How do you MASTER?

When I was producing music, I found two of the most difficult parts of the process to be mixing and mastering. The difference is mastering can be something you outsource. Of course then, finding a reputable mastering engineer you trust is a whole other topic... 😕

Anyhow, for the first few tracks of mine I attempted to master, I approached it completely the wrong way. Just fyi I produced in the progressive house genre. I forgot which pro producer I was reading about, but he said he mastered by sticking PSP VintageWarmer on his master chain. I copied him and started messing around with presets on the VintageWarmer. Nothing against the VintageWarmer - it is a fantastic plugin, if you know how to use it. Problem is, I had no idea what it was actually doing to my track. I just thought, "ok, this sounds bigger and louder and more saturated, I must be on the right track..."

After getting frustrated and not really knowing if I was making my tracks sound better or worse, I decided to actually sit down and LEARN about mastering. Numerous books exist on the subject of mastering, it's such a broad subject that is both an art and a science - it can be overwhelming. Thankfully, iZotope came to the rescue. Yes, I'm going to talk about Ozone, but it's not just that. They put together an amazing guide that helped explain mastering to me better than anyone or anything before it.

If interested, the PDF can be found here. This is the intro paragraph:

If you don’t know anything about mastering or mastering software, this Guide is a great place to start. Sure, iZotope thinks you should use iZotope Ozone to master your audio…you certainly could. But iZotope has learned so much from the audio community over the past 10+ years that we’re happy to give something back in return: a Guide that’s useful for everyone who wants to learn more about mastering. As a result, this Guide can be freely copied or distributed for non-commercial purposes.

It's a fantastic read. Anyhow, you asked specifically about the software - I think iZotope designs and builds fantastic plugins. I've mostly just used Ozone out of their lineup, but the UI on it is really nice and user-friendly. Is it the best mastering suite in the world? Maybe, or maybe not. Can you achieve the same thing with a "smaller" set of software? Sure. But man, it really helped me learn, and it helped me bridge the gap to making my mastered tracks actually sound halfway decent.

Eventually a couple tracks got picked up on a label, and after I did the mixdown their [far superior] engineer took over for the mastering phase 😄

That's cool, I actually hadn't heard of the A.O.M, Invisible Limiter. Very cool that Ilan Bluestone uses it! A.O.M. is actually completely new to me.

And who makes Dynamics Shaper? Is that by FXpansion?

Glad I was able to help! 👊 I checked out your soundcloud too, very cool. How many of the tracks on there did you produce?

Did you see we just released item categories? What do you think? Check out this forum post if you have feedback 😄

For final mixdowns and mastering we use Presonus Studio One exclusively. It has a very robust set of mastering tools and the sound quality is second only to Pro Tools.

That's interesting, I think you're the 1st person I've heard of that uses Presonus Studio One exclusively for mastering.