song. You don't want everything just to be sounding like it's on full all the time without anywhere to go. It's like you're already on full. How do you crescendo? You can't because you're already on full. So I'll just say use caution here, but probably, probably you're going to be going a bit further with something like a download of WMP3 than you do with the requirements they have on Spotify. One thing you wanna probably do at this point is listen to a few different reference tracks, the kind of songs that people might be listening to that they've already downloaded and may be listening to alongside your song and see what their loudness values are like and you may wanna try and match that. So that's all we have to it for today and that's the last stage in our mastering. Thank you so much for joining me in today's video. If you've got any questions whatsoever, please do ask in the comments down below and I'll do my very best to help you out. If you did enjoy this video, then make sure you hit the like button for me. That helps me out because it lets YouTube know that other people should see this video as well. If you do like this kind of content, especially tutorials about Studio One, then make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you're notified about my future videos. Also, if you'd like to help out the channel, check out my Patreon page for as little as $1 per month. You can help me to help you by making more and more of these tutorial videos and I'll see you in the next video.