this thread has some good stuff in it, but a lot of the information should only be used in specific cases. rarely is maul-the-band compression needed. rarely is harmonic excitement necessary. good EQ and light limiting is what does the trick the vast majority of the time. sometimes a little mastering compression. tools in mastering should only be used to fix problems that exist. pardon the cliche but: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Yea I agree mate. With all of them gear out there, I can see why it's not always easy not to chuck a bunch of compression/ limiting/ maximising etc on a track, just because they're there. Applying those without a good reason most likely will not lead to good results, still, that's the part of the entire music production process that takes the most time to master imo, to realise what is needed and what isn't.

People often say the most important part of it all is mixing. While I mainly agree with that, I think a huuuge part of it is down to instrumentation.

By "good eq" do you mean really detailed like using several frequency points with high Q, or is that overkill and a few gentle sloped are usually sufficient?

Do people compress their mix's master bus before mastering? What other things do people do to their master busses? (..what do you mean, YOU PEOPLE????)

also I'm having a hard time getting my stuff sounding as BIG as i want, what strategies do you all have for bigness? I was a/b-ing a current song with the widdler's froggy style and it was starting to make me feel like my balls are abnormally small :S

thanks for any help

rarely use High Q's. if there are issues like that they need to fixed in the mixdown if possible. usaully wide, musical Q's. the bigness you are looking for is only gonna be accomplished in the mixdown. i suggest layering things up more, cutting out unnecessary freqs with EQ, and having a solid gain stucture.

mastering can take a good mix to a nice loud level without destroying the dynamics of the material too much. there's only so much you can do with a sub par mixdown. do NOT look towards limiters/distortion/compression/etc in the mastering stage to make oyur track loud

dont compare your first steps to a master at running, its a great sound to shoot for but unless you have a solid base to start from you WILL NOT get a good loud clear quality sound out of your track.

Read a lil bit on sound design, sit in front of your computer making that snare/kick/hat/clap sound EXACTLY how you want it to sound, even if it takes hours.


Give all of your sounds space to shine.. its like throwing a bunch of people in a room and having everyone talk at the same time, chaos. I also suggest staying AWAY from over compressing and strange sidechaining techniques.
Make basic simple sounds that are high in quality, then take your music production to the next level

By the way McCabe, I replied to your comment on the kllsmth account I just realized, haha sorry bout that

this is kinda funny.. some of the stuff he says doent apply to EVRYTHING.. BUT dude MAN BRO!!

have you ever heard EPROM live? go to one of his shows then go talk shit about his mastering skills.

I don't listen to his music but I just listened to some of his tracks on youtube (1080p) and eh.. my unsigned friend has better mixes, same genre. And literally all he does on the master is use a small amount of EQ and then push it through BuzMaxi limiter. I don't think there are many people on this forum who should be mastering their own tracks with a complex program like Ozone, especially without reading the manual first.

I'd like to see if Eprom still follows this process for mastering his tracks. His post was made in 2009. Not tryina make waves or be a hater, but I think the info in the OP has the potential to sorely mislead many beginners. Seems like everyone and their mom thinks that the way to get their song to sound good is mastering.

Im sure hes on a non stop tour for the last few years cos his music sounds like shit, honestly
and Im SURE he doesnt follow these same steps in 2012, if he did, that would mean he has zero progression.

Used EPROM's technique. Is Perfect, even tho0ugh my premaster is usually -8db

i personally have quite a bad experience with Ozone, but i didn't bother to really learn it inside out. Instead i just found equivalent plugs, and i think i got to an acceptable level.

Sonalksis' MultiLimiter is really awesome as the final stage in the mastering chain. it basically puts a limiter on the frequency bands of your choice and sounds really clean. it also does dithering in real-time.

I also really like Cytomic's The Glue as a bus compressor. it really earns its namesake and sounds awesome when applied with the right dosage.

I recently mastered my band's EP and I only found myself using EQ once in the mastering stage, in a song which started and ended with this thunderous, boomy, low-passed noise (you know the sound effect they use a lot for space ships), i used FabFilter's Pro-Q and it really surgically removed all that extraneous bass rumble...

for those of you who want to hear some examples here is that EP : http://popchoppers.bandcamp.com/
the song with the spaceship rumble is the first one.

also it is a really good idea to have a good loudness meter. i recommend Sonalksis' Free G, which doubles as a gain plug-in.