How to Master Any Genre You Want
I feel your fear.
Not only is home mastering a little scary, but it’s even worse when you’re unfamiliar with the genre.
I’m not especially good at synth-techno-euro-dub-rock, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t either.
However, mastering is the easy part. It just takes a little extra effort and care.
You just need to know a few simple steps and the rest will come easy.
Gain, Compression, EQ and Limiting.
That’s it.
These are really the only tools you need for mastering. – Click to Tweet!
Gain – To make all the songs equally loud. Not LOUD, but at the same volume.
Compression – Use it to give each song more punch.
EQ – Sometimes the mix just isn’t cutting it and you need to do some extra EQ‘ing to make it ‘pop.’ Use surgical EQ to clean up the low-end or give the mix some presence.
Limiting – You need a limiter at the end of the chain to make sure nothing is clipping. I don’t use limiters to squeeze every last ounce of loudness out of a song. Neither should you. Just use it to control the peaks so that nothing distorts or clips.
That’s really it. Sure, there are some additional factors like stereo imaging, saturation and maybe(god forbid) some reverb that you could use in your mastering. But they come into play when the standard processors don’t cut it.
Applying these things are a little different depending on the genre, so how would you like to be a fly on the wall in a world-class mastering studio?
Ian Shepherd over at Production Advice just released his home mastering series, Home Mastering Masterclass.
It’s an 8 week course on everything you need to know about mastering. Not only do you get to see how he masters 7 different genres, but you get to ask him questions along the way.
If you’ve check out his course.
Click here to read more about it.
Mastering
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