It’s also vital to have an output meter that can indicate inter-sample peaks.
CREATE DDP MASTER FULL
Short for Loudness Units Full Scale, this is a new unit of measurement designed to recreate the way our hearing perceives loudness.
CREATE DDP MASTER PRO
To get the level of your mix right, you need not only a peak meter but also a loudness meter such as Nugen Audio’s MasterCheck Pro or Levels from Mastering The Mix that can give you a reading in LUFS.
The ability to measure loudness in LUFS is vital when mastering for streaming services.This is where the aforementioned specialist metering plug-ins come in. On a typical streaming service, a more dynamic mix that hits the target value will sound better than a heavily compressed one that exceeds the target value. However, with loudness normalisation becoming the norm, there is now no longer any advantage in making your track louder than the target value to which a playback system will turn it down. In the days of CD, which is a peak-normalised format, limiters would be used along with other dynamics processors to make tracks as loud as possible, sometimes to the detriment of sound quality. For more on these tools see SOS’s ‘DIY Mastering Made Easy’ article in the November 2017 issue ( Your limiter should be the last plug-in in the chain. Examples include vocal sibilance, occasional over-prominent bass notes, and mid-range harshness in loud sections of the track. More intransigent frequency-balance problems, or issues that are only problematic intermittently, may require more sophisticated tools such as multiband compression or dynamic EQ. A boost at around 5kHz can help with vocal clarity, while a high-frequency shelving boost at around 15kHz is often described as ‘adding some air’ to the sound. If the track has been mixed on small monitors, you may need to look at the 150 to 250 Hz area a gentle dip here is often required to remove muddiness that can build up. Unless you have to fix a very specific problem, subtlety is the name of the game, so use low Q and cuts or boosts of no more than 3dB. Sonnox Oxford Limiter v2.The EQ part of the mastering chain is a good starting point, for both enhancing the overall sound as well as fixing any problems that might be evident. These include suitable metering tools and a limiter that has a ‘true peak’ option to contain inter-sample peaks: examples include the Avid Pro Limiter, Nugen Audio’s ISL (shown above) and the new Sonnox Oxford Limiter v2. However, now that delivery formats have moved away from CD and towards loudness-normalised streaming services such as Spotify and Tidal, it is definitely worth having specialist tools available to help you manage levels appropriately. You can start off with the stock plug-ins in Pro Tools, like the EQ3 and the Maxim limiter specialist mastering plug-ins are also available, but there’s no reason not to use any plug-in if you like what it does. The exact make-up of the plug-ins you will need for mastering is dependent on the material you are mastering and what work needs to be done to it. This month, I’m going to go into more detail about the processes involved in mastering and the tools that can help you implement them. In last month’s column ( SOS February 2018), we looked at how you can set up a Pro Tools Session so as to carry out mastering duties, and we briefly discussed the sorts of processors that are needed to master in today’s environment. We continue our exploration of the mastering possibilities in Pro Tools. A meter or limiter that can display inter-sample peaks is highly desirable, as these will not show up on a conventional peak meter but can trigger distortion in lossy codecs such as those used by streaming services.
0 kommentar(er)
