I would love some feedback on my poor mastering skills

When it comes to mastering, I feel quite lost. Mixing, I can kinda do, even though I don’t know how good I am at it, but for mastering, it feels like I don’t even know what the basic steps are. Therefore, I thought that I should post a song that I’ve made both without any mastering and with my attempt at mastering and then ask you for feedback. I don’t know if it matters, but I’ve used my A4, AR, and M:C as the basis for this song, and I have individual mixer channels for each individual track.

So, this is what the song sounds like without any mastering. And this is what it sound like with my mastering attempt.

And this is my mastering chain:

First, I have a utility module where I increase the width a bit as well as making the lowest frequencies mono. Then I have an EQ where I boost everything above 1000 Hz (I don’t know if this need arises because of bad mixing, because it’s something that I almost always feel that I have to do). Next, I have a compressor in RMS mode (this just sounded like the right choise even though I don’t really know why).

Next, I’m using the Transient Shaper in the plugin Neutron Elements to make the transients a bit more punchy. I don’t know if this overlaps (or if this could have been achieved) with my compressor.

Finally, I have an Ozone Elements plugin with an imager (I don’t exactly know how/if this differs from what I’m doing in the Utility effect, but it sounded good to me)…

…and a maximizer where I stumbled myself into these settings (again, whether I should use True Peak or something else is a bit confusing to me).

If anyone would like to share your thoughts on my mastering process so far, I would love to hear them. I’m totally open to the fact that I probably don’t have a clue what I’m doing, so don’t hold anything back :upside_down_face:

I’m trying to focus on the mastering process here rather than the mixing process, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are steps that I’ve taken that could have been more effectively implemented by placing certain effects on individual mixer channels, so maybe a strict focus on the mastering process isn’t possible.

Finally, I haven’t automated any of the effects on the master bus, and I’m not sure if this is something that usually is done and something that could enhance my final result.

I’m not a mastering engineer, and are mostly just messing around.

Instead of using an transient plugin after the first compressor you could try to increase the attack. I see you have 1,5ms of attack, and thats pretty fast. If you increase it to 10-30 ms it will allow more of the original transients to come through. And maybe you dont need to do anything to the transients after.

I think both the utility widener plugin and the Ozone imager does pretty much the same things.

I like to use an Mid/side eq for widening. Not shure if the Ableton eq has that function. If that is better than using an imager type plugin im not sure, but i like it. I usually adjust the master bus eq to get the over all sound i like, then boost the sides a bit more at the upper frequencies. It opens up the track in a nice way. (At least with my music.)

Did a quick listen to the examples you posted, and it did make the song louder and more “finished” sounding. :slight_smile:

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I’m no expert but, afaik - and specially if it’s your own music, ie. you can edit the mix - one can help improve the other. Go back and forth, use mastering as a way to better understand your mixes (what to fix or improve on them). Then your mastering process will probably be easier, more streamlined and - most importantly - more enjoyable.

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My only advice is don’t get bogged down with mixing and mastering. It will suck the fun out of your creativity. Well it has for me. Now i say 90 percent playing to 10 percent the rest as a general rule.

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I’ll try experimenting a bit with the attack of the compressor. I have to admit I often have a hard time hearing the difference, but maybe if I have a goal in mind (how my song sounds with the transient plugin) it will be easier.

Thanks for the tip about mid/side eq. I don’t think I’ve heard about this concept before, but I found a short article about it that I will go through and then try out.

Maybe I should try this method. I’ve always been under the impression that you should be fully done with the mixing process before embarking on the mastering process, but maybe that’s not always the way to go.

Yeah, I’ll try to avoid getting bogged down with details. I just want to learn the basics so that I’ll probably be able to spend less time mastering each track in the future. But I’m totally with you; I don’t want to spend more time on the technical aspects of the song then on the musical aspects of the song.