Mastering is simple. Not easy, but simple.

That's the message behind this series of 6 video tutorials I made recently for Sound On Sound magazine.

In them, I walk you through my entire mastering process from beginning to end, explaining how and why I work the way that I do at every stage.

The most important thing about the Loudness Penalty isn’t really the number.

It’s how the music might sound as a result of that number, in comparison to everything else. The most powerful strategy is to listen to your music in context, with matched loudness – which is how it'll be heard most often online.

That's why we made Loudness Penalty Studio.

It's a brand new desktop application for Mac & PC, designed to quickly and easily allow you to see the loudness stats of a whole album or playlist at a glance – including the Loudness Penalty values – and more importantly to hear their effect.

If you listen to your music at matched loudness with your favourite references and it still sounds great, there is no penalty. But if the LP value is large and negative, and you feel as if it could have space, snap, depth and life to it – often a master with more balanced dynamics will help.

It's an easy test to do - just fire up an LUFS meter, measure the songs you want to compare with, do some simple arithmetic and adjust them all to the same LUFS value...

It's pretty tiresome, though ! Especially if you have a different set of references for different genres, or artists, and want to often swap files out. And as always, the devil's in the details. YouTube doesn't turn quiet songs up, Apple has a different Distribution Loudness level, TIDAL always uses album mode and so on... it can feel overwhelming trying to keep track of everything.

Whereas with Loudness Penalty Studio, you can just drag, drop & Preview. Create multiple custom playlists, save them and swap them around, add and remove files, and loudness match with a single click. It's become my default music player, at this point !

So if that sounds interesting, take a look at the video above, and give it a try.

I hope you like it – we have all kinds of ideas to make it even more useful, if people like it – let me know what you think !

People keep asking how I set up the live audio metering on my Mac during livestreams and videos, which allows me to assess the loudness, EQ balance, stereo image and more of any audio I'm playing, in realtime, without needing to download it or even open my DAW.

The answer is pretty simple, so made a video to show you how it works - along with some of my favourite plugins for analysing audio. Take a look !

Blue Pill or Red Pill ? Is there really that big a difference ?

So the new Peter Gabriel album 'i/o' is finally here - and everyone is talking about the fact that there are three alternative mixes of this album - not just a dedicated Atmos mix (as is becoming more and more common) but also two alternative stereo mixes. The 'Bright Side' mix by Spike Stent, and the 'Dark Side' mix by Tchad Blake.

So what's the difference ? Why are there three versions ? And which is the best ?

I couldn't resist, so started comparing one of the songs that I'd already heard - the first on the album, 'Panopticom'. And the results were fascinating, so I made a video.

To hear what I heard for yourself, plus some observation, comments and wild speculation - check out the video above.

And then let me know which mix you prefer in the comments - and why !

Wow, I really messed up this time.

Not only did I criticise the sound of the new Beatles single (gasp) and not only did I say it wasn’t a mastering issue (sharp intake of breath) but I used numbers to describe what I heard ! (Appalled silence, wolves howl in the distance etc...)

Oh, the horror…

People really didn’t like it.

I managed to upset people from every side of the debate, and they made that very clear in the comments on Facebook.