ENG202C.

018 Process Description Michael Benton

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3/24/2014

The Modern Theory and Practice of

Mastering Audio






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Table of Contents
Introduction and Getting the Right Equipment ........................................................................................ 3
Hardware ............................................................................................................................................ 3
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) ......................................................................................................... 3
Plugins ................................................................................................................................................. 4
Prepare the Track .................................................................................................................................... 4
Enhancements ......................................................................................................................................... 4
Bass tightening .................................................................................................................................... 5
Excitation ............................................................................................................................................ 5
Reverb ................................................................................................................................................. 5
Stereo Widening .................................................................................................................................. 5
Compression ........................................................................................................................................... 5
Multiband Compression ...................................................................................................................... 6
Clipping and Limiting ........................................................................................................................... 7
Equalization............................................................................................................................................. 8



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Introduction and Getting the Right Equipment
Track mastering is a type of signal processing that helps to make music sound clearer, louder, and easier
to listen to. The goals are clear and simple; make a music track sound as good as possible, give the
instruments perceived clarity and volume, and make the changes transparent. Generally, acceptable
results in mastering an audio track are achieved digitally with at least the following equipment:
Hardware
DAWs come with very steep computing requirements so a high performance computer is a
must. Not having speakers that adequately expose every tonal aspect of a track makes
mastering like painting in the dark, therefore; even non-professionals use Full Range Flat
Response (FRFR) monitors.
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
Common DAWs such as Reaper, Pro Tools, and Cubase allow an engineer to keep track of
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) processing along with signal routing options to insert
digital effects. A DAW will allow an engineer to look at the full signal chain of mastering plugins
while monitoring track amplitude levels.

Figure 1: Most DAWs will look like this




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Plugins
Plugins affect the audio signal with very specific parameters. The biggest names in digital
processing sell their plugins in bundles that include everything that company suggests you use
for both mixing and mastering. Bundles are advantageous in that the plugins will work well
together by offering parameters that will complement each other and is something akin to
taking professional advice, but most professionals use plugins from a variety of places.
Prepare the Track
Before any mastering is done on the track, engineers need to make sure that the track is not
coming out of the mixing stage poorly. First off, the bit rate must be sufficiently high for
processing without losing information. Next, an audio engineer looks for noticeable clips in the
sound. Clipping comes about because digital processing only stores information in available
expressive amounts, values higher than what the signal processor is designated to hold will just
be stored as the highest available amount. The solution is to simply output your mix at a lower
volume.

Figure 2: An ugly clipped audio signal
Another problem that occurs is phasing, which is where multiple tones of similar frequency can
cancel or amplify each others signal. This is brought back to the mixing stage before continuing.
As a general rule of thumb, mastering is not used to fix problems.
Enhancements
General improvements to the track sound need to be done first so that they do not undue the work
done in the final stages of mastering. The following is just a small list of the most common among
hundreds of these.


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Bass tightening
This means one of two things; first, low end is much more appreciated, but it is a bad idea to
only boost frequencies in the low range, because then instruments in the mid-range will be hard
to perceive. Generally mastering engineers look for a linear frequency distribution that slopes
down (See Figure 5).
Second, Low end frequencies are very difficult for the human ear to place a location on. Because
of this, when low frequency sound in the right isnt balanced by low end frequency in the left
humans tend to start physically moving their head to locate the sound.
These properties can be patched in equalization, as shown later, or with special plugins.
Excitation
Some plugins allow addition of extra tones that are not in the track to begin with. By adding in-
phase harmonics that are thirds and fifths (4/3 and 3/2 frequency respectively) to signals that
are already part of a track, you can make your music sound a little more distorted and come to
life. Engineers are wary with this because this produces the opposite effect of compression.
Reverb
Echo is very important for human perception of sound. When there is long drawn out echo, the
human brain processes that it is in a large room, and when there is no echo, people get
claustrophobic. Reverb is added by mastering engineers to help fill out the sound of the track
while making you feel like you are actually hearing the music in a setting that befits the tone and
genre of the music. Reverb on a full track helps glue a track together and make a track sound as
if the music is surrounding you.
Stereo Widening
Stereo widening is a much less subtle effect, but achieves the same goal as reverb. Many
mastering engineers feel that the mix should already have the instruments panned optimally to
the left and right, however, others feel that widening out higher frequencies really adds power
to the sound of a track.
Compression
Compression is a form of signal processing that will decrease the amplitude of a signal more the further
the signal is past a set volume threshold. Also, the amount of time a signal has been beyond that
threshold will decrease the amount of signal reduction (This effect is relative to the attack and release
parameters, see Figure 3). Adding various compressors is a great way to glue a track together and make
the instruments not seem like they are battling each other for space in the mix.

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Multiband Compression
A regular compressor can do wonders to an individual instrument, but to a full track a regular
compressor can mess with the frequency content of a track and will not be transparent. A
multiband compressor separates frequency content into different spectrums of frequencies and
compresses them separately. Every mastering chain has one of these after most enhancements
have been applied.
A compressor should have a threshold which sets the amplitude at which gain reduction begins
to be applied and a ratio that increases intensity of compression (in Figure 3, the bent-knee
graphs represent functions of output amplitude with respect to input amplitude). A Multiband
will allow you to adjust the relative output gain of all of the separate bands to adjust for the fact
that all bands arent compressed by the same amount.

Figure 3: Cubase's Built in Multiband Compressor

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Clipping and Limiting
These are the most aggressive types of compression and are the absolute last things done to
master a track. Due to the fact that instruments like drums and vocals introduce large changes
of amplitude to a track that would otherwise severely limit how loud the track could be
exported digitally (as seen by the little blips in the top picture in figure 4), clipping is applied to
smooth out the shape of a track. Clipping plugins allow control of how hard the clipping is, to
maintain transparency.
The final digital values for the track must lie in a standard range that all audio interfaces are
designed to work with. Going above that range will result in a non-transparent clipping sound. In
order to fit a track to take up the most of this range, engineers will apply limiting which
compresses any wave in a track to a set amplitude. This is the absolute last effect and yields the
final shape as seen in the bottom picture of Figure 4.

Figure 4: Track Before and After Mastering

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Equalization
In general, equalization can be applied in small amounts at any point in the mastering process.
In a mastering chain it is very important for sound engineers to be able to adjust frequency
content before another signal processing technique is applied in order to maximize the effect of
the follow up signal processing.
However, the most important phase of mastering is the final equalization after enhancements
and multiband compression. In order to not let frequency content cause your ear to get tired,
its important that frequency content does not favor any frequency too heavily over nearby
frequencies (see figure 5). Due to the fact that the human ear only hears sounds from 50 Hz to
20 kHz, a well mastered track will not have any frequency content outside of that range because
extra inaudible frequencies, especially on the low end, can still have an audible negative effect
to muddy up a track.

Figure 5: Final Frequency Distribution for a Mastered Track