I am a seasoned professional (personal account ignore name haha) and this is one of those gems on KZfaq where the knowledge is real and puts knowledge first. I am glad I found this video. To everyone who might come across this video, there's a sea of info on the internet and it's hard to identify what info to actually use/take in, but I can vouch that this video gives solid info that the upper echelon engineers use and don't discuss about (forget about the wannabes on KZfaq, I'm talking about upper echelon professional engineers). I am just stunned you would share this! Great video and thanks!

I am a mastering engineer myself but I'm very happy to say: you taught me something today, THANK YOU :)

I just love how you break down things to it's most atomic form 🔥🔥You make mastering look amazing, keep up the good work 💪🏿💪🏿

This is the best mastering education video I've ever seen. Just put it to the test on a master and it works amazingly! This has been something that I've certainly struggled with on mastering all my mixes. Thank you so much for sharing this!

Dialing in the compression attack and release time like that just blew my mind, i always was like slow attack fast release on the master and didnt really touched the attack and release parameters on the limiter but now you've really opened my interest to experiment in the right direction to get effective results. Thank you so much!

This video is the gold at the end of the rainbow. I have now realized that I have been doing parallel compression COMPLETELY wrong! Everytime I've used parallel compression, I've used an 1176. If you don't know, that is a F A S T compressor, which is exactly the opposite of what he suggests in the video. I am now getting punchy sounding masters at levels I never thought were obtainable. Thank you so absolutely much for this video!!!

LOVE THE HONESTY ABOUT MISTAKE..... WHAT A REAL GUY.

I do many of the things you've mentioned since I share the same mastering opinions; but so far, this is one of the most detailed explanations backed with solid foundational "facts". Excellent video and now a new subscriber. Cheers!

Bro!!!! You saved one of my tracks! Basically, I had way too much harmonic distortion from my sources (loud trumpet and synths) as well as mixing too loud into UAD plugins, followed by making my limiter work too hard. I went from my track sounding like crap in my car at -14LUFS, to loud and clean at under -10LUFS. I'm using a few different plugins to get the results, but the workflow is basically the same. Thank you so much for the helpful videos!

Happy to help! I appreciate your transparency! 😊

hah this was so good! i always feel so intimidated by all the science and math when it comes to dialing in precise values and stuff but you made it look simple. and in 1 minute or so you even managed to explained how Pro L works in a way that it made so much more sense than how i used to approach it before. and great final result as well. brilliant. thank you for the content. subscribed.

This was extremely insightful and informative. Especially your specific use of the L2 parameters. Will definitely be applying your techniques on future projects. Thank you!

gold, thanks for this mate one of the best vids ive seen :)

Honestly one of the best videos i've ever seen explaining the relationship between gain-staging and compressors. Once you made it clear that EVERYTHING must have the same true peak and can adjust the output gain accordingly, is a GAME CHANGER. So that the final limiter is effecting everything evenly and can push the balanced mix to the limit without distorting. Thanks so much mate!

Such a great video and it's definitely made me look into Standard Clip more. I also love your presentation style on complex topics, keep up the great work.

A goldmine of information in literally every video. Keep it up man, you're doing gods work!

That's so cool. Not only a guide to avoid distortion but a guide to how to get distortion too. Thanks!

So happy I've found your channel, such amazing stuff you share with us

You explain so much with the science to back it up and it sounds great

I really appreciate your honesty. Great work and very informative.

This is an advanced lesson! There are some great tips here about gain staging and other things, so I'll keep this as a reference to come back to later.

big ups for this video! you're by far my favorite mastering engineer on youtube :)

Seeing your process and hearing how you approach audio is such a nice perspective. Makes me realize the importance of getting more ears on a project. A lot of finer detail that just one person aka me, would miss. Getting a lot out of these vids :) Makes me want to get some one else to master my tracks when it’s time for that phase. You both offer mixing and mastering services for EDM productions correct?

You are ASSERTIVE and I like it. I bet people love working with you.

most helpful channel I found recently! Thanks for sharing your tips and tricks!

I love how youre showing us this in real-time. The track sounds great 👍🏻.

Smashed to bits

Gratitude & Appreciation 💯

Very Nice! Thanks for posting this.

Thanks man, this actually worked wonders on my mix and now I 'm a happy man.👌🤙

This video is what I really looking for! Thank you for sharing bro

Awesome video Nicholas. Great techniques. Also very humble of you to admit the bit about Standard Clip and soft clipping. As professionals we invariable are going to get something wrong when using plugins and their multitudes of features and UIs. That's the neat thing about KZfaq, in publishing videos and having viewers catch our slip ups, we learn and grow as well. I can't tell you the number of times I've missed something key about a plugin, and then read the manual and realized I was using it wrong. Please keep up the great content. Cheers mate.

awesome vid! cant wait to try out some of these tips on the next master! also shoutout to the license plate for hogging the camera focus spotlight 😂

This channel is liquid gold. Thank you!

Wow! Amazing messaging ability. Thanks!

You sir, are a wonderful human being. Many blessings to you. Subscribed!

Some great tips! Thank you

New York Compression in Mastering is a Mastering Engineer's best friend. Unless one feels compressing the entire frequency spectrum is needed to encompass punch and drive without altering the main track's transients, it is best IMHO to split the frequency spectrum into low, low mids, high mids, and highs (or lows, mids, and highs) using a linear phase EQ to avoid phase cancellation, blend each section accordingly. You have more control to determine which frequency spectrum area needs more or less than the other, instead of boosting the entire frequency spectrum all at once. I find this to achieve more punch, drive and cleanliness throughout. To add more punch, use SplitEQ by Eventide to boost the fundamental transient and backbeat's fatness and click using Mid based processing, bypassing the Side to avoid headroom increase, and keeping the low end overall in Mono where it is Mono-Compatible. Then, add Baselane Pro to ensure Mono Compatibility is in place.

These videos are very good man appreciate the insight and tips!

Man! This is awesome! I am Still learning Mastering but this will help a lot! Thanks! And Cheers😊

This video is PURE GOLD

So beautiful I cried😭💯🙌🏼❤️

thx for sharing your knowledge! you do great and really informative videos :)

Thanks for this. Great vid.

One of the best videos on mastering I've seen man 👍🏻

Great info! Thanks so much.

Insanely well explained, thank you so much

Great! I just discovered your channel. I already have subscribed to a lot of this kind but I had to subscribe to you too. Your approach is very professional.

Very well done - I learned all this by reading about signal and wave form science + many, many years of experimenting with plugins, mastering processes, order, tonal balance, referencing. But I don't regret that process, because when you do it that way, you earn it and own it - you own that knowledge. But if if I had seen this video about 10 years ago, this would have saved me time. And as others have stated in the comments, many YT audio videos (mixing, mastering) doesn't matter - are either master of the obvious or are just junk information - this video is how you do it. The facts are correct, and the techniques are what I learned the hard way.

Only gold and 🔥 in your tutorials. Thanks for sharing your knowledge brother.

Wow this is REAL knowledge here thanks so much. Impossible to find this stuff on YY. Instant subscribe here

Great Video! Thank you!

this helped so much, thank you!!!!! funny how i always gain stage in live audio mixing or DJing, but didn't translate that to mixing at home. thanks again

A thousand thanks for this excellent video tutorial. To say it was illuminating would be my personal candidate for understatement of the year. Top notch my man. o7

awesome video! thank you!

Thank you, this video is very useful. Really appreciate it, everyone needs to know this stuff.

Solid tutorial full of proper knowledge

Amazing content, thanks!

you're a godsend. thank you SO much for these videos. 🙏🙏🙏

You are amazing my friend

a little late to the game, but thanks for the awesome video.. the best I came across on this topic and cant wait to check out more from you. new big fan here. thank you!

Despite all your interesting advices, there is still one major issue here in terms of mastering; this infamous loudness war is ruining thousands of mixes for only one purpose : to sound loud, and loud... No matter what you do, you're actually shrinking drastically the dynamics of the original mix (which is often horridly reduced to some 6dB of overall dynamics). When listening to most of the "modern nowadays mastered stuff", it's just a pain for ears : too much squashed, it doesn't breathe, very exhausting after a certain time. And it's stupid too, because every streaming site has an automatic levelling, so there is clearly no point carrying on with wanting to sound "loud" at all costs. The real purpose of mastering is to make a mix sound great with the great principle "primum non nocere". It doesn't have to be insanely loud! Make it just sound as good and balanced as possible. If more mastering engineers explained and educated their customers, instead of complying to the only loudness factor, we'd have much better sounding masters for years (as well as less terrible remasters). We now have the best possible digital resolutions and converters available (24 bits, 96kHz and more), we can have a sound quality way better than that was possible back in the 70's/80's... Still, all these records of the past sound way better, and that's because back then, there was no loudness war, engineers had taste and the listeners knew there was a volume knob on their Hi-Fi equipment (because back in the days we also had relatively decent Hi-Fi systems to listen on). Were all those legendary records like "Dark Side Of The Moon" (Pink Floyd), "Thriller" (Michael Jackson), "Synchronicity" (The Police), "So" (Peter Gabriel), "Parade" (Prince), "The Joshua Tree" (U2), etc. to name a few that loud and squashed? Certainly not ! So, what the hell has happened in the meantime? People got used to fast-food sounding records, listen on the most terrible gear (telephones, tablets...). Fortunately, Jazz and Classical Music have been spared from this madness. Don't you think it's time for people to get a decent overall listening culture (with acoustic music is a very good start) and get themselves some decent Hi-Fi systems?

OMG i kept having a problem where my 808s would very audibly distort the SECOND they hit the limiter. the longer attack and release times on the master compressor completely fixed it!!! Thank you so much

Beautiful song

If any DAW supports 32-bit Float IEEE, use as recommended instead of 24-bit PCM. Also, to remove the possibility of Aliasing Distortion and Nyquist, use 96k Sample Rate (if your system can handle it). I use 96k sample/32-bit Float IEEE as a DAW Standard. Oversampling in over 95% chances is not needed, unless you want to remove all instances of A.D altogether.

KING!

YOU ARE AMAZING

Instant sub!

Very helpful!!!

This is a GEM of knowledge

This was so usefull!

This is out of my league but I'm trying to understand this. I've lots to learn. Will definitely rewatch.

Hey mate, I'm an amateur engineer trying to find my way. Studied for a few years, did a couple years in a small studio in my hometown etc. Always looking to learn, expand my box of tricks, & improve what I do. I've been chasing mastering for ages now, trying (& mostly failing), & absorbing every scrap of info I can find in what at times feels like a futile attempt to learn how to do it well. SO much of what I read & watch seems to tell me the same 2 things... either "Hey you want loud & distortion free? Try turning on oversampling!" or "You're dumb if you're trying to master loud because spotify turns it down anyway & it ruins the music, just don't do it." I found this video completely by accident & it absolutely blew my mind. I felt like I'd just found the holy grail like THIS is the kind of info I've been searching for. Something that goes into detail about the how, and more importantly, why, each step of the way. I just had my first truly successful mastering attempt before I saw this video, now I can't wait to try all the tricks you showed. Sincerely, thank you so very much for sharing your knowledge. From someone who truly doesn't want to do anything else but consistently feels like I'm falling short & not good enough, this was a complete paradigm shift & an absolute game changer!

Bought your course. Let's see if I can pick up some new tricks!

I love your approach man, not really a fan of just relying on “if sounds good it is good” I like to understand the science and maths behind why certain processes work, it improves consistency when you understand it from a technical standpoint, I think.

never change bro! youre the fucking man!

Valuable vid mate. I don't know why i never thought of using parallel bus in mastering, nice Btw you gotta turn that auto focus off haha. Just manual focus it to a fixed spot, it's not like you're moving off the chair in the vids anyway :)

Gonna have to watch / listen to this at least five times to understand half of it. This definitely goes deep. I wish i was able to hear the difference between a and b on the fast and slow low end compression. It sounded exactly the same. i have the same trouble whenever i change settings on a limiter or compressor.

I don’t understand it all but this is definitely opening my eyes to mastering vs just slapping a compressor

This is neat stuff, particularly the bit about calculating the attack/release times based on the lowest fundamental. I’m normally not one to break out a calculator while mixing but when it comes to the master bus, I’m no mastering engineer so I’m happy to minimize any guesswork. Just wanted to bring up one thing though regarding internal clipping you mentioned in the gain-staging bit. As far as I can tell, you can’t internally clip (in my DAW at least). I can clip on the way in and the way out obviously but any individual tracks in between that feed into the master bus don’t audibly clip when going over 0db so long as the master bus has a limiter on it. So I don’t find it necessary to bother with gain-staging so long as the mix is balanced. If I need more headroom before hitting the limiter, I simply pull down the fader on the master bus.

To avoid harmonic distortion via compression, make certain the release time is 50ms minimum. Anything under 50ms will constitute harmonic distortion. The lower the ms below 50ms, the more harmonic distortion will take place. That is for all compressors, digital and hardware. Fast attacks follow the same principle. In your tutorial example, 33ms attack time will constitute harmonic distortion. Saturation and distortion are two related, but very different things. Distortion is a very broad term that refers to the altering of a waveform’s shaping. One form of distortion anyone envisions in Music is harmonic distortion, which can have a very pleasant, or very harsh timbre depending on the amplitude, the type, and the number of harmonics. 1) Saturation is the combination of harmonic generation and soft-knee compression. Saturation occurs when the electrical components of a piece of hardware are overwhelmed. 2) When an electrical component is saturated, it can no longer output a signal in a linear ratio to the input, resulting in Compression and Distortion. Overall, different electrical components like tubes, transistors, and the magnetic particles of tape, each affect a signal different during saturation, resulting in different harmonics, different amounts of distortion, and an overall different timbre. Although this topic is pretty complex, the most important take away is that the terms distortion and saturation should not be used interchangeably. When doing so, the meaning of one term may be conflated, or confused with the meaning of the other. In turn, making it more difficult for engineers to discuss topics clearly. That said, it is best to know these terms and what they mean on a technical level so that they are not used incorrectly.

One of my favorite channels. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for the excellent vids Nick! Any thoughts on K-Clip vs Standard Clip?

Subscribed now, but just found your channel!! Not a lurker! 🤣🤣

Really good common sense information, thanks 😊

Hey Nicholas, love your videos! Wondering if you had a video about your routing for mastering in pro tools or any insight into this? Cheers!

Thanks

I set the attack release to the tempo of the song, usually makes the plugins work to full potential

It would be so much better if we could upload our finished songs without adding our own limiter and let Spotify's algorithm turn it up to the "appropriate level" if it's not up to the normalized standard. It makes perfect sense, since they have no problem turning it down if they deem it "too loud" It would remove all the guesswork for the inexperienced.

Is this something you would do before other things such as eq/saturation/etc or after and before the limiter?

Hi! Thank you for all the good info. I'm not getting one thing. You put the Clip slider to -7.5 db (so it actually does -1.5 db of clipping) but then you put 6 db of gain in the output of the clipper and actually get -1 db true peak. Shouldn't you be getting -1.5 db of true peak? What am I missing here?

lol i thought my eyes were going bad but i think its his camera struggling to decide what to focus on btw i love this tutorial i needed this

Great video!! This will be my homework this weekend. BTW Can we stream this track? 😊

Nice video! I also dig that track you’re processing, where can I find it?

Best video on youtube for mastering use inf eq for the global curve as a substitute

9:47 great tip! Was trying this parallel comp thing on a master in logic today and was wondering why to use the clipper before the compressor? Just so it won’t clamp on the loudest transients or is there a different reason? Also my peak volume increases a lot if I blend it in, a standard clip gain plug-in wil do the trick to get it back to the initial volume right? anyway great video as always keep up the good work! 🥂

Great explanation!ª How did you set it up at the end to compare, that solo alternate from tracks? I always have to solo one and unsolo the other... Thanks!

Thanks for the video. I've been struggling with this. The other piece would be while mixing or making a track. Would the concept be the same or similar for each channel? ie bass, drums, guitar, vocals, etc...?

Hey bro, I wanted to ask you a problem that I've been having so my mix and stuff sounds pretty good and all I think it sounds great but I wanna be able to peak the 2 track beat to 0 and I want to raise the volume up and also bring everything in the mix upfront but I'm not sure how to do it. Hopefully this makes sense

Hi, Is there any reason why you're using a compressor before the clipper on the RMS parallel track when you're going to clip it heavy anyways?