How I handle Mastering

Bit of background: I’ve been involved in pro audio since I was a child. My father worked as an audio engineer in Cambridge and when I got into making and recording music on guitar, he taught me a lot, and I’ve experimented and come up with my own thing, and have a personal recording, mixing, and mastering studio in my house. I also occasionally work at my friend’s recording studio, Haven, in DTLA. Good enough? Cool.

So, very technically I actually have a custom-made device dedicated to mastering, which I call a mastering box. It’s a stereo 2u rack unit that does everything I normally do when mastering, in order, with appropriate setting limits for everything based on how i do things. YMMV, of course, but the basic concepts should suffice.

The stages I use are saturate, EQ, compress, excite, image, and limit.

Saturation, when used sparingly, can amplify, limit (via soft-clipping), and generate musically-related harmonics, all at once. It’s not used in all things because sometimes it can lead to rather disastrous results, but generally speaking it’s handy and worth trying. When you hear people say ‘clip your master’, this is what they mean.

For EQ, I prefer a 3 or 4 band parametric EQ that can only subtract. Subtractive EQing is less destructive and generally easier to work with, especially when used over reasonably wide frequency areas with shallow cuts (no more than 6db). Some people prefer to use dynamic EQ for this, which I have separate because it’s generally ‘extra’.

Compression is important in really all stages of recording, mixing, and mastering, but on the master it’s used more to glue things together. Typically an LA2A or similar compressor is used here because it saturates and compresses everything together, which, when mixed properly, creates a gluing effect, tying everything together. While I do agree that tube-amplified opto-compression is bae, I use that elsewhere and prefer a FET or VCA-based compressor at this stage simply because it’s more controllable. The idea is still to ensure the mix is glued together. use a moderate attack and release, 4:1 ratio, and around -6 to -12db threshold.

Exciters are lovely devices that compress the low end and saturate the high end. When used correctly, they can add punch to the lows and sparkle/air to the highs.

Imaging in this context is really just controlling side level. This requires a mid-side coder. Boosting the sides of a stereo mixdown can really widen it and make it sound big and powerful without actually doing anything but amplifying the sides (or, reducing the mids). This can result in a sound similar to phase cancellation, so be careful how and when you use this.

Limiting is the final step, and is used purely to ensure no peaks go above the set threshold, which for me is -3dB.

And, that’s it. I do also have an input highpass to cut stray bass frequencies, and an output transformer just because transformer saturation is bae, but otherwise that’s all you need to do a basic master.