Always be thinking about what your mix is lacking in comparison to your references. Then listen to your mix with your eyes closed and take notes from that experience. If it helps, listen to your reference mix with your eyes closed, and take some notes. You should use references while mastering to help you dial in the right sound and to compare your master to commercial releases. You should also have a channel called “reference track” that you can use in conjunction with disabling your plugins on your stereo out as well as muting the mix. But without those large wall-mounted far-field speakers or some good mid-fields, you will ultimately struggle with some of these other sections of the stereo field. Near-fields are great for your midrange, some of your lower mids, and high-end. That is why I feel it is important not only to listen to your masters/mixes in your studio but also to the car, crappy speakers, and your phone speakers - which can be very revealing to your midrange, large PA speakers. Another issue you may not be ready to admit to yourself is that your imperfect mixing/mastering environment is lying to you.
Mastering in logic x how to#
In mastering there tends to be a good bit of back and forth before you begin working - that is unless your client has already figured out how to get a clean mix or you’re your client. Balanced mixes are boring, but you also don’t want such a skewed mix - like having only the kick drum being the only real audible sound in the song to be your first impression for people.
If a client submits a track into mastering and its already hitting at 0 and it's not delivering well, then you either need to reduce the gain of the track as early in the chain as you can or ask the client to EQ or reduce the volume if the mix is unbalanced. Starting with the first issue is probably a lack of headroom to get any work done in the first place. Ideally, you should use the highest quality lossless audio you can for reference tracks as the audio you will be comparing your reference tracks to will be high quality, lossless audio. Use these tracks as a baseline of what a good master sounds like. These songs “should” have a similar desired loudness, punch, tone, and/or characteristic that the artist desires. Reference tracks are songs that the artist or producer has chosen for you to refer back to for the master. Does a frequency pop out and hurt your ears? Or does the mix seemingly lose all of its life in this one section? Is this something you can fix at this stage or does it need to go back into the mix?īefore you start making any changes, take listen to your reference tracks. Make timing notes like - how long is this a problem? A mix can be fine and then a new element comes in that wasn’t properly taken into account and it skews it off.
Start making notes of where things are going wrong in the song you are mastering. If you’ve given it all, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get it there. Focus on the best result for what you’re given. While there’s always the “most optimal way” of getting a result, it’s important to not let yourself get fixated on the optimal result.
Mastering in logic x pro#
Luckily, most modern digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Apple’s Logic Pro X have most if not all the tools you’d need to solve any problem you could run into while mastering! It’s just a matter of whether you have the knowledge for it. The whole process of mastering one’s own record is great, but as soon as it is for someone else, those problems that were easy enough for you to fix suddenly aren’t. Sometimes songs get “normalized” on the streaming service and then the whole mix goes to crap. To further complicate things, not every streaming service treats audio the same. Sure loudness plays a role in how “good” we think a record may sound, but then as soon as someone mentions dynamics or transients we get kind of lost. While it can be a challenge for newer engineers to get down, in time you’ll find that getting a song up to competitive loudness isn’t really too difficult - the real difficulty being much more nuanced than that. Mastering is often referred to as a dark art on the internet.
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