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    Milo Burke

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    Viewing: Mastering - View all posts

    How to Master Music at Home 

    Introduction

    You're ready to publish your music and you can't afford a mastering engineer. You're familiarized with what a mastering engineer does, and you're ready to tackle this yourself. But one problem: you don't know where to begin. What's the best way to approach mastering when you've never done it before? Fortunately, that's what we're covering today.

     

    Preparing Your Files

    Before you begin, you need to gather all the files: whether you're mastering an 18 song album or a 3 song EP, you need to…

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    08/27/2018

    in Mastering, Compression, Equalization, Loudness

    How to Give Your Song the Perfect Loudness - 2018 Update! 

    Introduction

    I love listening to dynamic music. There's just no replacement for those clear sounds and clean, punchy drums that make the mix sound powerful. With many of the songs I critique, loudness is one of the biggest issues, and when the producer or engineer just backs off of the limiter by 3-6 dB, everything sounds cleaner and more professional.

    In a previous post, we explored the context for measuring loudness in decibels, how to read LUFS meters, and how to arrive at the perfect loudness for your…

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    08/13/2018

    in Mastering, Loudness

    Understanding Dither 

    Introduction 

    Maybe your DAW comes with a dithering plugin, or maybe you've seen dither as an option in your limiter, or in the export settings of your DAW. You have the vague idea that it's used for mastering, and you can't remember if you're supposed to always use it or never use it. 

    What is dither? Why do you want to use it? And when is it appropriate? 

    For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume you have a rudimentary understanding of sample rate and bit depth. If this isn't the case, we'll cover…

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    05/28/2018

    in Mastering

    How to Give Your Song the Perfect Loudness 

    Note: there is an update to this article (August 2018). 

     

    Introduction

    In a previous post, I covered how the Loudness War started, and why it's bad for the sound of music from increased distortion and decreased dynamic range. Fortunately, there's a glimmer of hope in that many of the popular streaming services are turning down songs that are too loud in order to even out playback volume for listeners. As of this writing, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal all turn down songs that are too loud…

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    08/22/2017

    in Mastering, Loudness

    Dynamic Range and the Loudness War 

    Why We're Talking Loudness

    Releasing music is complicated. One of the reasons it's complicated is that it can be really hard to know how loud to release a song. If you make your song too quiet, many listeners might check out and skip to the next song because they feel it sounds "boring". But if you make your song too loud, the audio quality really suffers.

    This is pretty easy to solve for those with money: hire a great (loudness-war-aware) mastering engineer and let him/her decide. But for those of us who…

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    07/25/2017

    in Mastering, Loudness

    Micro-Dynamics and Macro-Dynamics 

    In an earlier post, I wrote about how mastering isn't a process. It's definitely worth noting that a mastering engineer has to approach each song differently in order to make it sound its best. That said, of course there are some systematic things a mastering engineer should pay attention to. Some of which many readers may not already know. Two biggies are micro-dynamics and macro-dynamics.

     

    Why Dynamics Matter

    If you're not caught up on the lingo, dynamics simply refers to the volume variation within a…

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    06/06/2017

    in Mastering, Compression

    How Reference Checks Will Save Your Music 

    You know the drill. The song you're working on sounds amazing while you're working on it. But when you hear it the next day, or on a different stereo, it just sucks. What happened??

    A number of things, to be honest.
     

    Sources of the Damage

    First, our hearing adapts very quickly. Within seconds. And if you mixed your track yesterday to sound very fatiguing, but acclimated to it before you fixed it, you likely became used to the problem. This happens to me all the time.

    Second, you're likely not as skilled and…

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    05/16/2017

    in Mixing, Mastering

    The Truth About Mastering 

    The Big Misunderstanding

    I wanted to share this because there is so much confusion around the internet on what mastering really is. "Mastering is making your track loud." "Mastering is part of mixing; the engineer always mixes and masters." "Mastering is when you put these six plugins on your master channel."

    I can see where the confusion stems from. It's really hard to describe a process that may be different every time, or may occasionally be doing nothing at all. And it's something that even the masters…

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    05/09/2017

    in Mastering, Compression, Equalization, Loudness

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