The most popular post on my site right now is this one:

How to make your music loud

The video above is a “sequel” to that post, in a way, because it demonstrates many of the techniques I talk about in the original post.

(I’m not saying you should make your music really loud, by the way – far from it. But if that’s what you’re going to do, I’d prefer you to make a good job of it : )

The video was inspired by an email from Brendan Zacharias, a musician and producer who recently bought a copy of my eBook and video package Mastering with Multiband Compression.

(Multiband compression can be an invaluable tool for getting loud, punchy mixes without crushing the life out of your mix – to find out more, click here.)

Brendan was having problems matching the level of his songs, “Graphite” to a commercial release, even though he was following the guidelines in my eBook.

Here’s an excerpt from his email:

I know it is extremely hot, rms getting up to -3 and a DR of 2.7!! so I know this is ridiculously over compressed however, the drums sound nice and clear and punchy, all the bass is present and it just has a nice energy which of course sounds great over a club sound system. Even If I compress my mix to these levels it just lacks that in your face attitude, Is there something i’m missing?

I asked Brendan to send me before and after copies of his track, plus the commercial song he was trying to emulate, and once I’d heard it, I knew I could answer his question – in fact, it highlighted three key issues on making a loud master.

Instead of writing an email reply to him, I thought instead I’d do a video demo, so you can hear what my reply was, too. I sent Brendan a sneak preview of the video, and he said:

Great video, Deffinitely opened a few things up to me which I hadn’t been introduced to before.

I guess the thing which really answered my question the most, and I guarantee most young producers in my position won’t know about this same technique is using the eq to cut the bottom end and then using the gain utility to bring the apparent gain back up.

Most of the other guides and tutorials I have read on the internet have only talked about compressing and then boosting the top and bottom end using an eq. Maybe when writing the post you should really emphasize this point as it may be simple to you, but a completely new concept to others!

So, just to add some extra clarity to this point – bass has a big influence on the apparent loudness of a song, partly because it account for more of the power in the signal – so, it’s crucial to get the right EQ balance before you try to lift the level.

(I’m not just talking about slapping a high-pass filter across everything though, you need carefully chosen settings depending on the song – watch the video to see what I mean.)

The video was made on my home mastering setup, and the plugins I’m using use are made by Melda Production – if you’d like to know more about how (and why) I use them, I’ve made a series of free email tutorials – for more information, click this link:

Mastering with plugins – A free ‘quickstart’ eCourse

And, if you’re interested to learn more about multiband compression, as well as the link above you can check out a free 50-minute webinar I did with Joe Gilder, here.

I hope you find the video useful !

How to master a song loud – and the price you pay (Video tutorial) is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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I’m signed up to the Facebook group “End the Loudness War“. Last week Harman Aaron Loučka posted a heads-up that an example of the vinyl release of the new Red Hot Chile Peppers album, “I’m With You”, had been posted on YouTube.

I headed over to check it out, since vinyl releases often show as having better dynamics (“crest factor”, to be strictly correct) than their CD equivalents in the Dynamic Range Database. I don’t have a record deck though, so hadn’t had a chance to check it out, until now.

The results were pretty clear, and I’ve made my own short YouTube clip to demonstrate the difference. Take a listen, and see if you can hear a difference, and which one you prefer.

This is not a vinyl versus CD thing

Whatever you decide, it’s important to know – what you’re hearing is NOT some inherent limitation of the quality of the CD format.

CD and vinyl do sound different, but with identical masters, they should sound very close to each other. Much closer than this.

These are not identical masters – on the CD, the crest factor is about 6 dB less than on the vinyl, and there are some EQ differences too. (And, the vinyl is playing at a slightly higher pitch)

Yup, it’s the loudness war again.

The loudness war is insane

This means that the quality of the CD version, which is theoretically a far superior format technically, is lower (in my opinion) than the vinyl.

This is insane.

At the very least, they should sound similar, so that people who prefer vinyl can choose it for it’s particular characteristics.

As it is, since I prefer the mastering of the vinyl release, the only way for me to hear this version is to buy a record deck or download an illegal rip of the vinyl. Madness !

Why does the vinyl sound different ?

Of course, it’s sadly no surprise that a RHCP CD sounds like this – “Californication” helped kick-start the loudness war in the first place, and producer Rick Rubin is a serial offender, mistakenly believing that people always prefer a more heavily compressed version – they don’t, as research shows.

What’s interesting is to notice that the vinyl was released a couple of months after the CD. Since they were all mastered by Vlado Meller at Masterdisc, the question is, why does the vinyl sound different ?

Was this simply following the ironically perverse trend of “audiophile” vinyl releases ? Or might it be in response to the generally harsh reception of the album’s sound all over the web ?

We can only hope it’s the later…

For more information on the Loudness War, click here.

PS

As an interesting side-note, notice how YouTube’s lossy data-compressed audio sounds worse for the CD version – more artefacts.

This is further proof that higher-quality, more dynamic music actually survives better when mp3-ed, and makes it even more sadly ironic that the CD master was the basis for the so-called “mastered for iTunes” version.

And, a sadly missed opportunity – since there were separate masters for CD and iTunes, the iTunes version could actually have sounded better…

Red Hot Chile Peppers – ‘I’m With You” vinyl sounds better than CD is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 11 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

Since this is the final post in the series, and my speciality is mastering, it would seem to make sense for this to be a mastering tip.

But I’m not going to do that.

Regular readers already know all about my views on levels and mastering ! For example:

How to avoid over-compressing your mix

How to make your music loud (without killing it stone dead)

Learn the Loudness War secret that will give YOUR music an edge

- and there’s no need to repeat myself here. But this tip is about loudness – or rather, levels.

Specifically, gain structure.

Gain structure just means – how loud your audio is, at every point in the audio chain. Back in the days of analogue it was crucial to get the levels as high as possible at every point in the chain to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, but not so loud as to cause distortion.

These days, it’s not really an issue. With over 60 dB of signal to noise ratio in even a 16-bit signal, all we need to do to get clean audio is avoid clipping, and we’re good.

Or, are we ?

Here are 3 reasons to pay attention to gain structure, even in a digital recording environment.

1 – Where’s your head at ?

Pro audio equipment is always built with plenty of headroom in the analogue stage. You can push it as hard as you like and never run into trouble. But with “pro-sumer” or “home studio” gear, you can’t always rely on this.

To avoid trouble, always give yourself 3-6 dB of headroom at the converters when you’re recording – if you’re using 24-bit, you’ll never hear the difference. Plus you won’t get a nasty surprise when the drummer decides to go all “Animal” on you !

2 – Don’t float your boat

Most modern DAWs operate using 32-bit floating-point arithmetic. There’s no need to know what that means (although it’s pretty zarking clever) but in practical terms it means you have almost infinite headroom – you can’t clip your signal digitally.

That’s right, you can max out every single channel in your mixer, and then just pull the master fader down so it’s not clipping at the output.

But I don’t recommend it.

Not all plug-ins can be relied on to use 32-bit float correctly, and if you’re not careful you could end up clipping everything going through a VST reverb (say) without realising it. It’s safer to just keep things clean.

And until version 10 Pro Tools was still using fixed point. 48-bit fixed point, but even so – in Pro Tools, if it’s clipping, it’s clipping.

3 – It’s just bad practise and makes you look like a n00b

;-p

Seriously though, once the meters are hitting zero, they’re not telling you anything useful. There’s no reason not to keep the levels sensible, so do !

And just as analogue converters don’t sound great if they’re maxed out when you’re recording, so it’s best to give your playback D to A some headroom, too.

Rather than adding a limiter to your main ouput and pushing the mix as loud as possible, crank up your monitor gain, and give yourself a few dBs more daylight.

Your converters will thank you, your ears will thank you, and your mastering engineer will give you a big sloppy kiss. OK, maybe not that last one.

So there you go – those were my 11eleven easy ways to make your music sound better.

I hope you found something useful – if you enjoyed these posts, please take a look around the rest of the site, and share some links with your friends !

To see all the posts in the series, click here.

Day 11- Check your level [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Here’s a question I get asked all the time:

“What do you actually do
when you’re mastering ?”

And people seem surprised when I tell them it’s actually really simple.

I ask questions.

Seven of them.

EQ, compression and limiting are key elements in those questions – and there are other more obscure processes I use less often, but these are the main contenders.

So the next question is – what are these questions, and how do I use them?

What order do I ask them in, and why?

That’s why I put together this flow-chart – you can download a PDF version here.

Check it out, and then here are the answers to some further questions you may have:

What are “internal dynamics” ?

The relative levels of each section of a song.

So, if the chorus is much louder than the verse, the song has wide internal dynamics, and may benefit from being “pulled together” by compression. If everything sounds the same level, then the internal dynamics have probably been reduced too much, and less compression will probably sound better.

What does “DR8″ mean ?

It’s a measure of how dynamic your music sounds – to find out more, read this post.

Why should I level-match when comparing, and how do I do it ?

To get a fair comparison – to find out more, read this post.

Why do I have to adjust the level if I tweak the EQ ?

Because we hear things that are louder as if they had more bass and treble – see the previous question.

If you reduce the bass level, the song will feel quieter, even if the actual level change is very small. So after any EQ change, we need to check that the level still feels right.

Why check the EQ settings after adjusting the compression ?

Because compression can affect the overall level, and so affect how loud the song feels. But also, compression can change the way the song sounds. If there’s lots of bass in the mix, compression will react to that and reduce it – but it may also pull back other frequencies, too.

Multiband compression can get around this – I’ve created an eBook and video about this – to see a free 50-minute webinar plus extracts from the video, click here.

Why should it sound better than the original ?

Because that’s the goal of mastering ! If it doesn’t, you need to try again, or maybe the song doesn’t need any more processing.

Why does it need to balance against the other songs ?

Because that’s another goal of mastering ! Notice that I’m saying it should balance, not match – every song should work well against the others, which doesn’t mean they have to be matched or sound the same. This is something I think is at the very heart and soul of mastering.

But it looks like I’m constantly going back to the beginning !

Yes – you are !

But hopefully every time you go around the loop, you song will sound better and better. And with practise, it gets easier and easier – after fifteen years, I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it ;-p

You didn’t answer my question…

Ask me in the comments below, so I can make this post better !

The 7 key questions of mastering mastery is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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This tip is so simple that when I first thought of it I almost felt as if I didn’t need to post it.

But talking to people about mastering recently, I’ve realised that it’s one of those “obvious to you” concepts that Derek Sivers talks about. I just take it as read, but I’m finding out that many people haven’t even considered it.

In fact, I’m starting to think it’s one of the key differences between online mastering services that charge as little as $20 a track, and what I consider to be the “realistic” rates that I, and engineers I know and respect, charge. Those super-low charges just never made any sense to me, before – how could anyone make any money, charging so little ?

So here’s the tip.

When mastering, every track needs it’s own optimised settings

See ? I said it was simple.

It’s not just a case of choosing a single EQ, compression and limiting setting and running a whole album through it.

The whole point of mastering is to assess each song on it’s own merits, and choose the level, EQ and any compression or limiting settings purely based on that particular song. Every time, go right back to scratch and make a fresh start.

That’s how you achieve the goal of balancing all the tracks – finding the ‘centre of gravity’ of the album, the line that leads you through the sequence and ties everything together.

That’s how mastering can make an album from a collection of songs.

Even now, typing this, I can’t believe that anyone would want to do it any other way ! But I’m coming to realise that that’s what a lot of other places call “mastering” – boost the level, add a little bass and treble and some compression, and hit “bounce”.

Whereas I can spend anything up to an hour finding the perfect sound for just a single song.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that you won’t end up using similar settings on many songs on an album – if they’ve been recorded in a single studio, by one engineer, and have similar instrumentation, it’s very common to find that there’s a general character to the sound, that just needs moving one way or another.

But it’s the smaller changes around that general sound that works the magic. It’s how even subtle changes over the course of a group of tracks can give an overall result that’s far greater than the sum of the individual adjustments. I’ve literally made changes of only a fraction of a dB on a track-by-track basis and heard the impact of the collection of songs transformed – more times than I can count.

The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts

Or, to put it another way – mastering is not a zero-sum game.

And it can still astound me, even after all this time – while you’re working the adjustments seem tiny, trivial – too small to worry about. And then you listen to the whole sequence and the overall effect is like night and day, a transformation – it’s like… magic, almost.

In fact, it’s the heart and soul of mastering.

Make each individual song sound the best they can be – in the context of the rest of the album – and everything else follows naturally.

So, next time you’re tempted to take the easy route on the “mastering” stage – think again. Take some time, show the songs some respect, and you’ll be amazed what a difference you can make.

Image by ‘Just Justin‘

The heart and soul of mastering is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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If you checked out the free webinar I linked to recently about using multiband compression for mastering, you’ll have heard me talking about the eBook and video I’ve created on the subject.

If you didn’t – Hey ! I’ve written an eBook telling you everything I can about mastering with multiband compression, and a video demonstrating many of the techniques to go along with it.

Click here for more info

If you’re on my email list you’ll already know about it – in fact you may already have bought a copy. I got a fantastic response when I launched it to them earlier this year, and the time has come to let everybody else take a look.

But I watched the webinar, why do I need the eBook ?

The simplest way to answer that question is to tell you exactly what’s in it, and I’ve created two resources to tell you exactly that. There’s a free PDF report, and an extract from the video. To find out more, click here.

(If you’ve already signed up to watch the webinar, there’s no need to do it again – you’ll be sent the download link for the report automatically.)

The webinar was a decent introduction to the subject, but with a complicated topic like this I needed to take some serious time to make things as clear and complete as possible.

It took me almost a month to write, and I tried to put everything I’ve learned about using multiband compression from my 15+ years as a mastering engineer into it – and thankfully people are telling me I did a great job ! Here’s an example from an email I got recently:

“One concern I had before buying the eBook was I did think it was a bit pricey……just being honest….. it’s actually why I didn’t grab it right away, and then I figured, what the heck, go for it, and I am happy I bought it.

I really enjoyed it and here’s why. It was simple, easy to understand and made sense to someone like me. A lot of stuff out there is way to detailed and confusing, you just got right to the point and made sense…..that’s a skill my friend. I find when I read some stuff, I learn a lot but am left more confused than when I started….I have more questions about what I learned than answers, ya know…..but not after your book…..and the video was a great way to see it in action.

As I said, I have only been at this for a couple years, and have been a sponge for knowledge. The learning curve is huge!!!!  But I think I’m getting somewhere lately, and your eBook has really helped.”

Ian Hudson (Singer & Songwriter)

If you’d like to see exactly what’s covered in the eBook and video, and also get access to the webinar if you haven’t already seen it, here’s the link:

What you need to know about mastering with multiband compression

The eBook and video are available here.

Announcing ‘Mastering with Multiband Compression’ – eBook and Video is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Yesterday I wrote about one of the secret weapons of the professional mastering engineer – multiband compression. If you’d like more information than is included in that post, I’ve recorded a 50-minute webinar on using multiband compression for mastering, hosted by Joe Gilder from Home Studio Corner. You can check out the replay for free, here:

Mastering with Multiband Compression

Some of the topics we covered include:

• A visual description of multiband compression
• How you could build your own multiband compressor (not recommended !)
• My goals when using multiband compression
• Why you shouldn’t use multiband compression when you’re mixing
• The difference between multiband compression and mix buss compression
• The importance of selecting the frequency ranges correctly
• Why I only use three bands
• How multiband sounds different from single-band compression
• Where to use it in the mastering chain

You can watch the whole video replay for free right now – click here to get access. I hope you find it useful and interesting !

Image by PhotoGraham

Free webinar – using multiband compression in mastering is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Have you ever wondered how to get your mixes mastered really loud, without crushing all the life out of them ? Maybe you’ve tried a bunch of different limiters, and ended up with a flat, lifeless result – or just plain distortion ?

I remember when I was training as a mastering engineer back in the early 90s, I certainly felt that way. Luckily, I had some great mentors who shared their experience, techniques and strategies with me – and since then I’ve trained new engineers with those same methods – plus the new ones I’ve figured out for myself since.

Now, if you’re a regular Production Advice reader, you’ll already know I’m no fan of super-compressed masters, and I spend a lot of time trying to get people to keep more dynamics in their music.

But having said that, as a mastering engineer one of the most important things I do is to balance the levels of all the songs on an album, and often that means finding the “loudness sweet spot” where the level is high, the sound is punchy and powerful and I’ve kept the original feel of the internal dynamics.

I wrote about this in one of the most popular posts on the site:

How to make your music loud (without killing it stone dead)

But one subject I don’t cover in that post is multiband compression. That’s because there simply isn’t enough space in a blog post – or even, a series of posts !

So what is multiband compression, and why might you might want to use it ?

What ? And Why ?

In a nutshell, multiband compression (or any multiband processing) splits the audio signal into frequency “bands”, and processes them separately, without affecting the others.

That’s it !

So, for example you might choose to apply particular compression settings to sounds only up to around 160 Hz – to help control the bass end without causing pumping in the high frequencies, for example.

That’s multiband compression – and a multiband compressor is just a plugin or piece of hardware designed to make doing that as easy and powerful as possible. (Well, in theory, anyway – in practice lots of multiband processors I’ve tried are actually very fiddly and confusing to set up, unfortunately.)

There are lots of benefits to this approach – it’s easier to lift the average level without pumping and distortion, you can be much more aggressive with EQ, and there are some clever techniques that allow you to sculpt the sound to an amazing degree.

And that’s why multiband compression is useful in mastering – you can apply surgical processing to only one part of the audio, without messing up the rest. This is exactly the kind of control a mastering engineer needs – to subtly enhance or radically re-shape a mix. BUT:

WARNING

Multiband compression can also make a complete mess of your mix.

This is powerful stuff ! The default settings on many multiband compression plugins I’ve tried are often very far from what I would recommend to get clean, punchy, transparent results.

Careful choices of attack, release and ratio settings are needed – and especially the placement of the frequency crossover bands – where you choose to split the audio into bands, and how many bands you use, can have a big impact on the end result.

Find out more

As I said, there’s much too much to say about multiband compression for a single blog post, but if you’d like to find out more, click here.

Original image by yuan2003

Multiband compression – the mastering engineer’s secret weapon ? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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If you’re a regular Production Advice reader, you’ll know I firmly believe that with time, care and effort, you can learn to master your own music at home. There are a lot of pitfalls along the way, though !

A little while ago I guest-posted over on Joe Gilder’s Home Studio Corner site about this – and, I thought you might like to read those posts, too.

So, without further ado, here are the links:

Top 10 DIY Mastering Mistakes – Part 1

Top 10 DIY Mastering Mistakes – Part 2

I hope you enjoy the posts – let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

The Top 10 DIY Mastering Mistakes is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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So, the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, “I’m With You” is out – and it seems you can’t read about it anywhere without hearing the news that it’s:

“…the first rock album specially mastered to optimize digital sound quality for iTunes Store customers. The album was produced by Rick Rubin and mastered for iTunes using high-resolution sourced audio to provide fans with an incredibly rich listening experience.”

And you know what ? That pisses me off.

Why ? Three reasons:

1. It’s meaningless sales jargon. iTunes is software – an online store and mp3 player. It has no “sound” to optimise the sound quality for.
2. It’s still an mp3 file ! OK actually they’re AAC files, not quite as bad as mp3 – but still, the language implies that we can expect to hear something special. But lossy audio will always sound worse than anything on the original compact disc.
3. And finally – it sounds terrible. In my not-so humble opinion…

Alarm bells started ringing as soon as I read the blurb.

“We are excited to work with iTunes to make an even better listening experience for fans,” said producer Rick Rubin, who twiddled the knobs for the band’s five previous albums. “We can’t wait for everyone to hear it.”

Oh boy. The band’s “Californication” album is infamous for being one of the first absurdly loud CDs, way back in 1999 – and this one was produced by the same team, who were also responsible for Metallica’s infamous “Death Magnetic” – so you can understand this didn’t fill me with hope.

And sadly, the sound lives up to all my worst expectations.

I’m not going to lie to you, it doesn’t sound good…

To be fair, it doesn’t actually sound quite as bad as Death Magnetic – and in fact looking at the numbers it generates, it’s surprising that it doesn’t sound a hell of a lot worse. But even so the characteristic blunt, flat, clipped loudness-war sound is just… tragic.

If this is what audio “optimised for iTunes” is going to sound like, give me a wax-cylinder gramophone record, any day of the week.

And it leaves me baffled – WHY does it have to sound this way ? Rick Rubin is a self-confessed audiophile – he knows exactly what good-quality audio is about. He believes that people like compression – sure, we do. But not insanely compressed and pointlessly distorted to boot…

Mastered for iTunes ?

So what’s the basis for the trumped-up claims about the audio quality, then ? My guess is that the clue is in the phrase “using high-resolution sourced audio to provide fans with an incredibly rich listening experience.”

On it’s own that means nothing, since ALL audio is mastered from high-resolution sources, these days – but it probably means the AAC files in this case were encoded directly from a high-resolution file, rather than from a CD. Maybe the tracks were even mastered through a real-time AAC encode/decoder, to optimise them for a downloadable file-format rather than CD.

Will this make any difference, in a compressed format like AAC ? It’s impossible to tell with something as sad-sounding as this release, but let’s hope we can hear the benefits of music that’s “mastered for iTunes” in future examples.

I can’t help being reminded of the DVD I just finished authoring for black metal band “Cradle Of Filth” (whose latest album sounds pretty good, by the way – thrashing drums, shrieking vocals and all). It features a documentary called “You Can’t Polish A Turd, But You Can Roll It In Glitter”.

Hmm…

Update: Meaningless hype ? Actually no…

Scott from Masterdisc left a comment below shedding some extra light on this subject – I’m adding it here because lots of people don’t read the comments ! Thanks to Scott for taking the time to reply.

“The goal of the unique AAC master of the Chili Peppers album was to make it sound as close to the CD as possible. The ears involved in the process felt it was a success. Pick up the CD and compare to the AAC file with your ears. It’s really damn close.

Keep in mind, I’m not addressing whether or not you like the sound of the CD. It was RR’s goal to make the Itunes file as true to the sound of the CD as possible despite the data reduction. A lot of time, effort and careful listening went into this project. This was not just media hype.”

So, my guess that “Maybe the tracks were even mastered [through a real-time AAC encode/decoder ?] to optimise them for a downloadable file-format rather than CD” was along the right lines.

How sad and ironic that Rick Rubin asked for so much time, effort and careful listening just to accurately reproduce pointless clipping distortion…

(By the way, for those care about these details, I’m calling it “clipping” distortion because that’s what it sounds like to me – looking at the file it isn’t heavily visually clipped, which suggests the mixes were already distorted when they were supplied for mastering – which was the case for Death Magnetic, too.)

Mastered for iTunes – sonic revelation, or meaningless sales hype ? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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