Mastering

[Triple_B]

I've heard the word Mastering, I have what I know are VST's used for said process of 'Mastering' I know that it takes place after a song is finished, and is to fine-tune your sound. What I do not understand, is how exactly to go about this, or anything else virtually at all about Mastering.

VST's I know I can load into the mastering thingy on FL Studio that I have;

Default(s?)
FabFilter Pro-Q (Yaargh)
dblue_glitch
BloodOverdrive
Majiken'sChimera
MinimogueVA
OddyFree


... Now that I loaded them all in, I'm pretty sure Majiken's and Minimogue are Synths, not mastering VST's.... Oh well; never used them before, in fact, I haven't the slightest idea where I even got them. Oh well. Also; Why did I bother downloading BloodOverdrive when there is a version pre-installed into FL called Fruity Blood?... Not a clever brony, I am.

Um, yeah. Didn't really see a thread out there about this, just know it's been mentioned numerous times and I still don't understand the concept of Mastering; Wikipedia said it had something to do with producing music for disk and tape and... Something like that, I forget.

Thanks for any insight,

B~

EDIT: Also; what is sidechaining? Side-chaining, side chaining.... I don't even know the proper grammar behind it, yeesh. x.x

[Versilaryan]

Really quickly, side-chaining is when one signal affects another signal. Oftentimes, you'll have side-chain compression, where one sound will cause a compressor to compress a different sound, making it sound softer. You hear this a lot in house music -- it's how they get that pumping sound, where it sounds like the pads are all fading in on the offbeats. They side-chain the kick drum to the pads, so when the kick drum hits, all the pads lose volume, and then regain volume once the kick drum isn't making noise.

And yep, you've got it! Mastering is what you do when you've already exported a song. You're just working with the single music file, not all the different tracks. Basically, you're sticking stuff on the master track -- hence, mastering.

Typically, what you want to do when you're mastering is, in order:
1) Find the largest peaks and compress them. This makes the song more uniform and potentially a lot louder.
2) Some light EQ. Find the most transparent EQ you can get your hands on.
3) Other fancy mastering plugins. Oftentimes, people will use additional multiband compressors, stereo enhancers, and harmonic exciters, to name a few. Some people add a little more reverb, but I prefer to do that in the mixing stage.
4) Lastly, stick a limiter on it to bring the sound up. You want to bring the threshold as low as possible without clipping any of the sounds too much. What I like to do instead is export it, open it again, and then normalize the waveform. Then, I can compress/limit to get a bigger sound now that it's easier to see where the peaks are past compression.

iZotope Ozone is the go-to all-in-one mastering tool. Really easy to use (just look up tutorials on how to use it), but also really expensive. >.>

Now that I've told you all that, though, the best thing to do is to mix it so well that you don't need to master. Ideally, you should be able to just normalize, maybe apply a limiter or some light EQ, and be done.

[Triple_B]

Alright, I have another question.

What do you do here?



Another example, this time with vocals;



Or is that okay? I'm pretty sure audio is supposed to be equal on both sides of that.... uh, line-that-I-don't-know-the-name-of...

[Versilaryan]

That's called DC offset. I don't know the cause behind it, but just run it through a DC offset remover. FL Studio should definitely have one built in (if you can't find it, try looking in Edison). And yeah, you should definitely remove it. It makes things peak when they shouldn't be peaking.