Okay, in the last session, we created a single stereo file from all of that hardware, all the tracks the levels, their effects all down to a single file, like a WAV file or an air file. Now you might think we're done well, I mean, we kind of could be that far could be played anywhere. But there was a final process that can make your song kind of final note to me. So what the heck is mastering well, mastering used to be this black art that was done by a relatively few people whose job was to take the fall mixed down usually on a quarter inch master tape and convert that into a long groove that will be played by a disc cutting life. compressing into records you remember those things right records. So basically, here's the physics of that process.

We took vibrations through the air, fed them into microphones. recorded them, mash them all around, and finally had them convert back into a single groove into a record and that stylus on your record plan would move back and forth. In an analogy of the recorded signal. That's what I call it, analog. So, as a mastering engineer, you'd have to know how to finally cut those grooves to make the record loud enough. But if there was too much bass or what was too loud in those grooves would be wider.

Because you only had so much real estate and a little 45 then the song would have to be shorter. That's why those songs back in the Beatle days, no, I had to be around three minutes long. So I sell this as a bit of history and it's kind of interesting to see where we've come from. But the truth of the matter is for all of us right now, is that that's history and its limitations are no longer an issue for us. Add job in mastering today is all real about maximizing the signal and making a wimpy recording. Really a gutsy one.

Check out this mix down of an amateur band on MySpace. It looks fine but look at the average level of that waveform they're not using about 60 beats. Let's look at a commercially sold single by Taylor Swift. Look this level big difference, huh? Let's listen to them. But now if your song is played alongside that somebody right what's the perception gonna be out there on your audience?

Amateur? wimpy and godless, right? We need to pump this guy up. And that is the job of mastering it's really a final step. To do anything creative on a song, before we let go of it, our job is to maximize loudness. equalize the frequency spectrum, tweak the stereo, spread the final, you know across that and also limit the overall level to avoid distortion.

Now, the trouble is that many engineers have gotten involved in a lot of loudness wars where they want to make their final product sound louder than the next guys. That's all well and good. But there's a law of diminishing returns in play here. You can't push the levels up and up and up. without problems, just for fun. Listen to this overly compressed version of a song that we all know.

Loud a lot, but it's absolutely tiring to listen to. In fact, a couple of years ago Metallica released a CD called Death Magnetic that was so loud that many people complained and actually wanted to return the CD and metal fans. complaining is too loud then it's too loud. Just Google Dec magnetic distortion to see some of the comments is very, very interesting. So maximizing the loudness is good, crushing the signal is bad. Let's go ahead and look at the types of mastering effects that are available.

Now first and foremost, compression is the first tool that we'll look at. And we've seen compression before. But mastering compression is a little different. For starters, it has to be stereo, right we're dealing with a stereo file. It's quite often multiband in nature as well. In other words, instead of just a single compressor, squashing the entire signal down.

A multiband compressor has different compression settings for each of those bands of frequencies within your mix. Perhaps, maybe it's really crushing the low end frequencies, maybe squeezing the mids and then barely touching the highs. That gives us a you know a whole lot more control than just a single dumb compressor. Then we can use an EQ which can then cut or boost multiple bands of your mix and kind of evened out that Sonic spectrum. Now it's always advisable to use EQ after compression as compression tends to boost certain frequencies and setting EQ after allows you to kind of make adjustments for that coloration that the compressor or sorry compressor might have added. We can then tweak the stereo spread of the final mix.

Usually in the low end and high end independently. A good rule of thumb is to narrow the low end down into a kind of a mono source and then spread out the highs a little bit across the speakers. We can then add a final limiter to make sure we don't go into the red. You can see why we'd want to put that guy at the end right at the end of the chain. Now some of you might have some mastering effects, like in some of the br recorders. Some of the latest test cam recorders have mastering effects built in.

If so you'll probably see Single mastering effect chain are made up of individual mastering effects. Like what we've just discussed. More often than not, you can just scroll through preset chains of these effects. And listen to which one gives you kind of the best result, you can then go ahead and tweak those individual effects to some degree on these hardware monitor tracks, and that may give you the results that you want. But if there's any time to lean on your computer, then now would be at time. And here's why.

While jumping from a hardware multitrack to a software multitrack is a bit of a challenge. You need to make sure I mean that you have the right interfaces that need to work on a right hard drive speed latency issues to be able to record and playback in real time. The process of mastering is on a computer only requires a pretty basic computer and you simply get your files in and out, buy a little USB, thumb drive or something like that. You'll need to use some nice mastering software but a lot of these packages come with free trials so you can easily download them and try them out. I actually have some suggestions. And here are some of my favorites actually, if you already use a software like Pro Tools Cubase or reason record they have some sort of mastering software built right in.

Now if you want to go the software route, it here are two of my favorites. Ozone four comes with a new region Designed preset manager containing 140 presets designed by professionals giving you a great starting point for your mix or master. The preset manager can also be undocked and viewed as a separate resizable floating window making it easier to see how presets affect ozone settings inside of ozone fourth preset manager our new macro presets macro presets help you to take ozone fours presets one step further by customizing them to fit the particular character of the music you're working with. Each of these macro presets contains one or more macro faders, which are directly linked to control parameters inside one or more of those on the mastering module. Macro faders let you control key ozone parameters in real time directly from the preset manager. While each macro preset comes with many pre designed macro faders right out of the box, by clicking on the Advanced tab, you can edit the current settings or create your own custom configured To add your own macro fader to a preset, simply click on the Add macro fader button.

Give your macro fader a name and use the parameter menu to define what goes on for parameters you wish to control. You can also use the start and end scale values to define the range and behavior of that parameter with respect to your macro fader. Other new features include a new compare function, allowing you to easily do a B comparisons of different settings. The use of folders is now fully supported, letting you categorize your presets. You can drag drop and rearrange presets, create new folders and mix and match settings from different presets all from within the preset manager making ozone for the fastest way to get a great sounding master. These guys are a bit of an investment around two to three, maybe even 500 but he's work so you can make some of that money back.

Imagine that you sprung the two or $300 to these guys and bought one of these mastering suites. And you've got so good that that you could master with the pros. Okay? Guess what? Every high recording musician in the world who was uneasy with mastering doesn't even know where it is, is now your potential customer. What if you could put up a small website and start hanging around some of the forums and charge maybe 30 or 50 bucks a song to master their songs, they could easily transfer this tunes via SoundCloud and you can start gathering your presets for different types of genres and make some decent side cash anyway, downloading a few trials and getting some results is really a great way to get started in mastering.

Here's some of my favorite tips and tricks in terms of mastering. Number one is how is the original mix down. If you have a bunch of problems on your final mix, then sometimes the best thing to do is just go back and fix that mix. If you could is too loud in the mix and mastering your cues, you're probably not going to be able to fix that. Without screwing up a lot of other things that are in that same sound expect. Sometimes it's just better to go back to the drawing board and mix your song down.

Again. Also, if you're making a lot of EQ changes in the mastering EQ is like five DB or more, it's probably a warning signal that you need to probably go back and remix your song. Again. Keep in mind that we can actually use multiband compression as kind of a form of EQ in terms of boosting one part of your spectrum over the others. Now if you're quite if you find that compression is kind of taking the life out of your mix, then perhaps try slowing down the attack and release. Some of those transients, which give you a song live are able to get through before they get squashed out.

And if you're recording dance tracks, you might want to play with the release until it syncs up with the BPM of your song to get that popular kind of just pumping sound You hear at the clubs to kind of pumps with coordinates our rule of thumb and mastering EQ is to keep your cuts narrow, and your Bruce wide the cuts I corrected were problems and your boost at a kind of compensate wider over bands, so you can keep them a little bit wider. I normally give a slight boost around eight to 10 K to compensate for the slight kind of dialing that a compressor can introduce and then add a little error around 14 k on up. Now high pass filter position around 30 hertz will pull out any sub site stuff that's just kind of eating up the power where there's really nothing of value down there.

Don't be afraid of using the presets as well that come with mastering effects. They've been made by some very smart people who know a lot about the subject let's not lie and while you might not use them verbatim, they're normally a good starting point. And a way to kind of reverse engineer a sound fun one you Like, and kind of pull apart and see how they they achieve that sound. And finally, use the best monitors that you can afford. It's an exercise in futility to make all of these Sonic adjustments when the very system you're using on is sonically flawed, does that make sense? So basically, we set up a number of files in a playlist right down here and then when you hit play, we can hit that particular song and if you want to loop around a particular point, then you can set your loop points to the beginning and set this particular part of your song that you're really worth money except those loop points.

So this loop right between those points. Okay, so now let's go through some of these presets. Okay, now, these presets Like you can see the chain of all those effects as you go through these presets as well. Okay, let's go to the next one, which is more of an r&b tune to select that guy. And we can go ahead and play that and let's go through some of these presets. Listen to the bottom man.

This isn't the base. What happened that mix before I didn't even realize how much better could sound with mastering. Let's hear another example ship a second testing to get the ribbon stepped in a bit of a pinch it goes to the back of my neck and back so you can be packing let's go through some mastering examples whenever the graphic on the top of the screen is faded, that means that this is before and after Let's listen to this mix before that's without mastering right bigger round This one there is an example of a mix down Are you happy with mixed everything down? Well, that was pretty cool. You guys believe in mastering now actually, I've been leaving this business card up here on the screen because I really think it's a goldmine, absolutely waiting to happen, it's in your court. So once you have the final track, you'll want to export it and archive it along with all your multitrack masters and mixed up.

Here's a checklist I would do the individual tracks drive individual tracks, also with effects. Maybe your vocal comps are mixed down pre mastered and then a mix down after that Master, as these files can be pretty large and there may be maybe some alternate takes for each tract is probably Not best to do them on a CDL with a 700 mix, but maybe try a DVD out because you're about six times that storage for only a few pennies more. Now, I would keep all the files or sorry, all the files at their highest sample rate and bit depth that you can. But the final file should be diluted down to 16 Bitcoin Core point one k if you're going to be putting out some audio CD, if you're prepared to distribute some iTunes or mp3 player, then you can make it into an mp3 or a C file at normally around 120 or 160 kB s. Now, I can't recommend enough the importance of keeping your files organized, particularly if you ever want to work on those tracks again.

I mean, maybe you're on a cheap multitrack this year, and then you migrate to a high end Pro Tools rig next year you'll be really glad you export those files out of your old multitrack so they can be easily worked on inside your new door with all those bells and whistles. Now you'll usually be used USB export to get your cars out of your hardware, Mowry tracks. If you monitor track allows you to do that, then I would normally have a section on the products DVD that shows you how to do that in those product specific ones. If worst comes to worst, then you can always just record each track out in solo mode into your new record, just make sure that you know exactly when each track starts. You actually even might want to record a beep at the top of each track right across all of them so that you can sync them later on in your computer.

So in terms of getting your music out there, to your potential fans, you have a few options but there's never been more options if you want to sell your CDs. And I would partner with a company that specializes in this area, disc makers and Oasis also great resources for recording musicians who specialize in the duplication and packaging of your file DVD. So I T CD. They're great packages, just a few hundred dollars, then give you that record shop ready CD complete majority paste all that packaging, but there are others that do this kind of work, which you should shop around. But I know that these two that I mentioned just make is no ISIS make a great product they've been doing it, you know, really for a long time. So once you have a file CD that you can then sell them at gigs or anywhere that you have direct access to fares, you'll all know that the internet is really where a lot of people find and buy music.

A great resource to sell your CDs online is at CD, baby and others they keep a stockpile of your CDs and take orders over the internet. They should mount for you and send you a check at the end of the map. Now another resource I use is CreateSpace who was actually owned by Amazon. They go a little differently because they actually keep a disk image of your CD and the artwork and just make plenty of time when someone orders it. There's no imagery that you can also get Amazon mp3 downloads just by signing up with them. So I really like CreateSpace because Once you set them up, you can just forget about them.

We have every DVD, all of our training DVDs within that means that all of our DVDs are on Amazon. And I never had to check stock because they just have our disk images on their computers on their servers. And they just send me a check. At the end of the month, I do nothing they do at all. It's very cool. I guess, obviously, the big player is iTunes and who would have thunk it a few years ago, how many massive record stores have gone away.

It's absolutely amazing. Anyway, there are a lot of ways that you can get your song into iTunes. And I've placed I mean, there are ways you can find out on the internet. My favorite way is using a service called tunecore that Texas music and syndicates into a ton of online music sites, like the ones that you see on this on the screen. But given the amount of music out there, and the level of competition, just getting your music out there. That's the easy part, you then need to find an audience.

And this comes down to good old fashioned networking and marketing. And if you're an artist who just wants to make your own music and you really don't care, you know about popularity or anything like that. Yeah, I'm not going to try to convince you that you need to, you know, be this high pressure salesman in terms of marketing your music, it's, it's just, you know, I just do want to say that if you've made something good, then it would be a shame not to have had that thing hurt. Greetings, internet. This is Ethan diamond. Here with five minutes.

37 Seconds. All right, so here we are on the band camp powered site for 20 minute loop. You can see that it's super clean. They've got their discography, running down the right hand side. Nice big cover art, a custom header graphic, and the tracklisting and liner notes for their latest album. Fans consume the album from here by clicking the play button.

And you can see the yellow bar goes up as the track button. And playback is nice and Zippy. Now let's say I want to get more information about this track called mercury vapor. I click it, and now I'm on its track page where I can play it. Read its liner notes, lyrics, or download it. Ben's decided to make this particular track available at highest quality.

So when I opened download menu, I see all the various formats we offer. There's four flavors mp3, a sea of black and Apple Lossless, you upload a single lossless audio file and then we take care of doing all these conversions for you. Here's another track the 20 minute loop has decided to charge for giving away the 128 k MP Three, but letting fans name their price for the higher quality formats. setting that up is totally easy and bandcamp. And I'll show you how to do that in just a minute. So let's go ahead and start that track downloading.

Alright, well, one thing that drives me crazy is when I go to a band site, download a track and end up with a file and then something like master three final dot mp3 and it has no cover art and no information about who it's by or what album It's from. So we decided to just take care of that for you. As you build out your site on Bandcamp, we keep all the metadata of the downloadable tracks up to date. So check it out, I'll tab over to my desktop where that file was saved, do get info on it. And there's the cover art, track name, album title, artist year. And you can see that all of that just saves into iTunes for me.

Now let's jump back over to the track page and next to download. You can see that I can also share this track with my friends. I can email or I am it post it to Facebook or MySpace, or embed it on my blog. Let's choose my space. And here's a preview of what the player will look like. I just have to copy paste this code, and I'm good to go.

Now everything you've seen so far has been from the fans perspective. So let's take a look at a few things from the band's point of view. We're now on 20 minute Luke's stats page where they can view their plays, something we call buzz, and downloads, and slice all that by year, month, week, and so on. This shows the total number of plays reach of their tracks, and even breaks down those plays by whether they were complete partial or just a skip. Let's start by complete plays. And this helps them figure out which tracks their fans are really into versus say which ones we're just getting plays because they happen to be the first track on the record.

Now let's go over to buzz. This shows all the places out there on the web where people are linking to their music, and it even shows all the places where that music has been embedded. So this gives them an easy way to better engage them. are fans. For example, you can see that the track Winsor McCay is getting some visitors from a site called film cow. So let's just click that link.

And here on some corner of the web that the band has probably never heard of, are people talking about their music, they can now join in that discussion mentioned they've got a new record out, talk about an upcoming show and build their fan base. Now let's take a look at how easy it is to build out your site on Bandcamp. I've just signed up for new account, so I click on the Add a track button. Let's give that track a name. Pop over here and upload some cover art and start the upload of the audio file. This one isn't going to be part of an album so I'll skip that set a release date and make the 128 k mp3 available for free, but charge a set price of $1 for the higher quality versions.

And here's where I'd fill out my credits and lyrics but for the sake of time, let's just click Save. And now we're on the track page. I'll click up here to upload a custom header. And my site is already on its way. All right, one last quick thing. on the track or album page, your fans can view the cover art or pick a visualization.

Now if that word makes you think of seeing laser Floyd at the planetarium lunchrooms, adjust your expectations. Defense can even insert the legalizations into the embedding players, thereby making your music even more viable. We have an EQ as well, but forget this. If you're not already on the site, please check us out The 274 hardworking people of band camp for your time. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time.

Thanks for your your time. So how do you market music? Well, the trouble with music is that it's definitely not a need, like food or water. People aren't dying to the lack of music. It also isn't really searchable like an article or a book. The way that most people learn about music is either hear on the radio or a friend recommends it.

We might not be able to be lucky enough to have our song heard on the radio. So our best bet is probably to be recommended by a friend or associate. So first, get an account on all of this stuff. social networking sites, but I would most definitely start with MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. And once you get on board with these guys, then you can use a number of plugins that allow you to post your music on your profile. The powerful thing about social networking is that they make it very easy for your friends to be Spanish share your songs and content.

And once people start to like your music, then they'll want to keep up with your latest songs. And you can post as a comment, saying that you're working on some new stuff, and it really starts to spread virally around. YouTube is huge for this kind of stuff. The most recent YouTube sensation is Justin Bieber got plucked out of obscurity and this type of story just would have never happened 10 years ago. By the way, I've had over two and a half million views and growing on YouTube and accounts for a lot of our traffic. But here's the one tip to consider.

No one's looking for David wills online I don't know who I am. They are looking for a particular product tutorial and because the title of my video include that they come to me if your music isn't the style of say, Peter Gabriel be on site and place those keywords in your title. The Internet runs on keywords, look for the songs are similar to yours and mimic those keywords, descriptions and tags in your video, maybe place comments and similar music video so you can start attracting viewers to your staff. Well, congratulations, you did it. I can't believe that you you're probably in the top 3% of recording musicians out there in terms of your knowledge now. It really blows my mind that there are stats out there of how many people buy courses like this and never even cracked the case.

You got through the whole thing. So I'm very confident that you have learned the essentials course that will just help you your whole life as a recording musician. So let's go ahead and swear you in. Okay, you ready? I solemnly swear on threat of bodily dismemberment that I will use this knowledge to good and not evil, and will help my fellow musician on any occasion including but not limited to, sucky mixes, incorrect usage of accents, and any other home recording COPPA sworn Swan in this day, you are all duly deputized to go out and really make some some great music. So I mean, where do we go from here?

Let's take all of this knowledge. And first I just want to encourage you to practice what you've learned today. Use this course and companion DVD and just go through the material a few times in the coming days and weeks. Everything I've ever read about retention says that you really have to use what you've learned or you will lose it. So practice, practice, practice. I would also encourage you to get together with like minded musicians.

It's not always And that we get to see each other face to face and why not keep it going with maybe a local home recording Meetup group? In fact, have you seen meetup.com It's a way for people who are interested in the same types of things to regularly meet up at, say, a library or a coffee shop, why not start your local chapter, there's a lot to be said, in terms of making local connections there. Now, having said that, you can always connect with people all over the planet, by our forum at Pro Audio help.com. It's a great place to post any struggles or challenges that you might have been making. Well, maybe we'll link to some of your finished masterpieces that you've been working on. fantastic way to help each other out, and kind of critique each other's work.

Even post a picture of your studio, it's a really cool place for that. So remember to break down your skills by using some backing tracks and record vocals over those karaoke tracks. As I said earlier, there's no better way to concentrate on the style and mix. The lead vocal. Remember that also a word that perfection is out there. I've read many years ago, the best way to become prolific anything is to write the white wastebasket.

In other words, don't wait till you get a perfect before you produce anything, create a bunch of stuff. And maybe make some goals of maybe writing and recording a song a month was my that no one needs to hear them but just do it for the exercise of hurting your craft. And finally, teach others the best way to retain what you've learned is by teaching it to others, and catch up with some fellow musicians who are maybe having a hard time doing the stuff that we just learned. It'll help them and dramatically help you retain what you've learned here in this course. And when I say it might even make a handy little second income from the day I made her her business card that said audio consultant on it was the day I started making a living out of it, you can easily make 50 bucks or 100 bucks an hour going out teaching musicians how to use this stuff.

This really might be the start of a like a little side business there. So, in closing, thank you so much for your time. I hope you've had a really great time learning this stuff. And if you're so inclined to record a testimonial, encouraging others to check out this course please leave them on our website. So thanks for your time. My name is David Wolf and Ciao for now.