Mastering question ( again)

[MrFigg]

Hi. As I’ve said before I’m not really bothered about getting my music “out there”. Just a hobby which I enjoy a lot. For this reason I don’t need any professional mastering but it’d be cool to get a song sounding even better. A Reason acquaintance told me that to master I need to first finish mixing my song to how I like it then export it to a wav. It’s then that wav file which I import into Reason to start mastering. I’m guessing there’s loads of ways but is that method one of them?

[Loque]

Yes, it is one way to do it.

[RobC]

Is the mix perfect? Then get rid of infra and ultra frequencies, leave enough headroom to avoid inter-sample peaks distorting (-16 LUFS "loudness" that includes 1 dB headroom is the shiz apparently), and you're done.

[Pingafuego]

Hi, there´s a sale at plugin boutique dot com. If you buy any product, even a $ 1 dollar product, they send you a free Ozone 8 Elements license. Ozone Elements has a "Master Assistant" that can set an initial custom preset that you can tweak.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/articles/1392

[MrFigg]

Is the mix perfect? Then get rid of infra and ultra frequencies, leave enough headroom to avoid inter-sample peaks distorting (-16 LUFS "loudness" that includes 1 dB headroom is the shiz apparently), and you're done.

Ha ha ha :):). And I quote: “It’s just a hobby which I like a lot. “.

[Marco Raaphorst]

why master it when you can all do it in the mix?

[MrFigg]

why master it when you can all do it in the mix?

Beats me . Something to do to pass a boring Wednesday afternoon? :):). Anyone?

[rgdaniel]

Just a hobby which I enjoy a lot.

Same for me. Can't justify spending money to optimize a release that will be heard by only a handful of people. I look at mastering as a final tweak of the mix, at a higher level, using devices (like, recently, Ozone, but historically just the Reason mastering suite) within the Master Section. So I get the mix the best I can, including lots of tweaks at the channel level (pan, level, eq of course, but also compressing and/or limiting as appropriate). When it's pretty good, I give it the once over at the overall level, maybe some bus compressor (often sidechained to get lessen the effect of bass frequencies - see

). I've played with multi-band compression in the Master Section, but I remain unconvinced, and have moved away from it. My aging ears, admittedly, may not be up to the task of assessing the differences. If it sounds good to me, we're done, time to move on...