I know nothing much about mastering, but decided to have a quick experiment today.
I knocked of a quick tune track and output the drums as one wave, synths as another ect ect.
I then loaded each wave into Reaper and added an Ozone to each track, got the sound I liked for the drums ect, played with the volume for each track, put a bit of compression on the master to stop the little bits of odd clipping and output the result. It came out better than I thought it would. A lot more punch to the drums ect.
Is this really the correct way to go around it, or what is the right way?
I have had a look through this forum, but can't see a definitive way to do it.
I use ozone for mastering too so I can tell you about how I do it.
I usually have just a basic limiter on the master channel while mixing down and tweaking every element in the tune separately with eq, compression and effects. I always make sure that the limiter does not change the overall sound (sound and volume wise) in a way and influence me on mixing and eqing. I think this is sorta important.
I tend to use ozone as an effect already during the production process, for instance to add clarity and punch to the drums etc... After I did so I export the wav and bounce it back due to cpu and latency. This is a bit weak but it works.
As soon as the mixdown is good and every element sits where it’s supposed to I replace the limiter on the master with the ozone. I then use the loudness maximizer in there and make the sound as loud, as hard or as soft as I want it to be. It’s a good thing if your mix isn’t too loud before applying the loudness maximizer, because if so, it will just prevent the whole going past 0 db and maybe also smash the sound and you will have no really possibilities changing settings and experimenting.
Afterwards I add some slight multiband compression and finally a bit of harmonic excitement. The harmonic exciter is a thing that does not always fit tho. It enriches the sound, especially the low’s and highs (adding harmonics as the name says I guss). But you’ll end up with a kinda warm sound. Not necessarily the best for dnb but yeah, it really depends… I use it for hip hop and house.
In the very end I use the paragraphic eq to cut the very lows (under 30 herz) and correct minor issues cause often I’m too lazy to check the tune again and again to see what element it is that is baldy eqed and causes crap.
I never use the reverb or the stereo imaging, I do that manually on every elements that requires it. That guarantees more flexibility because I may not want to wide the whole mix up from 2- 5 khz, just a specific element like a lead or so.
Overall I recon, the better your mixdown, your equing and your choice of sounds was in the first place, the better the final steps will turn out. I always thought I can make shit quality with mastering into gold but, at least for me, that’s not how it is.
This is my way of “mastering”, I hoped it helped a bit. I dunno if it’s the appropriate way of doing it, but I don’t care cause as long as it sounds good it cannot be THAT wrong.
I almost always do have 4 - 5 different mastered versions of a song.
