Your Favourite Mastering Patch?

[VOLCANIC]

What is your favourite mastering patch and does it really do the trick or do you add something to spice up the patch?

I like 8 band limiter as it inlcudes the most favourite mastering patch in all DAWS like cubase pro tools and others, yes I am talking about multiband compressor.

8 band limiter just like the multiband compressor levels the frequencies to nice tight and balanced sound but it does not end there, it goes further and widen your suound with the power of stereo imager. A compressor can only do so much as there will still be some frequencies that will go through undetected and stereo imager detects these frequencies and widen the high frenquencies into a long smoother sound. I then add 1 EQ so to detect and cut those low frequencies and then I spice up the whole performance with the mighty bus compressor

Halla at your Boy

[mcatalao]

I used the M-S patches in the Factory refill, i think one is from Peff.

Recently i've been using a combo with Red Queen (in a stereo or m-s setting selected), 4Dyne, Saturation knob, the MClass stereo imager, the SSL master compressor as pre or post, finally into Ozone for finishing. I also use a Selig Gain at the beginning and end of the chain to compare levels. Aside from "Selig gain"'s, the other devices are bypassed, and then connected as the song need!

My best advice (second to taking your mixes to a mastering engineer) is to separate the mixing from the  mastering process into a second project, in order to glue all your songs together and to "ease" DSP usage. 

I also leave a good amount of time between the mixing sessions and the master sessions, just to try a be more objective.

[Marc64]

Here's my master setup, tweaking as I go, the saturation knob is a great RE
http://kentvalden.se/patches/saturatemaster4.cmb

[mcatalao]

Hey Marc, what setting do you use with the  Saturation knob?
I mostly use the preserve highs and tweak the knob as needed.

[Marc64]

I use keep low, to preserv the low and tweak as needed

[Benedict]

Hi All

I wrote an article explaining my current rig a few months ago

http://benedictroffmarsh.com/2014/12/28 ... l-fantasy/

Interestingly I use am much simpler process than those commonly mentioned in forums. I used some multi-band stuff for a little while but realized that they totally re-arrange the sonic spectrum, which doesn't matter perhaps, but is definitely changing the recording. From what I can gather Mastering engineers don't use really complex rigs  

Hope this helps

[Marc64]

Just to hear how nice my master combi is
before master:
http://youtu.be/08qsSg3w_j4
with my master combi:

[Benedict]

Hi Mr 64

That is a pretty big wow difference. I guess that is the soft-clip thing in action. In both cases there is a lot more mid and high energy which makes the track Pop with more detail. I found the Onyx RE did fair bit of that too.

Definitely makes your track more exciting.

[Higor]

I start my chain with this 4 band compression. Very slight settings - soft knee on low frequencies.

 


I turn this on just when i defined the settings from this - wich comes in second place:
The compressor's frequencies are splitted between high and low. I compress the low frequencies less than the highs. This allows them to breath more getting less claustrophobic. I split the frequency around 440hz.

 


I'm thinking about using some tape saturation after the limiter as a send fx - around 61/65 in the aux/send. I've downloaded this - with that phase correction set up - here on reason talk. I've done some tests and it's sounding pretty good.

 

[selig]

My favorite mastering patch is around 4 dB of limiting, using Ozone these days. I will use other processors if needed, but that's the key - IF NEEDED. Multiband is helpful, again to fix spectral balance issues (which could better be addressed at the mix stage). But I've ALWAYS found that the more you do early in the production, the less you need to do later on.

In other words, a good mix doesn't need much mastering at all, so if you find you are doing heavy processing with multiple devices on all your mixes, you may get better results working the mix harder.  

[hydlide]

But I've ALWAYS found that the more you do early in the production, the less you need to do later on.

These days I mostly stick in a chain of:
m/s routing (Anansi)
2 subtle compressors (to compress the final mix a bit different on the mid / side)
an Ozone Maximizer to make things loud.
Sometimes I like some additional EQ on the final mix, and mostly I will pick the MClass EQ, MP5 (Kuassa). The changes in EQ are really subtle since everything is often well balanced in my mixes.

If something is really wrong, I would always go back to the source (the track that is causing the issues).

[Higor]

Multiband is helpful, again to fix spectral balance issues (which could better be addressed at the mix stage).

I think at my case the 4 band compression works more like an overall FX than a mastering tool. Makes the frequencies slightly alive. A very subtle thing.
I once read an interesting description about mastering. It is as if the track was a balloon with a drawn on it. Mastering it's about to inflate this balloon to make the drawn as defined as  possible without distorting it or explode the balloon.
P.S: I try to use google translator but it confuses me more than it helps. Sorry.

[Higor]

I used the M-S patches in the Factory refill, i think one is from Peff.

Perhaps is the dubstep easy midside?
I put my track into an overall level of -3,6 db and passed through this. It's pretty good. I thought it better than my set up i showed above.
You adjust the settings or used as it was?
 
If anyone could explain what this thing does it would be nice.

[Higor]

About the Mid-Side Processing I've found these videos

[Ashpool]

I am not that into Mastering but most of the topics and information I have found so far is all about loudness.
What about dithering? I use the Ozone RE too and always applied dithering without knowing what dithering exactly was. Now I have read the "dithering with ozone" of from iZotope's HP and learned what Dither can do to my tracks when reducing the bits to 16 for CD mastering. In this document iZotope mentioned that it is important to remove the DC offset first to not waste any bits (if I understood correctly). Not sure if that is that important only using MIDI files but that can happen during recording, right?
Reason's manual does not mention any DC offset or how to remove that. Does this even matter in Reason? I think it should (or am I wrong?). And consequently does that mean that you actually cannot use the full potential of dithering withing Reason and have to use an external Sample Editor for this task? No one mentioned dithering here. So I guess you simply ignore that? I am just curious because after reading the iZotopes "dithering with ozone" pdf I thought dithering makes totally sense.

[mcatalao]

Ozone RE has a Remove DC offset option (DC Filter Switch). You can of course do it in an external audio editor, but if you already have Ozone RE, you're fine using it inside reason.

Anyway - please someone correct me -  DC offset is caused before audio gets into the audio card, so only audio tracks rather than reason instruments (unless something wrong happened in a sampler or something) and i rarely use it this days. I guess audio cards are less and less prone to that.

As far as dither, most times i use a medium setting for noise shaping and dither amount.
Ozone introduces an amount of noise at very low levels. You even can see this behaviour, if you switch Ozone to a higher level. Set Ozone to 16 bit dither, mid to high amount of noise, and you will see that the Big meter never goes back to 0 even without nothing playing. That's dithering, very low levels of random noise introduced on top of the mix.

[mcatalao]

PS.: A very important thing to retain. If you dither with the Ozone RE, when you render to 16 bit, be sure to deselect the dither tag. This is of maximum importance, because you will be adding noise twice, and the dither noise might become more audible.

[tibah]

EVE AT-1 -> Sat Knob -> MClass Maximizer

The SSL comp is active from the very first second of production. About 2dB gain reduction.

AT-1 is dialed to one of the mud remover presets which I then tweak to my liking. Sat Knob helps with "another kind of loudness", usually set to neutral or keep low. I hardly touch the Maximizer, if even, I will increase the input gain until I hit close to 0dBFS.