Hi, good evening, hello.

I’m wondering what steps and measures ya’ll enjoy taking for personal mastering. I’ve been fooling around with only compression, maybe a little limiting, and a tad bit of eq just to get rid of a few frequencies.

I’m not sure if I subscribe to the “go pay huge sums to get it mastered” school of thought, and feel that a producer’s final sound is part of the personal art. Anyways, are there settings/plugins/tips you want to share?

Hi,

here’s a few pointers for some more advacend techniquues than just eq and simple compression:

Mid/Side processing:
http://www.bluecataudio.com/Tutorials/Tutorial_MidSideProcessing/
http://www.about-audio-mastering-software.com/mid-side-mastering.html

Multiband Compression:
http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mixing-mastering/how-to-use-multi-band-compression-in-mixing-and-mastering/
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan01/articles/advanced.asp

Dynamic EQ:
http://www.voxengo.com/product/glisseq/ (never used tho but the concept seems very interesting)

cheerio

Mastering, essentially, in Logic is EQ+Multicompressor+Limiter+use of your ears - so go for it!

Thanks much for the replies! I’ve been messing around with limiting and multi-compressing, and they’re both very cool. I’m finding, however, that the sound in Logic is very, very different from the bounced product in iTunes or on my mp3 player. Has anyone encountered this? Listening in Logic, it sounds super clear, and perfect, but the bounced product sounds slightly distorted (especially on bass) and not mixed very well. I feel that different software and listening devices have their own sound (like listening to two different pairs of headphones), but how can this be backdoored so that the final product sounds very much like what is being heard in Logic?

It *should* sound exactly the same. When you bounce, never bounce as MP3 but always as WAV or a lossless compression. Use 96/24 unless you are specifically mastering for cd or other 44.1/16 media.
If the bass sounds distorted this can have several reasons. In no particular order or completeness:
- your monitoring setup sucks and you mix in too much bass to compensate.
- your mp3 player or headphones cant handle the ultralow bass that you forgot to filter out and is overdriving your headphones
- you need more compression on your bass to get rid of the spikes that cause distortion
- you are clipping (related to the previous one)

check it out, hope it helps.

—Ralph

Hi! Check out that you have normalization “off” in the bounce screen, it might be the problem. Normalization should always be off when mastering.
http://www.primeloops.com/pdf/uploaded/Logic—Mastering.pdf - Great article, learned the basics from there myself!