Hi folks, I'm back with another post in the series where I talk about how I composed, mixed and finally mastered the track Dark Roots. So far we have looked at the composition process in this track and some of the musical ideas I used to write this Epic Orchestral piece. Recently, we explored how I mixed the track, a lengthy and detailed process but it pays off in the end. Finally, in this post, we're going to look at how I finished the track, put some spit shine on it (Space Jam reference folks) and Mastered my track Dark Roots. 

Lets get cracking. To begin with, I take the Mix stems from the mix project and put them in to a new project and give it a listen. What I am listening for are any glaring problems or minor tweaks that need to be made. Things like a randomly occuring high frequency note or noise happening in the third Act, which happened in this track. Really, this should have come up in the mixing process but either I didn't notice it or it was caused by the Stemming process. 

N.B Remember, Mix Stems are essentially Playback Stems but printed versions of the Mixed material, not the unmixed material.

Once I printed all of the stems (alternatively, I could bounce the project, more on that later) I then had a single, stereo audio file of 24 bit 48 khz quality to Master. Which looked like this.

Let's just talk about this image for a second. This image is of the waveform of the track, which is basically the representation of noise over time, noise represented vertically and time horizontally. You can actually see that the track is in three acts, with a tail at the end for dramatic closure. This is obvious, because the first third of the wave form is substantially quieter than the second and third halves, though the second and third halves are not necessarily quieter, but composed (pardon the pun) of different content, which is what makes all of the difference. 

Moving swiftly on, let's talk about the plugins. There are many facets to Mastering. The things I am going to focus on is the timbre of the song as a whole, relative volume in the frequency spectrum and allow to me naughty here, making it sound fatter. 

I begin with a channel Equalizer. This EQ is the last step that I can use to shape the overall sound of the track. As I mentioned in the previous post, sometimes you need to get rid of a low mid rumble build in. That just makes the track sound very muddy and not very crisp and clean. This can happen after a mixing process, when you apply Reverb plugins and the like, they can often create a lot of mid range frequency build up if there are a lot of instruments playing in that range, which only gets exacerbated with the reverb plugins. There are many other reasons things like this happen to a mix but that is just one example. Alternatively, maybe you want to enhance the sound of the higher frequencies and the air of the track. Put simply, if you boost some of the higher frequencies in the track, you can make the airiness of the room that you placed all the instruments in sound cleaner and more crisp and of course, bring any instruments, vocals and the like, to the front of the mix a little more. 

From the image above, you can see that I boosted some of the higher frequencies of the track to do exactly what I was just talking about. I didn't really look at mid frequencies too much because I didn't think there was necessarily a problem there. I did however, roll off some of the sub-bass frequencies. Again, this just sort of neatens up the sound. 

In the signal chain, I had the Channel EQ, followed by the Stereo Spread (just spread in the image below) and the Multi-meter, in that order. The signal flow is an important thing to consider, both when mixing AND mastering because the order in which you place certain plugins can have a dramatic effect on the decisions you make. 

For example, if I placed the Multi-meter before a Channel EQ and made some changes to the sound of the track with the multi-meter and then tweaked the settings on the EQ, it would alter the decisions made when using the multi-meter. I will go on to explain what the Multi-Meter is in a little bit, so don't worry. 

As the Stereo Spread is the next plugin in the signal chain, it only makes sense to look at that next. Essentially, what the Stereo Spread plugin allows you to do, is widen the sound of certain sections of the frequency spectrum to give the impression of width and space in the sound. As you can see below, I used a stock pre-set of Medium Mid & HF (high frequency) Spread. This widens or spreads the frequencies out a bit, so that when you are listening to the track in a stereo environment (headphones, stereo speakers, modern iPhones, etc) those frequencies are more audible, relative to the listeners ears. Ever noticed that when you're listening to music played through a car stereo and it sounds crappy if you sit in one seat but great in another? This is one of the reasons. 

Finally, the Multi-Meter, as promised! The Multi-meter is a complicated bit of kit (or plugin in this case). I won't lie, I'm not a Mastering expert but I have a good sense of what a compressor does and what a multi band compressor is, which is what this plugin is. 

N.B Multi Band Compression essentially breaks the frequency spectrum down in to 'bands' and then applies different levels of compression to each 'band'. The image below shows 4-band compression options.

Because I'm not a Mastering expert, I start with a pre-set (Strings Compressor) and work from there adjusting things until the adage is proved true, 'if it sounds good, it's right'. I made sure that the pesky percussion and bass frequencies were in check and was generally happy with the rest of the sound. The important thing at this stage was to listen to the track at various points. The compressor won't need to do much in the early stages of the track, where things are quieter. But later in the track when things get all bombastic and epic, the compressor is going to work harder. 

And there we go, 'Mastered'. There are lots of other things I could do the Master, that in future tracks and related blog posts, I'll hopefully talk about with more confidence and cleverness. 

As ever, I hope you enjoyed reading this marginally more technical post. If you have any ideas about the next tracks blog posts or any other general thoughts, drop a comment below, let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading!