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I’ve been putting together some tutorials to help other music producers finish more music so they can share it with the world.

You can find the first episode below. It’s part of a series to help turn a short loop of music into a complete production.

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Finishing a new track every week requires a certain amount of discipline. Creating musis is a creative act, and there is a sense in which the possibilities are limitless. This applies to every stage of the process: not just the creation of melodies, but the sculping of the overall sound [mixing] and to the final act of polishing that allows you to say that the track is finished [mastering].

Many people say that mastering is a dark art. It is true that there are – and will remain – extremely dedicated and talented people who have specialised into mastering alone. Mastering engineers do this for a living, focussing exclusively on bringing out the best in other people’s music, and the best ones achieve levels of fame on the basis of this particular practice alone. They take tracks that are fully mixed, and already complete from the perspective of the musician, and add the finishing touches. 

On the other hand, not everyone can afford to have all their tracks mastered by a dedicated professional. Even if they do, many dance producers will still do an initial master themselves – think of a producer working in Ibiza who wants to play one of their tracks that evening in a club to test it out. Ultimately, they may pass the track to a mastering engineer before releasing the track on a label, but the first cut will likely the theirs. 

Even when I ask Jaytech to master The Jig for week 10, he did the mixing as well. Jaytech is a producer rather than a mastering engineer exclusively.

When I am mastering tracks for this site, I am typically looking to achieve these things: 

Loudness – making sure the track plays at the right volume, whilst retaining a decent dynamic range. (I aim for -12db as a rough target). 

Balance –  ensuring that there is harmony between the different frequencies of the sound. 

Musicality – bringing out the best of the track and helping it to fulfil its potential.

Coherence – dance music consists of many different instruments which must work together.

To work accurately and quickly, though,  I find it works best to constrain some aspects of the process. At this point my mastering chaing tends to have these elements as staple: 

MClass Stereo Imager

MClass Stereo Imager

This is the simplest of tools and sits, untouched and infallible, in the first slot in the chain. I use it to convert all the stereo info in the very low end (below around 70hz) to mono. 

FabFilter Pro-Q 3

FabFilter Pro-Q3

A quite superb EQ. It is not known for having its own sound or character; rather for its ease and joy of use. I’d have to have a particular reason to use anything else, and whilst I will occassionally use other EQs whilst mixing tracks, for mastering, it’s Pro-Q3. 

Townhouse Bus Compressor

Townhouse Bus Compressor

I don’t go overboard with this, but it does add a sense of overall cohesion to the track, encouraging its different elements to feel like they are working together. 

Any decent Bus Compressor is fine – I just find this one sounds great without having a load of distracting options. 

FabFilter Pro-L2

FabFilter Pro0L2

The final element of the mastering chain that has an affect on the sound. Again, I don’t apply massive amounts of limiting, and don’t aim for my music to be very loud. Still: as you’re clicking through the different music on the site and don’t hear massive differences between the volume of each track, you have Pro-L2 to thank. 

ADPTR Metric AB

ADPTR Metric AB

I use this to compare the sound of the track I’m working on with other tracks – both other people’s music and tracks from previous weeks. Using other music as a reference helps me to calibrate, so I can use the tools above more effectively. Metric AB allows for effortless switching between the track I’m working on and the reference material to which I am comparing. It also provides visual comparisons, such as the frequency balance between the respective tracks, their dynamic range or stereo spread. 

SPL Hawkeye

SPL Hawkeye

I leave this up on a second monitor so I can see what I’m hearing. I’m fond of Zen Koans, so I’ll leave you with that paradox unexplained. 

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Before mastering
After mastering

Week 4’s track is one I’ve really liked for a while, but I was unhappy with the final sound. I’m part way through the home mastering masterclass with the venerable Ian Shepherd. 

Mastering has something of a mystique to it. The Mix (all the individual parts of a track) is already fixed: the balance between the the different elements, the notes, the arrangement are all locked down. When you master you get to work only on a single file, like the one you’d get if you ripped a track from a CD.  

With Mastering, you make the grand, but ever so subtle changes to the already-nearly-finished piece of music, which make it sound as good as it can stand. It requires a more critical perspective, concentrated listening, and a very delicate hand. You make almost imperceptable changes, one by one: correcting small aspects, tightening things up here, loosening things up there. 

Ian likens the process to photoshop, and I nearly agree. Except: in photoshop you can work quite invasively, going deep into very specific elements of the photograph. I reckon it’s more like Lightroom, where you make overall changes to the image. Think of a photograph that seemed great when you took it but when you view it later, the whole thing has a colour tint that shouldn’t be there, or it looks washed out with no contrast. 

I’ve always found mastering a scary process as you can easily ruin things with a overly heavy hand. But take a listen to the before and after sounds of the track – I hope you’ll hear the improvement. Small changes can add up 🙂 

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Week 3’s track was not one where everything came together without friction. The track has been nearly finished for a while but was sitting in the pile of not-quite-done. This makes it a quintessential piece for the website. There are many reasons why a piece can sit unfinished for too long:

  • Sheer resistance.
  • Fear of the finished piece falling short.
  • The relinquishment of hope.
  • Lack of determination
  • The accumulation of too many such pieces, such that it all feels like a swamp and starting afresh feels more inviting.
  • A belief that only with further learning and experience can I justify the piece’s promise.

When I came to open this up, something dispiriting (in the short term, I hope) happened as I was finishing it. I was greeted by a wealth of ‘enhancements’ I’d made to various elements of the track – giving the drums a bit more distortion, the pads more fizz, the sounds more coherence. On returning afresh, I found that many of these were not helping; some were harming.

So finishing the piece mainly involved removing plenty of ‘enhancement’s that I thought were a good idea at the time, revealing the track again, and then making a far small number of overall balancing corrections.

I’ve noticed that the really good producers seem to add far, far less processing than less experienced ones. Some are incredibly judicial in their work, but each change seems to count so much more. This is exemplified by mastering engineers (who receive someone else’s finished track and make the final tweaks to prepare it for release. Their changes are often tiny: a db of eq cut here, a touch of gentle compression there. When you’re following along you don’t think their changes are adding up to much, but when you here the original again it’s like night and day.

It’s hard stuff this, but in the end I was pleased with the result.