Are You Listening?

Season 1
Link to original YouTube series

Table of Contents:
● General Notes About Mastering
● Compression
● Limiter
● Equalization

General Notes About Mastering

Purpose of mastering:
● Control the tonal balance of the overall track
● Last chance to fix something in a track
● Prepare the track for publishing

The loudness should be chosen depending on:

● Genre - rock music is louder than acoustic jazz or classical music
● Context - how listener will listen to music

When choosing references it is important to understand which version you are about to pick up. Streaming
services might apply normalization and other features that will lead you to not correct decisions. If you are
about to do mastering for cd - pick the reference straight from cd.

Playback volume calibration:

● Take 10-12 recordings in a similar style, put them on one track and jump between the loudest
sections of these recordings. It can be observed that loudness is more or less constant at such
places (so you have no desire to adjust the volume knob).
● Download any app for SPL measuring, and measure the loudness in a place where your head will
be during the listening. Aim for 85 dBSPL (deviations are ok). Mark the position of the volume knob
(with pencil or something) to know that baseline for yourself.
● Put the track you are working on on the timeline and compare with references - the difference in
tone and loudness will be noticeable.
● Probably the volume indicator in DAW will show something around -12dB. This is the sign of what
exactly volume should be in the digital world.

It is important to be able to switch from “working state” to a “casual listener state”. Try to distract yourself
(go for coffee), imagine yourself a casual listener or imagine someone sitting next to you and listening to
that track - it will become clearer what to do next and if there are any issues in the decisions that you’ve
made.

The position of the listener’s place in the room is very important:

● Do not get close to any wall, because there will be unwanted filtering.
● The worst place is the exact center of the room, because all room effects that are made by that
particular room will sum up in that exact place.
● Do not place speakers near the walls or in the corners - it affects the bass (it gets amplified). If the
room has a rectangular shape, then you should face the small side since the first reflection will take
more time to reach the ear and mix with the original audio (so the effect of the first reflection will be
decreased).

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Plugins - choose the ones that do not give any color. Colorize only if the genre of that particular track
requires it.

Compression
Compression in mastering is applied with a great care:
● If we are talking about dynamics then just move the volume fader by hand, but sometimes you want
to give the recording a bit more punch or the opposite (to blur the mix more) - in that case the
compressor is the tool you need.
● It is important to remember that the compressor decreases the level of signal. While it is doing so, it
affects the low harmonics (1-3kHz), which affects our perception of loudness. And because of the
same reason the compressor affects the timbre of the recording.
● It is good to think of a compressor as the correction tool for the ADSR of the signal. Sometimes you
will want to attenuate the peak of the attack, while sometimes you will want to put more focus on it.
● Compressor always brings a challenge of balancing between:
○ Attack and sustain
○ Clarity and density of overall sound
● To add a punch means to make the transients more clear (separate them more from other content).
It can be used for making drums a bit more noticeable among the other instruments. Use a long
attack to pass the transient while affecting the sustain. (Rate~2, Attack~50ms, Release~100/125ms)
● Attack time can be represented as the wavelength (50ms = 20Hz). By increasing the attack time we
are increasing the amount of harmonics that do not get affected by the compressor. By decreasing
the attack time we decrease the amount of harmonics, so the transients become more blended into
the mix again.
● Release time is also affecting the sound. The longer the release time the more sound gets softened
(the release of the compressor gets layered with incoming loud signals).
● Sidechain in the mastering compressor uses the same signal but filtered with HPF, so the
compressor gets triggered only by high frequencies, which have a shorter wavelength. By doing that
the effect from the compressor should become more transparent.
● To glue means that we should focus on the sustain part of the signal. The transients should be
attenuated to better fit the overall sound picture.
● Knee type:
○ Hard knee - the moment when the compressor gets triggered becomes more distinctive. Use
it to spice up the recording, for example when working with electronic music.
○ Soft knee - the compressor works more smoothly, can be very useful when working with
vocals.
● Detector type:
○ Peak - immediately reacts to peaks. Very useful for drums if you need to spice them up.
○ RMS - reacts to the energy of the signal during some short period of time (around 300ms).
Very useful for the sustain type of instruments (vocals, etc..) if you need to glue them more.
● Low frequency compression - when we separate the spectrum (around 150 Hz should be fine) and
work with low frequencies only. Useful when you need to correct the relationship between kick and
sustained bass. It is done by tweaking the attack time as described earlier.

Limiter
● Where to start: put the limiter on a track, set it to the needed volume output, listen to the result and
try to understand where the limiter distorts the signal. This will mean that you need to do additional
tweaks.

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 ● When you do A/B testing make sure that levels of A and B signals are at the same levels (level
match comparison).
● LUFS is a primary thing by which streaming services decide to amplify or attenuate your audio.
They measure the whole file for it. So consider the dynamics of your track when adjusting the limiter.
For example if you have a soft part and a very loud intense part, you will want to give some space to
the limiter instead of locking it to the value that you might associate with LUFS. For such cases 3-4
dB of headroom is usually enough.
● Since the limiter is used to do small changes, some people prefer to split the channels and work
with them separately with a separate limiter on each one of them.
● Limiter affects sound quality:
○ Limiter affects the timbre: low frequencies get muddy, while high frequencies get distorted.
The situation with low frequencies is happening due to the fact that low frequencies carry a
lot of energy and the limiter affects them in the first place and tries to decrease them. When
low frequencies get limited, the new harmonics get born and get summarized with the
existing upper harmonics of the signal, so you hear the distortion in high frequencies.
○ The release time affects the sound of the limiter. The bigger the release time the more
smooth the outcome will be. Plus sound will get less distorted. You can check it by yourself -
try to limit the 100 Hz sine wave while looking at the spectrogram - there will be additional
harmonics to it, and by increasing the release time they get decreased.
○ Considering all that being said above, when working with a limiter ask yourself: did kick
become less powerful? Did hi-hat become more bright? Did the hissing parts of the vocal
become more bright?
○ Decreasing the side-effects of the limiter - usually people doing a chain of two limiters with
more soft settings, so the signal will get affected step-by-step and the overall effect will be
more smooth. If you want to keep the release time short, then consider using equalizer to
bring the high frequencies to the original level.
● Izotope Ozone limiter modes:
○ IRC1 - analogue limiter mode - reacts to signal immediately, transients get affected instantly,
overall sound becomes more warm and low frequencies start to be more punchy.
○ IRC2 - digital limiter mode - more mild effect compared to previous one.
○ IRC3 - more sophisticated mode which tries to take care of multiple factors. As a result
-sound is more clear and less distorted. Some people experience it as a more bright sound.
○ IRC4 - limiter with dynamic EQ before it. EQ attenuates the peaking frequencies before the
limiter, so the limiter will affect the signal less.

Equalization
● EQ in mastering is very subtle: 0.5 dB is pretty common, while 2 dB is considered to be quite
extreme and indicates the problem at the mixing or arranging stages.
● You can think of EQ as a way of fixing the overall timbre of the recording. Usually the studio
speakers and the room in which people do mixing are not perfect (compared to the mastering
speakers and room). They have their own artefacts in the frequency domain, which leads to a global
artefacts of the final mix (for example mixdown is attenuated around 1 kHz). By doing equalization ,
a mastering engineer is trying to fix the things that are currently gained up or attenuated. While
doing that he tries to imagine what result the mixing engineer was trying to achieve. In other words
the goal of equalizing is not to bring something new, but to carefully fix the existing result.
● The mindset. First of all just sit down and listen to the recording. Write down what you like in this
track and what you think is needed to be fixed. This will be your point of synchronization, so while
you will be digging into the details you will have the opportunity to take a look into the notes and
remind yourself what is really important.

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 ● Equalization process, choosing the settings:
○ First of all the correction of timbre takes place: make the track more bright or dark, make
bass more impactful etc. Choose wide bandwidth bands or shelves for highs and lows. Do
not use filters (HPF, LPF) as they create the phase shifts and, for example, the punch at low
frequencies might be decreased (which is not what is supposed to happen while equalizing).
■ After you’ve done with timbre changes it is important to do A/B testing for every
frequency band and understand if sound is shaped in the desired direction. If for
some frequencies it doesn’t happen then redo it.
○ After that the correction of particular notes/sounds/instruments takes place because usually
after timbre correction the overall balance gets broken so you need to fix it back. Or
something was mixed muddy and you want to fix it. Choose narrow bandwidth for band and
tune needed frequency. Before doing that try to understand what exactly makes you not
comfortable and only then try to find it on the frequency spectrum. It is important to
remember that usually you want to do more than it is needed, so after you’ve fixed some
frequency you can cut the gain value by half - in most cases it is exactly what is needed.
● How to understand when to stop: when you understand that you can’t add anything more. That’s it -
stop!

Thanks to iZotope for the videos. Notes created by me, and I apologize for possible english mistakes. Feel
free to share with anyone and have a great day!