Mastering Tips

If you want your song to be mastered, but don't want to use a mastering service such as Crickets Mastering, and have decided to master your own song yourself, here are some tips to help you avoid common mastering errors.

Mastering DON'Ts

• Don't "kitchen sink" your master chain by throwing everything you can think of on your master chain.
• Don't do anything too drastic (e.g. a 6dB change). If you feel the need to do something drastic, return to the mixing stage.
• Don't do mixing. If you find yourself mixing, return to the mixing stage.

Mastering DOs

• Your master chain should consist of an equaliser (EQ) followed by a compressor followed by a limiter.
• If you find yourself automating your mastering plugins, return to mixing.
• Use EQ to roughly flatten out the frequency spectrum at the point of the loudest part of your song.
• When flattening the frequency spectrum, use a slope of 4.5dB/octave. For some genres, it can be a bit higher.
• Use gentle compression for singer+guitar songs, and aggressive compression for EDM.
• The output from the compressor should peak at about -12 RMS.
• The output from the limiter should peak at about -9 RMS.
• Set the limiter maximum output to -1.0dB.
• Turn on the limiter's oversampling to x4 or x8.
• Turn on the limiter's interpeak limiting.
• It's best to master at 48Khz (or 96KHz) rather than the standard 44.1KHz.
• Your master should be a 48KHz (or 44.1KHz) 32-bit (or 24-bit) WAV file.
• You don't need to generate different masters for different platforms (SoundCloud, Spotify, Tidal, etc).

Recommended Mastering Chain For DIY Masterers

• Saturation
• EQ
• Stereo Field
• Compressor
• Limiter
• Monitoring

Recommended Mastering Plugins For DIY Masterers

Professional mastering engineers have an "arsenal" of saturators, compressors, and limiters, and choose an appropriate combination of them for each song (although they have their favourites!). This can be expensive though, and if you want to master your own songs, the following set of plugins will serve you well in most cases:

• Saturation: FabFilter Saturn2
• EQ: FabFilter Pro-Q3
• Stereo Field: iZotope Ozone Imager
• Compressor: The Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor
• Limiter: FabFilter Pro-L2
• Monitoring: iZotope Tonal Balance Control 2
• Monitoring: iZotope Insight 2