The Right Way To Master At Home

Every time I prepare a piece of work for export I go through the same process. I call it „fake mastering“.

The reason I call it fake, is that it can hardly be described as mastering at all. In fact I could summarize it in two easy steps:

  • Gentle peak limiting
  • Removing redundant headroom

However there is a process to it, and reasons why I do what I do. I’d like to share them with you. In fact, it’s what I recommend you do in all cases but when handing it over to a professional mastering engineer. And in that case you are well prepared, since all you need to do is disable (or not enable rather) one single plugin.

I’ll go through these steps whenever I know that the export won’t be processed any further. The export is intended purely for listening purposes. These may be that I want to double check the mix at home or on my MP3 player, that I want to upload the track to the net for demoing purposes, or for the mix to be checked by my clients. In any case, it’s the last step in the processing chain.

The idea behind the processing then is pretty simple. I want the music to be roughly on par with the volume of professionally mastered tracks. However I don’t actually want the process to change the sound of my mix in any way. That way I can directly compare how my mix stacks up against other tracks without me having to to constantly adjust the volume. I can judge the quality of my mixing work, because I know that non of what I hear may be due to sloppy master bus processing.

In effect, the result is simply a headroom starved version of the mix.

The baseline for this to work is of course a solid mix with plenty of headroom on the master bus. You are working with plenty of headroom aren’t you? I may have used gentle compression or EQ on the master bus during the mixing process. But non of it was for the purpose of increasing the technical level of the material.

I then insert a simple peak limiter on the master bus. My limiter of choice is the entirely free Limiter No6 by vladg/sound. It offers a whole range of functionality, but I really only ever use two modules. The „Peak Limiter“ and „Protection“. I keep the other modules disabled.

On the peak limiter, I’ve found the following settings to suite the kind of music I work on:

  • Mode: Brickwall
  • Type: A
  • Peak Limiter: Linked
  • Speed: 1/3

On the protection circuit, I set:

  • Ceiling: -0.1dB
  • Protection: ISP Precise

The „ISP Precise“ setting will keep any Inter Sample Peaks from surpassing the set „Ceiling”. This is potentially important if the exported file is converted to MP3 later on, as some MP3 encoders apparently introduce distortion if Inter Sample Peaks occur. I have to admit though, that this is purely a precaution, as I have never actually witnessed this happening. I have all these setting stored in a preset for quick access.

So now comes the important part. I set a loop around the loudest section of my mix and press play. On the peak limiter, I’ll then turn down the threshold until I see the needle in the VU meter twitching. I tend not to go beyond 1 or 2 dB of gain reduction. I also pay close attention, listening out for any obvious changes through the squashing of the transients. Ideally I don’t want the limiting to be noticeable at all.

The beauty of this approach, in comparison to most other limiters, is that the volume of the music remains the same. This makes it extremely easy to hear the effects of the limiting process.

I then turn to the protection circuit. On the „Output“ knob, I add back the same value that I took away with the „Threshold” knob on the peak limiter. This effectively removes the remaining headroom. So if I set the threshold to -12dB, I’ll set the output to +12dB. And that’s it! It’s that simple.

We now have the mix playing at its highest possible technical level. We have carefully reduced the peaks so that the volume should only slightly be below that of professionally mastered material. We also know that what we are listening to is still the mix, just like when we were working on it, since we made sure that the peak limiting process doesn’t change the sound.

The best thing about all of this? When we go back to work on the mix, all we have to do is disable the plugin (and you better make sure that you do!). If we decide to export the track again, for another round of feedback listening, we simply enable the plugin and we are good to go. And finally, if we want to hand the track off to a professional mastering engineer, all we have to do is leave the plugin disabled when we export. The mastering engineer will thank you for the extra headroom.

A final tip: As you can imagine I can’t recommend the use of much other processing on the master bus for fake mastering purposes. Tools like multiband compressors or stereo wideners are incredibly powerful tools when used the right way. But in most cases they’re more trouble than they’re worth. More importantly they actually defeat the purpose of what we are trying to achieve in the first place. Which is to not change the sound of the mix at all.