Home Mastering Headstart – Lesson #1

The five essential plugins you need to master your music

Great home mastering results are possible! This is the first in a series of seven lessons that will tell you how to get started.

(If you haven’t already seen my overview of mastering, read this link first: How to master your music – the basics)There’s loads of fancy mastering kit available, but the truth is, you only need five key processors – and yes, these days they can be plugins ! You can probably even use the ones that are included with your audio software.

The five essential mastering processors, and why you need them

There are a few other optional extras, but these five types cover all the requirements for good, solid mastering results.

They are:

  1. Gain
  2. EQ
  3. Compression
  4. Limiting
  5. Metering

In this Quickstart Course we’ll look at all of these in turn, but first let’s quickly describe why we need each of them.

Gain

Probably the most basic element of mastering is to balance the levels. Notice I said balance, not match. Loudness-matching is a crucial part of making reliable decisions when comparing audio, but in mastering we don’t want everything to sound exactly the same loudness. We want contrast and variety – but also consistency. Some songs really want to kick, some want to relax back a little.

Mastering is all about making an album from a collection of songs, and choosing the right level is the most fundamental part of that process. In Lesson 6 we’ll discuss why you should do this with a separate plugin.

EQ (Equalisation)

EQ decides the tonal balance of the song – balanced, bass-heavy, toppy, thin, harsh, muddy or warm. The EQ has a big effect on how we perceive the loudness, so sometimes after adjusting the EQ, you need to change the gain. EQ in mastering usually need to be clean, powerful and accurate – I’ll cover it in Lesson 5.

Compression

When I first started mastering over twenty years ago, compression was quite rare in mastering. Often we would just use EQ and limiting. But times and taste have changed, and now compression is a much more common process in mastering, whether single or multi-band.

Compression allows you to manage the dynamics of the music – add power, punch and warmth, without adding pumping or distortion. I’ll go into lots more detail in Lesson 4.

Limiting

Lesson 3 covers limiting. A limiter is sometimes all you need to master a great-sounding song, but even if compression is needed to manage the dynamics too, a limiter is an essential tool. Limiters are often quite simple to set up, but there’s a lot to learn about using them.

Metering

None of these plugins is any use at all if you don’t have accurate feedback on what they’re doing to your mix. In the next lesson I’ll tell you about the free metering plugin that no mastering engineer can do without, and how to use it to get great results.

What order to use them in

In a nutshell – the order listed above! Gain, EQ, Compression, Limiting, Metering. For a more in-depth discussion on how and why this is what I recommend, check out this post:

My mastering signal chain

My Golden Rules of Mastering

It’s not possible to cover all aspects of mastering in this course. But here are some rules of thumb I’ll refer to as we go through the lessons:

  • Always listen at only one or two fixed monitoring levels
  • Balance the levels, balance the EQ, but don’t try to match them
  • Do as little as possible, to get the best results
  • But do whatever is needed !
  • The master should only sound better
  • Always listen and compare “before & after” with matched loudness
  • Your goal is to make the music sound the best it can be

See you soon for Lesson 2 !

P.S.

Did you get here via a link from a friend, or Twitter? This lesson is part one of a 7-part free email course to give you a head start with home mastering. I give you quick, useful guidelines from a professional perspective to help you get started today, without damaging all the hard work you’ve already done. Learn more about it and sign up here.