I didn't explain the reason EQ cuts make tracks 'louder', because I intended to link to the video already done by #DanWorall, but now I can't find it! its the one where he rebuilds a saw wave by stacking sine waves, does anyone remember which video that was? EDIT: I just made my own in the end : th-cam.com/video/Y1Y2-tpMAek/w-d-xo.html
Haha thanks that's because I'm trying to do my best impression of him! He's got far better diction though. I'm from the north where it's common to heavily abbreviate words or not annunciate which is terrible for the intelligibility of international audiences so I have to make a real effort to speak clearly! Whereas it sounds like it's natural for Dan, I'm convinced he's from further south in the country.
@Bthelick Since I am not a native English speaker, I have never had any problems with this while watching your videos. So I think you did a good job! And thanks for the great content!💪💪💪🔥
what was the basic reasoning for eq cuts being 'louder'? Less total samples? Since the sub contains more energy per vibration and the high end contains more vibrations the master can only see the 'mid range' which with a smaller sample pool might contain more "0's" thus diluting the total sample size and showing red but without actually sounding louder? wild guess btw
This is hands down one of the best technical dives into audio engineering and DSP with direct applications for music production / mixing / mastering. Thank you!
Explaining “difficult” music theory while the related music is playing is the USP what makes this channel good and very understandable. It is easy to forget alot of info when someone is ranting for 10mins in a facecam and giving 2 mins of examples, … usually even after the short plug/sponsor announcement. This workflow of explaining with the music is very easy to follow along. Big up bthlick
THANK YOU. I had to learn to stop using hi passing in the master the hard way. So many established TH-cam edm music educators still show that, even some with over 100k subscribers. I have reached out to them couple times, they ignored me. We shouldn't hi pass/low pass on the master because we see a TH-camr declaring it's part of a pro-level mastering chain.
I'm currently studying a multimedia audio production course and this video needs to be taught to students! Keep coming back to it now and again and it's one of the most important and information filled videos I've watched regarding production since I started this journey. You sir are a legend!
I am so happy when one of your videos pop up, just helps me get through my 9-5 and I also learn so much that I can apply them for my music afterwards. Thank you so much!❤️
Sensational video. As a self taught producer I have always been confused by the need to master - why not just get it right in the mix? Thank you and keep the videos coming!
You're right, it doesn't make sense, not today anyway. Mastering was originally for other necessary reasons. Putting the album in order, making sure it fit onto radio, tape and vinyl without distortion or groove skipping, meeting certain broadcast standards. These days it still has value from the lending of a 2nd pair of ears alone, especially if those ears are more experienced and in a good room, but it's no longer technically necessary.
Lots of good information here! The first half of your video is something I thought about yesterday and came to the conclusion that having everything sit in the mix and blend nicely is more important that what the meter says. Trust your ears! Mr. Bill has also touched on your last part before on some TH-cam videos. Great video as always! Thank you!
It's really refreshing to see videos like this. We're forever bombarded with so many different ideals on how to produce. Not to mention the plugins we should be using. So often I've been guilty of adjusting tracks based on the headroom/ the dreaded red, it's ironic that it sounded so much better prior to all my tweaking. Square peg round hole. I'll try trusting my ears now. Love you channel. Keep it up!
It took a while before I realized “clipping” doesn’t always negatively impact audio quality, I just never fully understood why. Some of that went over my head, but was still good information. There’s so many things that can impact “loudness,” It’s overwhelming. I try not to obsess over it and be patient with myself though. I appreciate your videos btw. You’re really good at breaking things down. It can get confusing with all the information out there.
What u say just makes sense for electronic music Production and mixing. A lot of advice is from a live recording view point and some live instruments. I've totally changed my buss set up based on what u do a it works. I was compressing the hell out of my music,now took it all out,and work on sound design,and EQ especially low shelf on stuff to clear the frequency range and things sound much better now. I'd see red but i couldn't hear distortion,now i know why.👍🏿👍🏿✌🏿
In all my years of learning/producing thus far (7.5 ish - self-taught through TH-cam etc.), I have to say that you are by far the most enjoyable and fluid engineer to share your knowledge. I came across your one of your other videos randomly when I was looking for something to watch while eating (as we do haha) and I loved it. While I know/am familiar with a lot of what you have posted so far, I have watched a few of your videos now and am happy to say that I have learned something new with each one. The way you explain and share things is incredible. So clear and easily digestible. 10/10 recommend to anyone wanting to learn/learn more about music production/sound engineering. Bthelick knows his stuff. You're a legend my guy.
Thanks for compliments macca! Great to hear even those with years at it are finding value 👊 it just goes to show we're always learning I'm sure I can learn much from you too 🙏
I instinctively been doing the same since the 80s, just with the analog hardware. Carefully choosing and shaping all your initial sounds, arrangement and the mix, then driving the outboard gear and the recording console hot and using all the headroom and then some is a thing.
this answered some questions i was having about mystery master clipping on a track where i was confident all the individual elements were solidly not clipping, thanks man!
I love how you explain this stuff! I did all the maths and technical stuff shown here on audio uni and I remember how hearing that technical info felt super empowering. It's super fun to watch the topic being slowly introduced and explained, it's like re-living that aha moment! Just here's my constructive criticism....... I would still recommend against mixing near 0 dB FS even if you intend in getting a perfect mix that don't need no mastering. First reason being that if you work near zero and somethings too loud by accident you can blow out your own ears 😂 Also, if your monitoring situation is not 100% proper you could run so hot out of Ableton that in an accidental burst of noise you could damage your speakers. Another issue with mixing near zero is the fact that when you upload your track after mixing / mastering it will be converted into a lossy format like MP3, and Spotify actually streams those lossy files. On the conversion process the peaks actually change, intersample peaks that used to last for 3 or 4 samples will then be exaggerated into noticeable distortion. That's why mastering engineers that know their shit will try to leave 1 dB FS of headroom even if the mix is squared off. Coz you want the master to be clipped and limited like the artist intended, not like spotify's mp3 encoding wanted. A good alternative would be to put a clipper plugin at (let's say) -10 dB FS and mix into it as if that was the ceiling. This is to "emulate" that Spotify will turn down your master to be around -14 LUFS. That would make your master sound exactly like a turned down by Spotify type of deal. That will mean you can clip intentionally into the ceiling instead of letting mp3 encoding do extra clipping. But at that point you might as well mix at any other level other than at zero ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's the issue with missing at zero, those pesky intersample peaks, but the thing is you can avoid them by mixing with any amount of headroom.
Good point, My interface obviously isn't running zero to my monitors / monitor station. I forget people might not know that. Regarding lossy conversion yes I'm aware of what happens post conversion. I used to check that more often, but It's not been an issue for over 8 years now though so I've stopped checking as often. That's why I don't recommend it lightly. I'm only clipping mostly inaudible transients and those take ear training to appreciate. I had one client try to do their own mix once when I was ill and couldn't make the deadline, it was a distorted mess! They just couldn't hear it and thought going onto the red was fine in general after seeing me work 🤦. They released on time at least! 🤣
@@Bthelick yeah of course no one should ever run at max volume from the interface into your speakers, and it's supper cool to see this level of good advice on TH-cam. Just the audiophile in me obsessing over distorting at Spotify 😅 Plus if you stopped checking it's provably because you can actually hear the subtle distortion as it creeps in and thus you end up with a loud but clean song, stamp of great engineering 😎👍
I've been reading about the Clip to Zero strategy lately and some people do that by putting clippers on every track or group bus and let it get as high as -9 LUFS and even 0.1 true peak. Don't know the tech side of it but I guess it works for them.
I'm conflicted by the advice too, since the loudness illusions appear to suggest that my ears (indeed most human ears) cannot be trusted. If track B sounds louder than track A to my ears, but the LUFs meter says the opposite is the case, I find it very hard to "trust my ears", because my ears are easily fooled. Since my eyes are also easily fooled, I think I'll try mixing with my nose! ;)
is it weird in years...I never cared to look at my meters except to see where my master channel was sitting before going into mastering? Like, thats literally only when I look at meters
@@Bthelickits like you mentioned in the video, trust your ears. I went to SAE Institute for audio engineering (more so to learn more about music production for myself) and when it came down to mixing/mastering...it was pushed and drilled into our heads every....single...day "Trust...Your...Ears". I was always asking for secrets on Kick/Bass correlation and what dB value should my kick be at and what my bass should be at and anytime i sat in a studio with one of my tracks with a professor and asked "How do i do this?" or "How do i make it sound like that?" The answer was AWLAYS "well! use youre ears!" And I always hated that answer. Stop holding in your secrets. And ill never forget when we learned about live sound, how to remove microphone feedback from PAs and we pointed the mic straight at the speaker and it had a feedback resonant frequency so the professor said "Ok! So what frequency do you think that peak was at?" Immediatly i just said so quicky and bluntly "1k!" and my professor looked at me in aw and said "How the fuck did you know that!?" Because it was. And i said "Idk, i just remember what a 1k sine wave sounds like and thats what it sounded like" and he said "So you get it now? Use your ears!" And after that....mixing was never the same. I know to not clip the master before I go into any mastering, but other than that? Im just listening. Idc what meters say. Does the kick and the bass play nice? What does it sound like? DOes it sound good? Yes? Then its good!
First off, thank you so much for these videos. I am blown away by the depth and quality of these tutorials. You're the best. Secondly, I want to watch that Dr. Dre interview! Is it still available somewhere?
I did try to find it so I could link in the description but can't sorry I distinctly remember him talking about how he would swap out snare samples and then resend the track to the mastering engineer to see which survived best. And the clipping they were describing was obviously not a DAW but clipping the converters , which is technically different but I ran with the concept anyway. I'll let you know if I find it.
Great video, but you forgot a very important explanation. The reason why the signal went into red after cutting some lows and highs with EQ is because of phase rotation, which modifies the waveform. To see how an EQ or multiband compressor changes your waveform you need to use an Oscilloscope. EQs work by copying the signal and rotating the phase of some frequencies then adding it back to the original signal in order to add or reduce volume of some frequencies. So if you have a waveform that does not clip or activate a limiter, by adding some EQ to it you change that waveform and it might end up clipping or activating the limiter.
well, it's more accurate to say that all minimum phase filters create post-ringing artefacts through phase rotation, with high pass filters being among the worst offenders
Correct, but that's not what i'm talking about in my above post... post-ringing wasn't the cause of the waveform going into red @@UnfortunatelyTheHunger
Yes correct. It's the result of constructive harmonic interference via phase rotations caused through the pass band! I didn't explain that because I intended to link the great video Dan Worall did on that, but then I couldn't find the video! Can you remember which it is? He reconstructed a saw wave on it with sines and showed the phase interference in a very clear way.
If you aren’t redlining you aren’t headlining has been my new favorite saying lol. I used to fear it while DJ’ing too but realized it’s not the end of the world and on occasions necessary depending on the setting.
I love this ❤ When I done my sound recording and Engineering course in 1990, they told me to push the levels into the red to saturate the tape So when the digital era came along, I was told not to do that, but I am back to the red lol If it sound good let’s do it 🖐❤️
Thanks again for making this video. I understand a teeny bit more about clipping the master ("it is a visual sign that 3 consecutive samples are in the red, which is more accurate than a limiter, but ultimately trust your ears"). What I still want to understand is how far you can push the clipping, or more accurately why you can push it so far with certain tracks and not others (even when trusting your ears). I appreciate the answer is still 'trust your ears'. Also, I was experimenting earlier this week with bouncing a clipping track to a new track (via direct routing not resampling via the master), and it also clips to zero which is weird given tracks are 32 bit floating (just another anomaly I discovered that reveals my lack of full understanding). Buying you a coffee, now ☕ ❤
In a nutshell keep it dynamic. Don't use compression, limiting or saturation on dynamic elements so the only things that clip are transients too fast to detect aurally
@@Bthelick Awesome! I haven't been using limiters lately. And I have been using compressors less and less (Pancz and Glip have been getting more use in their place). I'm getting happier with my mixes (cleaner and louder) mixing into the master like this. And I now have more of an understanding, 'why'... But upon recent self-reflection, I need to focus more on the song writing / creative side (as per your recent video referencing Kush) because I have noticed I am spending more time on mixing than creating... (ie it's important and I love learning about it, but I need to prioritise creativity, arrangement, and referencing so as to match the mixing skills I have recently developed...).
reminds me of a lecture from electronic engineering course days. Police force was always blowing out speakers, they tried better speakers but no change ... suggestion was to increase power of the amplifier driving. Turned out the original amp was clipping and producing square waves with lots of energy which would blow the speakers. Bigger amp ... original sine wave ... no blown speakers.
Great vid, I always struggle with volume, usually moving down track volumes not to clip in master and the final result is just very low volume even though master shows ~0 level, now I understand I should better trust my ears first, thanks!
trying to guess the edm track! -6 is loud af, so that might make it bass house, and it looks like it might have an offbeat bassline (that seccond peak frequency seems to be hitting opposite to the kick (asuming the lowest peak is the kick). the frequency tilt seems to be pretty dark tho (shifted to the lows, so i by that i would guess more tech house or uk bass.... IN THE END, no idea of the track, the first song that came to mind was fisher- losing it, even though it meetsnon eof those criteriea (this was made before finishing the vid! curious af on what the track is) (the offbeat bass is rare in hosue so it could also be slow eurodance or techno/psyteck whatever housepeed genres are crutching on the 1/8 offbeat bassline)
At the start of the video I said to myself “well I usually use my ears rather than having set numbers to aim for” glad to see by the end of it I felt relieved I might actually know what I’m doing
Fuck yeah. Love your videos man. Thanks for keeping this going. Big success is coming for you on this channel- you got me into making music which i will always appreciate.
Coming from an intermediate, the only piece of advice I'll give you to remember for the next couple of years is enjoy the journey! Its not all about the destination, take pride in the progress you make and the things you learn 😊
Would love a video on how to do Tom basslines and more of that square tough style with the 1/8 hi-hat pattern I feel like that’s the foundation for every track that I’m really into.
Well that's why I made this video, it's because I don't really have one, or not one that's anything you can teach. Mixing is a listening skill, not an operation skill! I can show anyone what to do, but it's useless without the ear training. If you can't hear the same things as me , which is the reason I make any given decision, then the decision on it's own is useless. That's why I made this video th-cam.com/video/tW9imrfzGf4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=19QDRrLtEVDADKnv Once you have the ear training you just pick the right sounds for the situation, side chain the appropriate parts, then there's very little to do mix wise after that. If you want to see my full process in action I show everything in the start to finish videos. The last one was this; th-cam.com/video/1Bs_5Ls4Dhg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IA97wewtYSvcs_db
@Bthelick Thanks man🙏 that's true.. I'm a live sound engineer.. I also make music. I find it hard to produce good mixes consistently on my music. Some are good. Most are bad. Thanks for you feed back.. I guess it lies more on sound selection..
@endmoore ah you're already a live engineer! I got that "mixing is not an operation skill" from live engineer Kenny Chesney. If you're struggling you're probably just not referencing enough (by that I mean at least every 20 mins) especially at the sound selection stage. Also speaking of the point of this video, it's to show that working 'at zero' to the reference is a great way mix master. If you leave your master channel empty, you will hear obvious distortion any time you have a mix unbalance , so you can fix it then and there until the distortion goes away. That takes away a lot of pain most experience later on when they raise the level only at the end to suddenly discover all the problems they avoided by mixing at lower reference levels.
Hmmm never thought of the conversion from internal 32bit float to external 24bit for the dac, pretty logical after your explanation. I am by the way surprised the audio engines are still 32bit as we left the 32bit era long time ago in other software. Checked the specs of my own dac, seems to have a range of -129 to +120, a lot less than the internal fader channels 😂 Really enjoyed the experiments, cool to see how the brain reacts on stuff like this. As usual, many tanks!
I think it's because largely any errors at the least significant bit of 32 float are so far down the resulting noise is still way below the self noise of any analog system at the output. so any further precision is just a waste of CPU.
Serious Question: At exactly timecode 9:26 on SPAN I notice at the far right of the high end there appears a "L" shape cut above roughly 18k. I notice that on almost all professional tracks I examine. What is going on there? Are you doing something to cause that cut or "L shape?I ask because I see that same shape on all professional tracks.
That's an artifact of MP3 compression you won't see it on the non-compressed original. The high frequencies are being culled and there is some residual 'leakage' at the top.
Thanks for the great explanation! But what are saying the streaming services, when you deliver > 0db peaks? i made by accident a mixdown in the red, but without hearable distortion. This track was not accepted from the distribution service. Therefor i insert always a limiter.
I've been doing this nearly 10 years , not had any problems yet. Not with streaming services anyway. There is sometimes an issue with the player inside Dropbox for some reason but no where else. Like I say though I don't recommend it lightly. I've had clients of mine try it themselves and what they thought was inaudible distortion was far too much to my ears it still takes skill to get right and a trained ear for detail.
@@Bthelick Ah, i see, that was the problem. My distributor suggest to upload the best quality as possible, so that the streaming services habe the best basis to convert the track in different streaming formats. So i upload 32 bit float wav. When open the track in Audacity, you see the red peaks. So it is better to deliver in 24 bit. Thanks!
@@Positive_Tea The distributor (recordjet) rejected the track. They are bit more strictly, i think. They want to avoid trouble with streaming services.
Love this and definitely learned a lot. Would love to know why the band pass filter you added to the master track caused the clipping to happen? Even with all this tech my brain can't tech it out haha
This is perfectly competent. What do you think about doing the clipping at a higher sample rate to avoid aliasing, and then downsampling at the mixdown?
It's a thought sure, I've never deemed it necessary though. Given that I'm only clipping mostly inaudible micro transients I don't think it would make an appreciable difference. If I had ever experienced a rough sounding master hindering the performance of a song then I would be a lot more precious over the sound quality in general and wouldn't be clipping at all. Luckily in the real world that's not the case!
Thanks again for this great video! Can you please explain the process and theory on how to improve a mix in such a way that the limiter becomes unnecessary because the clipping gets inaudible? You mentioned it when tlaking about mastering the hiphop album and the quotes from Dr Dre and Bob Katz. Cheers! Is it all about getting the transients "thin and short" plus the body, or sustain of the sounds so leveled out that none of them are being affected by the clipping?
That's basically it yeah. The key is really sub frequency management as that's where all the headroom is. In my video on how I process bass I show splitting the bass into sub and other bass so I have full control over their side chains. Vocals can be tough , I sometimes add a limiter on vocal heavy tracks in the offending sections but that's only a last resort. Getting that low end managed well should govern the head room for the rest of the track
unreached depth and excellence! thank you sir! I have a question though. Do you render those tracks finally just like that or do you throw a clipper on the master to shave off anything above 0dB?
@@Bthelick awesome 👍 that means also I actually understand now completely what you were elaborating on in this brilliant piece of educational video (and art!)! Thank you so much!
So how and why when I'm checking industry or big labels song/tracks I see -30db almost on every single track on span? Of course it's not the same tracks or song and each one is different, There's no perfect line only what's works in the club haha, But still why? I'm talking even David Guetta, Calving harris ect. all -30 db in the bass/kick low at span .
Well eras do go through sound profile trends sure. But the point is if you make your bass LOOK like theirs I guarantee you it will sound nothing like theirs! I do say "reference reference reference" and this is why. You will certainly want to aim for matching your reference but span is like one window on a house that has 50 windows. If 'the truth' is inside that house there's still lots of other 'windows' to look through before you start to get close to the real sound. Timbre, timing, side chaining, pitch, width, depth, etc etc. But nothing can match your ears for getting closer to the truth. Physics is also at play, to get a typical dance track to the ballpark of current master loudness It will just naturally end up here as this is the 'natural limit' of that genre.
In the 2nd half? it's called Polymetric. (it should be reaching streaming services by now) if you mean the hidden track that was skrillex / boys noiz Fine Day
Great vid again! I seen another engineer advising to turn off True Peak Limiting on your final master limiter to preserve the punch on the drums. Would you recommend this? He said a lot of popular tracks taken off beatport would show as clipping as they don’t have TPL on either.
Yeah, well I take it the extra step because I don't use a limiter. If I have to use a limiter though, true peak Is a fine theory using upsampling and interpolation to pre-empt over shoots after conversion, but it always sounds worse to me on transient heavy material. when you see what kind of 'true peaks' digital is capable of (and analog actually that eq cut phenomena is not a digital thing) then it makes sense why true peak sounds worse. Technically 'safer' but doesn't work nicely with music
The more I learn the less I know! I love having a simple technical solution but there is none! Thanks for teaching me. Just gonna go by vibes now, trial and error. Listen to my track on studio monitors, headphones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers.
Excellent video Ben, I had been wondering about your red master fader for ages! I was going to ask whether you did a just a -1dbfs cut or something after your 24 bit export but then I noticed you had linked to one of those hip hop masters so I ripped it from SoundCloud, purely for educational reasons of course. It came out as 320k mp3, it's absolutely smashing the meters but it sounds superb! So I think I will try this one my next tune, full bareback is the way to go. Do you go this way for absolutely every track you release? I take it from your other comments you have no truck with all the spurious LUFS requirements of the various streamers.
Bareback lol. Yeah for all modern edm/ pop/ rock / hip-hop I use this. I will lean on a good limiter occasionally when there is audible distortion on soft sections if I don't have time (ozone's max is pretty transparent and appears to be intelligently clipping anyway) But by that point all the hard work is done and it barely has to do anything. For softer or acoustic material like solo piano / orchestral I don't use this method. That hip-hop mix/master is a good 10 years old now, glad to hear you liked it though 👊
I know some old BBC dubbing mixers and that's what they always used to call mixing without the limiter. But in those days they had to hit PPM 6 in telly, now it's -23 LUFS! pretty tricky to bareback.... But it's so true, don't trust your eyes. When I looked at the waveform of the Sonix track I thought it was going to sound LOUD like that dreadful early 2000s period when everyone was hard limiting. But no, just sounded great.
Great stuff Bethelick! This one was quite something to wrap the head around. If I want to do more ear training to be able to steer towards the "no limiter workflow", where would you suggest me to start?
Great question. Regards getting an ear for clipping, it's most obvious on softer / acoustic sounds, like voice, piano, Rhodes, and bass so you can try play around with free clip and those kinds of sounds (lower the ceiling so you don't have crank everything) and get used to what digital distortion sounds like. I would also get used to listening for healthy transients , try to identify drums in your library that are 'spikey ' or 'punchy' and have a play with a transient shaper plugin (the free one from kilohearts is great) to get an ear for transients in general, then play with compression and distortion vs clipping to see how it effects them. If you ever get the privilege to see a live orchestra at any point , take it! That will give you a better appreciation of good dynamics and loudness too 👊
For the last year I have stopped mastering tracks. I transparently clip tracks in the mix to basically produce at a mastered level as I go. Personally I find this is an amazing way to work because you don’t leave any surprises for yourself like you usually get when you come to master a track traditionally. By the time I’ve finished the mix down the track is done and usually hitting between -6/-7 lufs without any distortion. It’s also great for trying out sounds because I find certain sounds just simply can’t be made loud enough to work in modern dance tracks.
@@Bthelick also there’s an amazing free gain plug-in called blue cat gain. It allows you to link it to other instances of the plug in so they all move when you adjust one. It’s super useful to have before all of your track clippers so if you’re coming in to hot or not hot enough you can either push the gains up into the clippers or back them off. Also handy for sharing stems or when labels want to master themselves. Saves a lot of time trying to get some headroom on the master.
@@nihftyy ah right you're talking about the clip to zero method? I don't do that. I have no track clippers at all. I find clipping before the clipping makes the final clipping infinitely worse.
@@Bthelick yeah that’s right! Interesting, I’m going to have to try your method too. I usually have a clipper on the master bus but it is never actually doing anything. It’s more of a safety precaution more than anything haha.
Great info once again. I have been using reference songs and creating custom curves in various metering software. Just to get a general ballpark. That said; You mention ear training several times across your videos. What do you find is the best way to upgrade ear training for electronic dance music? Thanks!
Recreating your fave tracks is always a good one. There's websites like sound gym now or tone gym now too. If you don't have an ideal monitoring set up then switching up your playback system often is a must. Check on a mono Bluetooth speaker, phone, laptop, headphones as much as possible so the brain can connect the dots and fill in for what's missing on the speakers. Especially in an untreated room situation
Good question, it was a good 10 years ago now! I did try to find it before finishing the video, but unfortunately couldn't. I'll keep you posted if I find it.
I bet getting Fruity to do it for me is a good answer lol. But for now it suffices, and it's probably more than my current mixing skills deserve anyway. Seen the techiestuff on clipping before, makes sense. Most of it does. But between things making sense, or me making sense with a thing in my hand... There's bound to be some discrepancy there.
Fascinating deep dive! As a software engineer, I appreciate the details you explained. How does all this factor into playing through an audio system? I imagine speakers have their own threshold and after a certain dB level, they would distort or am I wrong?
Well clipping certainly isn't kind to tweeters that's for sure! But that's usually a sustained clipping problem. That's why I don't advise this lightly to anyone without ear training because I'm only clipping of the inaudible transients which would be bright anyway (or clipped 'intelligently' in a good limiter) so I don't think what I'm going here is that damaging, as I'm keeping an ear on dynamics in general my material can't be worse than some of the squashed to hell stuff I'm hearing out there.
Interesting video. But how you deal with the True peaks that comes out after you export your music to mp3 or 16 bits Wav files? at the end you just export the song into clipping? I hope your response on that. It could be interesting a video on how to get certain levels of loudness like -5 lufs, etc.
Yeah I just export it like that. What I'm hearing from my speakers is occurring after analog interpolation is with true peaks after all. I double check the mp3 conversion obviously but I rarely find issues except in cases of extremely distorted genres like d'n'b / dubstep, and even then the only issues were on playback through dropbox's internal player only. LUFS is just another number. Like I said in the video, a 1 dimensional number in a 4 dimensional world. It doesn't take into account frequency, balance or frequency density or transient punch. You don't get loud by aiming for a number please stop thinking that way. Take off all your compressors , clippers, and limiters, learn to listen for true punch and dynamics in the sound sources on selection, and before you know it you'll have achieved "loud" without realizing it. I just work to a reference , (see my 3 simple steps video) I don't even have to check any loudness numbers before I hit render. It's either in a similar area to the reference or it's not.
I didn't explain the reason EQ cuts make tracks 'louder', because I intended to link to the video already done by #DanWorall, but now I can't find it!
its the one where he rebuilds a saw wave by stacking sine waves, does anyone remember which video that was?
EDIT: I just made my own in the end : th-cam.com/video/Y1Y2-tpMAek/w-d-xo.html
Man I'm always think of you as a Edm Dan Worrall. Collab will be super cool. You even got similar tones of voices.
Haha thanks that's because I'm trying to do my best impression of him! He's got far better diction though. I'm from the north where it's common to heavily abbreviate words or not annunciate which is terrible for the intelligibility of international audiences so I have to make a real effort to speak clearly! Whereas it sounds like it's natural for Dan, I'm convinced he's from further south in the country.
@Bthelick Since I am not a native English speaker, I have never had any problems with this while watching your videos. So I think you did a good job! And thanks for the great content!💪💪💪🔥
Great to hear, thanks for letting me know 👊
what was the basic reasoning for eq cuts being 'louder'? Less total samples? Since the sub contains more energy per vibration and the high end contains more vibrations the master can only see the 'mid range' which with a smaller sample pool might contain more "0's" thus diluting the total sample size and showing red but without actually sounding louder? wild guess btw
This is hands down one of the best technical dives into audio engineering and DSP with direct applications for music production / mixing / mastering. Thank you!
Came here to write exactly this! Thank you!
if you ain't redlining you ain't headlining
I just got into music production after years of wanting to try it out. This channel has taught me more than all others combined!
Stick w this guy…music is the focus, and backed up by years of releases so it’s WHAT you NEED to have fun asap. All the details will come. 🖤😎🍭
Click the Thanks button and buy him a coffee. He deserves it
Explaining “difficult” music theory while the related music is playing is the USP what makes this channel good and very understandable.
It is easy to forget alot of info when someone is ranting for 10mins in a facecam and giving 2 mins of examples, … usually even after the short plug/sponsor announcement.
This workflow of explaining with the music is very easy to follow along. Big up bthlick
THANK YOU. I had to learn to stop using hi passing in the master the hard way.
So many established TH-cam edm music educators still show that, even some with over 100k subscribers. I have reached out to them couple times, they ignored me.
We shouldn't hi pass/low pass on the master because we see a TH-camr declaring it's part of a pro-level mastering chain.
I'm currently studying a multimedia audio production course and this video needs to be taught to students! Keep coming back to it now and again and it's one of the most important and information filled videos I've watched regarding production since I started this journey. You sir are a legend!
I am so happy when one of your videos pop up, just helps me get through my 9-5 and I also learn so much that I can apply them for my music afterwards. Thank you so much!❤️
Sensational video. As a self taught producer I have always been confused by the need to master - why not just get it right in the mix? Thank you and keep the videos coming!
You're right, it doesn't make sense, not today anyway.
Mastering was originally for other necessary reasons. Putting the album in order, making sure it fit onto radio, tape and vinyl without distortion or groove skipping, meeting certain broadcast standards.
These days it still has value from the lending of a 2nd pair of ears alone, especially if those ears are more experienced and in a good room, but it's no longer technically necessary.
Lots of good information here! The first half of your video is something I thought about yesterday and came to the conclusion that having everything sit in the mix and blend nicely is more important that what the meter says. Trust your ears! Mr. Bill has also touched on your last part before on some TH-cam videos. Great video as always! Thank you!
It's really refreshing to see videos like this. We're forever bombarded with so many different ideals on how to produce. Not to mention the plugins we should be using. So often I've been guilty of adjusting tracks based on the headroom/ the dreaded red, it's ironic that it sounded so much better prior to all my tweaking. Square peg round hole. I'll try trusting my ears now. Love you channel. Keep it up!
It took a while before I realized “clipping” doesn’t always negatively impact audio quality, I just never fully understood why. Some of that went over my head, but was still good information. There’s so many things that can impact “loudness,” It’s overwhelming. I try not to obsess over it and be patient with myself though.
I appreciate your videos btw. You’re really good at breaking things down. It can get confusing with all the information out there.
Pretty sure Noisia said something in an interview once, that if it sounds good surely that’s what matters! Nice one B
This channels is the one of the best in the field of music production. Thank you for all the pragmatic and helpful knowledge that you share!
What u say just makes sense for electronic music Production and mixing. A lot of advice is from a live recording view point and some live instruments. I've totally changed my buss set up based on what u do a it works. I was compressing the hell out of my music,now took it all out,and work on sound design,and EQ especially low shelf on stuff to clear the frequency range and things sound much better now. I'd see red but i couldn't hear distortion,now i know why.👍🏿👍🏿✌🏿
Absolutely fantastic! The bit about the master bus was the final piece of the puzzle for me. Love tihs! :)
Kicking myself after the reveal of what the mystery track was in the video description. So obvious from the Span analyser now watching it back!
In all my years of learning/producing thus far (7.5 ish - self-taught through TH-cam etc.), I have to say that you are by far the most enjoyable and fluid engineer to share your knowledge. I came across your one of your other videos randomly when I was looking for something to watch while eating (as we do haha) and I loved it. While I know/am familiar with a lot of what you have posted so far, I have watched a few of your videos now and am happy to say that I have learned something new with each one. The way you explain and share things is incredible. So clear and easily digestible. 10/10 recommend to anyone wanting to learn/learn more about music production/sound engineering. Bthelick knows his stuff. You're a legend my guy.
Thanks for compliments macca! Great to hear even those with years at it are finding value 👊 it just goes to show we're always learning I'm sure I can learn much from you too 🙏
@@Bthelick much love my man! 😎
Great video, love this channel!
This is by far the best one in this field on TH-cam. Master craftsmanship!
I instinctively been doing the same since the 80s, just with the analog hardware. Carefully choosing and shaping all your initial sounds, arrangement and the mix, then driving the outboard gear and the recording console hot and using all the headroom and then some is a thing.
this answered some questions i was having about mystery master clipping on a track where i was confident all the individual elements were solidly not clipping, thanks man!
Wasn't expecting a video at half past midnight but I'm here for it! 🤣🔥
Wow you just blessed us with so much game here! Thank you for not gate keeping this!
You're welcome. There's a part 2 also if you haven't seen it yet 👊
I love how you explain this stuff! I did all the maths and technical stuff shown here on audio uni and I remember how hearing that technical info felt super empowering.
It's super fun to watch the topic being slowly introduced and explained, it's like re-living that aha moment!
Just here's my constructive criticism....... I would still recommend against mixing near 0 dB FS even if you intend in getting a perfect mix that don't need no mastering. First reason being that if you work near zero and somethings too loud by accident you can blow out your own ears 😂
Also, if your monitoring situation is not 100% proper you could run so hot out of Ableton that in an accidental burst of noise you could damage your speakers.
Another issue with mixing near zero is the fact that when you upload your track after mixing / mastering it will be converted into a lossy format like MP3, and Spotify actually streams those lossy files. On the conversion process the peaks actually change, intersample peaks that used to last for 3 or 4 samples will then be exaggerated into noticeable distortion. That's why mastering engineers that know their shit will try to leave 1 dB FS of headroom even if the mix is squared off. Coz you want the master to be clipped and limited like the artist intended, not like spotify's mp3 encoding wanted.
A good alternative would be to put a clipper plugin at (let's say) -10 dB FS and mix into it as if that was the ceiling. This is to "emulate" that Spotify will turn down your master to be around -14 LUFS. That would make your master sound exactly like a turned down by Spotify type of deal. That will mean you can clip intentionally into the ceiling instead of letting mp3 encoding do extra clipping.
But at that point you might as well mix at any other level other than at zero ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's the issue with missing at zero, those pesky intersample peaks, but the thing is you can avoid them by mixing with any amount of headroom.
Good point, My interface obviously isn't running zero to my monitors / monitor station. I forget people might not know that.
Regarding lossy conversion yes I'm aware of what happens post conversion.
I used to check that more often, but It's not been an issue for over 8 years now though so I've stopped checking as often.
That's why I don't recommend it lightly. I'm only clipping mostly inaudible transients and those take ear training to appreciate.
I had one client try to do their own mix once when I was ill and couldn't make the deadline, it was a distorted mess! They just couldn't hear it and thought going onto the red was fine in general after seeing me work 🤦. They released on time at least! 🤣
@@Bthelick yeah of course no one should ever run at max volume from the interface into your speakers, and it's supper cool to see this level of good advice on TH-cam.
Just the audiophile in me obsessing over distorting at Spotify 😅
Plus if you stopped checking it's provably because you can actually hear the subtle distortion as it creeps in and thus you end up with a loud but clean song, stamp of great engineering 😎👍
I've been reading about the Clip to Zero strategy lately and some people do that by putting clippers on every track or group bus and let it get as high as -9 LUFS and even 0.1 true peak. Don't know the tech side of it but I guess it works for them.
I'm so glad I found your channel. I learnt more in the last 24mins than I have in 10years of other tutorials. Thank you
Ah that's great to hear (I think haha)
Welcome!
I think this left me more confused then I was before. I am really unsure how to go about mastering or mixing now if all those illusions exist.
By using your ears!
I'm conflicted by the advice too, since the loudness illusions appear to suggest that my ears (indeed most human ears) cannot be trusted. If track B sounds louder than track A to my ears, but the LUFs meter says the opposite is the case, I find it very hard to "trust my ears", because my ears are easily fooled. Since my eyes are also easily fooled, I think I'll try mixing with my nose! ;)
Thanks!
Thanks John! Appreciated 🙏
That was epically good! Never seen anyone explain things in so much depth like this..
Thankyou sir!
context is everything .... thanks for this video ... that explanes me what i learnd in the last years and now i truly understand
is it weird in years...I never cared to look at my meters except to see where my master channel was sitting before going into mastering? Like, thats literally only when I look at meters
Nah it's not weird at all.
What seems obvious to some is extremely unintuitive to others.
@@Bthelickits like you mentioned in the video, trust your ears. I went to SAE Institute for audio engineering (more so to learn more about music production for myself) and when it came down to mixing/mastering...it was pushed and drilled into our heads every....single...day "Trust...Your...Ears". I was always asking for secrets on Kick/Bass correlation and what dB value should my kick be at and what my bass should be at and anytime i sat in a studio with one of my tracks with a professor and asked "How do i do this?" or "How do i make it sound like that?" The answer was AWLAYS "well! use youre ears!" And I always hated that answer. Stop holding in your secrets. And ill never forget when we learned about live sound, how to remove microphone feedback from PAs and we pointed the mic straight at the speaker and it had a feedback resonant frequency so the professor said "Ok! So what frequency do you think that peak was at?" Immediatly i just said so quicky and bluntly "1k!" and my professor looked at me in aw and said "How the fuck did you know that!?" Because it was. And i said "Idk, i just remember what a 1k sine wave sounds like and thats what it sounded like" and he said "So you get it now? Use your ears!" And after that....mixing was never the same. I know to not clip the master before I go into any mastering, but other than that? Im just listening. Idc what meters say. Does the kick and the bass play nice? What does it sound like? DOes it sound good? Yes? Then its good!
First off, thank you so much for these videos. I am blown away by the depth and quality of these tutorials. You're the best. Secondly, I want to watch that Dr. Dre interview! Is it still available somewhere?
I did try to find it so I could link in the description but can't sorry
I distinctly remember him talking about how he would swap out snare samples and then resend the track to the mastering engineer to see which survived best.
And the clipping they were describing was obviously not a DAW but clipping the converters , which is technically different but I ran with the concept anyway.
I'll let you know if I find it.
Bass 2 goes hard 🔥
This video blew my mind man
lmao the british snark is epic in this one, i love this channel
Great video, but you forgot a very important explanation. The reason why the signal went into red after cutting some lows and highs with EQ is because of phase rotation, which modifies the waveform. To see how an EQ or multiband compressor changes your waveform you need to use an Oscilloscope. EQs work by copying the signal and rotating the phase of some frequencies then adding it back to the original signal in order to add or reduce volume of some frequencies. So if you have a waveform that does not clip or activate a limiter, by adding some EQ to it you change that waveform and it might end up clipping or activating the limiter.
well, it's more accurate to say that all minimum phase filters create post-ringing artefacts through phase rotation, with high pass filters being among the worst offenders
Correct, but that's not what i'm talking about in my above post... post-ringing wasn't the cause of the waveform going into red @@UnfortunatelyTheHunger
Yes correct. It's the result of constructive harmonic interference via phase rotations caused through the pass band!
I didn't explain that because I intended to link the great video Dan Worall did on that, but then I couldn't find the video!
Can you remember which it is? He reconstructed a saw wave on it with sines and showed the phase interference in a very clear way.
If you aren’t redlining you aren’t headlining has been my new favorite saying lol. I used to fear it while DJ’ing too but realized it’s not the end of the world and on occasions necessary depending on the setting.
Well, live is a different animal. Redlining live can destroy speakers!
Great video and clever title!
🤯
I love this ❤
When I done my sound recording and Engineering course in 1990,
they told me to push the levels into the red to saturate the tape
So when the digital era came along, I was told not to do that, but I am back to the red lol
If it sound good let’s do it 🖐❤️
I JUST sat down for a quesadilla and this pops up. Perfect timing. Sup B 😎🖤🕺
Nom, Enjoy!
Perfect timing. I am in the middle of mastering a project and always struggle with volume.
Thank you 🙏
Congrats on 25k mate, your going from strength to strength.💪💪💪
on Football Sunday lets go!
Thanks again for making this video. I understand a teeny bit more about clipping the master ("it is a visual sign that 3 consecutive samples are in the red, which is more accurate than a limiter, but ultimately trust your ears"). What I still want to understand is how far you can push the clipping, or more accurately why you can push it so far with certain tracks and not others (even when trusting your ears). I appreciate the answer is still 'trust your ears'.
Also, I was experimenting earlier this week with bouncing a clipping track to a new track (via direct routing not resampling via the master), and it also clips to zero which is weird given tracks are 32 bit floating (just another anomaly I discovered that reveals my lack of full understanding). Buying you a coffee, now ☕ ❤
In a nutshell keep it dynamic. Don't use compression, limiting or saturation on dynamic elements so the only things that clip are transients too fast to detect aurally
@@Bthelick Awesome! I haven't been using limiters lately. And I have been using compressors less and less (Pancz and Glip have been getting more use in their place). I'm getting happier with my mixes (cleaner and louder) mixing into the master like this. And I now have more of an understanding, 'why'... But upon recent self-reflection, I need to focus more on the song writing / creative side (as per your recent video referencing Kush) because I have noticed I am spending more time on mixing than creating... (ie it's important and I love learning about it, but I need to prioritise creativity, arrangement, and referencing so as to match the mixing skills I have recently developed...).
reminds me of a lecture from electronic engineering course days. Police force was always blowing out speakers, they tried better speakers but no change ... suggestion was to increase power of the amplifier driving. Turned out the original amp was clipping and producing square waves with lots of energy which would blow the speakers. Bigger amp ... original sine wave ... no blown speakers.
Great vid, I always struggle with volume, usually moving down track volumes not to clip in master and the final result is just very low volume even though master shows ~0 level, now I understand I should better trust my ears first, thanks!
trying to guess the edm track! -6 is loud af, so that might make it bass house, and it looks like it might have an offbeat bassline (that seccond peak frequency seems to be hitting opposite to the kick (asuming the lowest peak is the kick). the frequency tilt seems to be pretty dark tho (shifted to the lows, so i by that i would guess more tech house or uk bass.... IN THE END, no idea of the track, the first song that came to mind was fisher- losing it, even though it meetsnon eof those criteriea (this was made before finishing the vid! curious af on what the track is)
(the offbeat bass is rare in hosue so it could also be slow eurodance or techno/psyteck whatever housepeed genres are crutching on the 1/8 offbeat bassline)
8:55 this whole bit had me giggling like a child
So true, thanks for this excellent explanation!
Great content, please make a video how you mix, balance levels and more. Your videos are gold and practical. :)
x2 🙂
👌
Eh 🎉 can't imagine 🙌
At the start of the video I said to myself “well I usually use my ears rather than having set numbers to aim for” glad to see by the end of it I felt relieved I might actually know what I’m doing
Is this Dan Worrall’s brother? 🥸
Haha nope just a Dan Fan trying to do my best impression because unlike Dan, if I used my natural accent no-one would understand a word 🤣
@@Bthelick Hahaha fair, love your videos mate!
**bthelick white glove slaps the wannabe mastering engineers** flies away to make more great content.
This is so valuable, thank You
Excilent breakdown⚡
Wow must watch again
Thanks. Great video.
Outstanding info. Again
Thanks for re-replying! 🙂
Fuck yeah. Love your videos man. Thanks for keeping this going. Big success is coming for you on this channel- you got me into making music which i will always appreciate.
Coming from an intermediate, the only piece of advice I'll give you to remember for the next couple of years is enjoy the journey! Its not all about the destination, take pride in the progress you make and the things you learn 😊
Very insightful stuff!
Would love a video on how to do Tom basslines and more of that square tough style with the 1/8 hi-hat pattern I feel like that’s the foundation for every track that I’m really into.
Thank you so much 🙏
Dope video, but i still don't know what to do with this information..
Thanks, it might not be a problem for you. I I suppose the general warning is don't mix sound with your eyes!
@Bthelick Yeah, can you please do a video of your full process when approaching mixing..
Thanks 😊
Well that's why I made this video, it's because I don't really have one, or not one that's anything you can teach.
Mixing is a listening skill, not an operation skill! I can show anyone what to do, but it's useless without the ear training. If you can't hear the same things as me , which is the reason I make any given decision, then the decision on it's own is useless.
That's why I made this video
th-cam.com/video/tW9imrfzGf4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=19QDRrLtEVDADKnv
Once you have the ear training you just pick the right sounds for the situation, side chain the appropriate parts, then there's very little to do mix wise after that.
If you want to see my full process in action I show everything in the start to finish videos. The last one was this;
th-cam.com/video/1Bs_5Ls4Dhg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IA97wewtYSvcs_db
@Bthelick Thanks man🙏 that's true..
I'm a live sound engineer..
I also make music. I find it hard to produce good mixes consistently on my music. Some are good. Most are bad.
Thanks for you feed back..
I guess it lies more on sound selection..
@endmoore ah you're already a live engineer!
I got that "mixing is not an operation skill" from live engineer Kenny Chesney.
If you're struggling you're probably just not referencing enough (by that I mean at least every 20 mins) especially at the sound selection stage.
Also speaking of the point of this video, it's to show that working 'at zero' to the reference is a great way mix master. If you leave your master channel empty, you will hear obvious distortion any time you have a mix unbalance , so you can fix it then and there until the distortion goes away. That takes away a lot of pain most experience later on when they raise the level only at the end to suddenly discover all the problems they avoided by mixing at lower reference levels.
Hmmm never thought of the conversion from internal 32bit float to external 24bit for the dac, pretty logical after your explanation. I am by the way surprised the audio engines are still 32bit as we left the 32bit era long time ago in other software.
Checked the specs of my own dac, seems to have a range of -129 to +120, a lot less than the internal fader channels 😂
Really enjoyed the experiments, cool to see how the brain reacts on stuff like this.
As usual, many tanks!
I think it's because largely any errors at the least significant bit of 32 float are so far down the resulting noise is still way below the self noise of any analog system at the output. so any further precision is just a waste of CPU.
Serious Question: At exactly timecode 9:26 on SPAN I notice at the far right of the high end there appears a "L" shape cut above roughly 18k. I notice that on almost all professional tracks I examine. What is going on there? Are you doing something to cause that cut or "L shape?I ask because I see that same shape on all professional tracks.
That's an artifact of MP3 compression you won't see it on the non-compressed original.
The high frequencies are being culled and there is some residual 'leakage' at the top.
not me using a high shelf on my master for 8 years 🤡
Thanks for the great explanation! But what are saying the streaming services, when you deliver > 0db peaks? i made by accident a mixdown in the red, but without hearable distortion. This track was not accepted from the distribution service. Therefor i insert always a limiter.
I've been doing this nearly 10 years , not had any problems yet.
Not with streaming services anyway. There is sometimes an issue with the player inside Dropbox for some reason but no where else.
Like I say though I don't recommend it lightly. I've had clients of mine try it themselves and what they thought was inaudible distortion was far too much to my ears it still takes skill to get right and a trained ear for detail.
@@BthelickI also was wondering about true peak over zero being rejected by streaming services.
I'm not delivering > 0 rememeber. > 0 doesn't exist in the usual 16 or 24 bit final format, which is what I deliver to stores
@@Bthelick Ah, i see, that was the problem.
My distributor suggest to upload the best quality as possible, so that the streaming services habe the best basis to convert the track in different streaming formats.
So i upload 32 bit float wav. When open the track in Audacity, you see the red peaks.
So it is better to deliver in 24 bit.
Thanks!
@@Positive_Tea The distributor (recordjet) rejected the track. They are bit more strictly, i think. They want to avoid trouble with streaming services.
This is very useful, everyone should see this
I like science. One of the best videos I have watched lately.
Love this and definitely learned a lot. Would love to know why the band pass filter you added to the master track caused the clipping to happen? Even with all this tech my brain can't tech it out haha
Thanks! I linked a video in the description.
This is perfectly competent. What do you think about doing the clipping at a higher sample rate to avoid aliasing, and then downsampling at the mixdown?
It's a thought sure, I've never deemed it necessary though. Given that I'm only clipping mostly inaudible micro transients I don't think it would make an appreciable difference.
If I had ever experienced a rough sounding master hindering the performance of a song then I would be a lot more precious over the sound quality in general and wouldn't be clipping at all.
Luckily in the real world that's not the case!
i'm not british, but all i can say is ..... brilliant, innit.🍺
Magic video thanks
Thanks again for this great video! Can you please explain the process and theory on how to improve a mix in such a way that the limiter becomes unnecessary because the clipping gets inaudible? You mentioned it when tlaking about mastering the hiphop album and the quotes from Dr Dre and Bob Katz. Cheers! Is it all about getting the transients "thin and short" plus the body, or sustain of the sounds so leveled out that none of them are being affected by the clipping?
That's basically it yeah.
The key is really sub frequency management as that's where all the headroom is. In my video on how I process bass I show splitting the bass into sub and other bass so I have full control over their side chains.
Vocals can be tough , I sometimes add a limiter on vocal heavy tracks in the offending sections but that's only a last resort. Getting that low end managed well should govern the head room for the rest of the track
unreached depth and excellence! thank you sir! I have a question though. Do you render those tracks finally just like that or do you throw a clipper on the master to shave off anything above 0dB?
I render as is, it's basically the same thing though. Stores don't accept 32bit files so rendering at anything less clips off at zero anyway.
@@Bthelick awesome 👍 that means also I actually understand now completely what you were elaborating on in this brilliant piece of educational video (and art!)! Thank you so much!
Thank you, this blew my mind..
So how and why when I'm checking industry or big labels song/tracks I see -30db almost on every single track on span? Of course it's not the same tracks or song and each one is different, There's no perfect line only what's works in the club haha, But still why? I'm talking even David Guetta, Calving harris ect. all -30 db in the bass/kick low at span .
Well eras do go through sound profile trends sure. But the point is if you make your bass LOOK like theirs I guarantee you it will sound nothing like theirs!
I do say "reference reference reference" and this is why. You will certainly want to aim for matching your reference but span is like one window on a house that has 50 windows. If 'the truth' is inside that house there's still lots of other 'windows' to look through before you start to get close to the real sound. Timbre, timing, side chaining, pitch, width, depth, etc etc.
But nothing can match your ears for getting closer to the truth.
Physics is also at play, to get a typical dance track to the ballpark of current master loudness It will just naturally end up here as this is the 'natural limit' of that genre.
WOW What an ''Eye'' opener! THANKS!
Class video what’s the prog tune in the background ?
In the 2nd half? it's called Polymetric. (it should be reaching streaming services by now)
if you mean the hidden track that was skrillex / boys noiz Fine Day
I get the feeling I'm going to need to watch that one a few times.
I'm making a follow up to this video, is there anything you still don't understand? I'll try to include it.
Great vid again! I seen another engineer advising to turn off True Peak Limiting on your final master limiter to preserve the punch on the drums. Would you recommend this?
He said a lot of popular tracks taken off beatport would show as clipping as they don’t have TPL on either.
Yeah, well I take it the extra step because I don't use a limiter. If I have to use a limiter though, true peak Is a fine theory using upsampling and interpolation to pre-empt over shoots after conversion, but it always sounds worse to me on transient heavy material. when you see what kind of 'true peaks' digital is capable of (and analog actually that eq cut phenomena is not a digital thing) then it makes sense why true peak sounds worse. Technically 'safer' but doesn't work nicely with music
The more I learn the less I know!
I love having a simple technical solution but there is none! Thanks for teaching me.
Just gonna go by vibes now, trial and error. Listen to my track on studio monitors, headphones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers.
Excellent video Ben, I had been wondering about your red master fader for ages! I was going to ask whether you did a just a -1dbfs cut or something after your 24 bit export but then I noticed you had linked to one of those hip hop masters so I ripped it from SoundCloud, purely for educational reasons of course. It came out as 320k mp3, it's absolutely smashing the meters but it sounds superb! So I think I will try this one my next tune, full bareback is the way to go. Do you go this way for absolutely every track you release? I take it from your other comments you have no truck with all the spurious LUFS requirements of the various streamers.
Bareback lol.
Yeah for all modern edm/ pop/ rock / hip-hop I use this. I will lean on a good limiter occasionally when there is audible distortion on soft sections if I don't have time (ozone's max is pretty transparent and appears to be intelligently clipping anyway)
But by that point all the hard work is done and it barely has to do anything.
For softer or acoustic material like solo piano / orchestral I don't use this method.
That hip-hop mix/master is a good 10 years old now, glad to hear you liked it though 👊
I know some old BBC dubbing mixers and that's what they always used to call mixing without the limiter. But in those days they had to hit PPM 6 in telly, now it's -23 LUFS! pretty tricky to bareback....
But it's so true, don't trust your eyes. When I looked at the waveform of the Sonix track I thought it was going to sound LOUD like that dreadful early 2000s period when everyone was hard limiting. But no, just sounded great.
Game changing knowledge!!!!!
Great stuff Bethelick! This one was quite something to wrap the head around. If I want to do more ear training to be able to steer towards the "no limiter workflow", where would you suggest me to start?
Great question.
Regards getting an ear for clipping, it's most obvious on softer / acoustic sounds, like voice, piano, Rhodes, and bass so you can try play around with free clip and those kinds of sounds (lower the ceiling so you don't have crank everything) and get used to what digital distortion sounds like.
I would also get used to listening for healthy transients , try to identify drums in your library that are 'spikey ' or 'punchy' and have a play with a transient shaper plugin (the free one from kilohearts is great) to get an ear for transients in general, then play with compression and distortion vs clipping to see how it effects them.
If you ever get the privilege to see a live orchestra at any point , take it! That will give you a better appreciation of good dynamics and loudness too 👊
Thank you @@Bthelick , much appreciated 👊🏼
For the last year I have stopped mastering tracks. I transparently clip tracks in the mix to basically produce at a mastered level as I go. Personally I find this is an amazing way to work because you don’t leave any surprises for yourself like you usually get when you come to master a track traditionally. By the time I’ve finished the mix down the track is done and usually hitting between -6/-7 lufs without any distortion. It’s also great for trying out sounds because I find certain sounds just simply can’t be made loud enough to work in modern dance tracks.
Exactly! Glad to hear it's not just me that came to that conclusion. People thought I was nuts when I suggested it in 2014!!
@@Bthelick haha they still think we’re crazy now!
@@Bthelick also there’s an amazing free gain plug-in called blue cat gain. It allows you to link it to other instances of the plug in so they all move when you adjust one. It’s super useful to
have before all of your track clippers so if you’re coming in to hot or not hot enough you can either push the gains up into the clippers or back them off. Also handy for sharing stems or when labels want to master themselves. Saves a lot of time trying to get some headroom on the master.
@@nihftyy ah right you're talking about the clip to zero method? I don't do that. I have no track clippers at all. I find clipping before the clipping makes the final clipping infinitely worse.
@@Bthelick yeah that’s right! Interesting, I’m going to have to try your method too. I usually have a clipper on the master bus but it is never actually doing anything. It’s more of a safety precaution more than anything haha.
Great info once again. I have been using reference songs and creating custom curves in various metering software. Just to get a general ballpark. That said; You mention ear training several times across your videos. What do you find is the best way to upgrade ear training for electronic dance music? Thanks!
Recreating your fave tracks is always a good one.
There's websites like sound gym now or tone gym now too.
If you don't have an ideal monitoring set up then switching up your playback system often is a must. Check on a mono Bluetooth speaker, phone, laptop, headphones as much as possible so the brain can connect the dots and fill in for what's missing on the speakers. Especially in an untreated room situation
Illuminating content! Which Dr. Dre interview are you referring to? Would love to read that!
Good question, it was a good 10 years ago now! I did try to find it before finishing the video, but unfortunately couldn't.
I'll keep you posted if I find it.
@@Bthelick yes, please! Thank you very much!
At the time we were also in touch with and getting help from his then-engineer Focus, so I made have heard it through him
Supreme knowledge
amazing video!
I bet getting Fruity to do it for me is a good answer lol. But for now it suffices, and it's probably more than my current mixing skills deserve anyway.
Seen the techiestuff on clipping before, makes sense. Most of it does. But between things making sense, or me making sense with a thing in my hand... There's bound to be some discrepancy there.
Fascinating deep dive! As a software engineer, I appreciate the details you explained. How does all this factor into playing through an audio system? I imagine speakers have their own threshold and after a certain dB level, they would distort or am I wrong?
Well clipping certainly isn't kind to tweeters that's for sure! But that's usually a sustained clipping problem. That's why I don't advise this lightly to anyone without ear training because I'm only clipping of the inaudible transients which would be bright anyway (or clipped 'intelligently' in a good limiter) so I don't think what I'm going here is that damaging, as I'm keeping an ear on dynamics in general my material can't be worse than some of the squashed to hell stuff I'm hearing out there.
@@Bthelick hi when you say squashed, do you mean over compressed?
@@shaunsadler6769 yes I mean over compressed.
hahaha you are a joker. these videos are gold my man glad youre finally getting some subs
Teacher from GOD!!!
Oof, gonna have to give this one a few spins. Tons of info 🤓
Interesting video. But how you deal with the True peaks that comes out after you export your music to mp3 or 16 bits Wav files? at the end you just export the song into clipping? I hope your response on that. It could be interesting a video on how to get certain levels of loudness like -5 lufs, etc.
Yeah I just export it like that. What I'm hearing from my speakers is occurring after analog interpolation is with true peaks after all.
I double check the mp3 conversion obviously but I rarely find issues except in cases of extremely distorted genres like d'n'b / dubstep, and even then the only issues were on playback through dropbox's internal player only.
LUFS is just another number. Like I said in the video, a 1 dimensional number in a 4 dimensional world. It doesn't take into account frequency, balance or frequency density or transient punch. You don't get loud by aiming for a number please stop thinking that way. Take off all your compressors , clippers, and limiters, learn to listen for true punch and dynamics in the sound sources on selection, and before you know it you'll have achieved "loud" without realizing it.
I just work to a reference , (see my 3 simple steps video) I don't even have to check any loudness numbers before I hit render. It's either in a similar area to the reference or it's not.