How to NOT Master Your Tracks Pt2



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I am a professional musician, songwriter and sample creator who brings the world of music theory into electronic music. I help and collaborate with producers, djs, musicians, rappers, singers and songwriters creating new music and I also create instrumentals & sample packs of musical licks, guitar stems and melodies

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45 thoughts on “How to NOT Master Your Tracks Pt2”

  1. This principle is so straight forward
    Trusting your ears with good headphones

    I have never thought of Ignoring the red in the digital realm

    Now that you’ve explained it, it seems obvious lol

    Gonna give this a go 🙏❤️

    Reply
  2. Only being able to use headphones due to my living arrangements a little while back I started producing with a master chain active from early on in a project to get some gain into my cans,

    I can't get a feel for EDM unless there's some headrattling going on…

    And since I've adopted this technique it's not only making things fit together much better from the get go but also saving me all the rejigging later on once the format of a track is finished and it's time to finalise.

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  3. I usually start the creative process with hardware, so I'm not referencing at this stage. The big problem is sometimes I end up with something that is interesting, but it can be something I can't quite place genre wise and just have nothing to reference against when going into the DAW. Anyone else run into this, how would you approach this situation?

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  4. Over the weekend, I was thinking of asking if you could explain your mastering method in detail, then, lo & behold, your next video is exactly that! 😲

    I love playing around with sounds and the whole process of making music, but the mastering of it has always felt like some sort of dark art that I couldn't possibly understand, which fills me with dread every time I get towards the end of the track. Your method seems to intuitively make sense thanks to your detailed explanation, and now I'm actually looking forward to testing this out!

    You genuinely are one of the best (if not the best) teachers I've ever had the fortune to listen to! 👏

    Reply
  5. Your timing is too perfect. Just this week I came to a very similar conclusion (stripping out all compressors and rebalancing starting on the lows). "Energy pool" is the best description. Just like in physics, no additional energy is created. The energy pool is all you have to work with.

    Reply
  6. Should I follow the general guidelines like leaving your kick to -6db or how does this work? Because without pushing the limiter on the master track then how is my kick ever going to be louder than -6db? Like let's say the song has a DJ intro and only the kick is playing, then it's not going to be very loud during that?

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  7. This video should be titled “All I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more”. Ben is like Morpheus from the Matrix, in music production! Forget the RED 🤟🤟🤟🤟🤟🤟btw, Yo Ben! 😃🤜🤛

    Reply
  8. I was applying compression to my arp today, I felt like logically I need it because my arp goes low and high, but it didn't make a world of difference, without compression it still sounded amazing so I wasn't sure if it actually did need it

    Reply
  9. I also watched a different look on this from a beat producer, he said when finishing a beat you shouldn't lose your head over mixing because the rapper will want the stems anyways and his voice will be put into the mix so all you need to do for a beat is basic leveling and eq, maybe some reverb depends ofc, make sure it hits hard, but only in a way to make people think the beat "goes hard", the goal shouldn't be a grammy winning mix, just a mix that presents what your mix is trying to say

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  10. Hello, and wait wait WAIT XD. I feel confused , should I start that process putting my kick at 0 db on the master channel? or take the starting point from the reference and Span? Please help. (Your tutorials are GREAT! 🔥

    Reply
  11. What's your thoughts on someone making music in a "bass music" genre without an actual focus on bass? Do you think it makes sense for bass itself to be more of an afterthought if being made by someone whose ears have always had shitty bass response (with the occasional rare day where I can hear bass properly) and as such never learned to focus on bass itself? I've been practicing to be an EDM musician but with more of a focus on the harmonic arrangement and its groove, with low end as my last concern.

    Percussion and low end are always worried about AFTER I think about the melodic and harmonic content I'm working with. And I think playing to my strengths here probably(?) makes more sense than to try to force my brain to think about kick and sub choice before even getting to the meat of the arrangement.

    I generally work with entirely placeholder percussion until I'm practically done, lmao.

    Reply
  12. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mix and master for a living, and this is fantastic information. The limiting factor (pun not intended) audio engineering is ear training and good sounding rooms. And modern budget full range speaker and stock plugins from any DAW are more than sufficient to make chart topping mixes from production to master. Good sound selection, arrangement, simple tools and taste make good mixes, all the hardware and shiny plugins in the world will not make any difference AT ALL!

    Reply
  13. Step 5: "Hopefully don't get stuck or bored after that loop has been on rotation for 8000 times"

    Yea I never did get past this step. My tolerance for listening to the same thing over and over is way too low and it kinda sucks.

    Reply
  14. a master limiter solves all the problems then you don't even have to think about the sub bass interacting, just choose a better sounding (or real) bass and never think about it. Just make it sound great as you work out the track. What I think about is that if it was a live improvised performance, then there would be no way to duck the bass, or do fancy tricks. So if you can make it sound like it came together on a live stage, you can make it sound amazing. Just think about those specific sounds melding in real life and make it sound like that . . boom instant good!

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  15. Once again you've proved why your video's are the best on Youtube…….it's always a " I can't click on it fast enough moment " when i see a new video drop from Bthelick, top tutorial as per usual…… 🔥🔥

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  16. If you want to be a good dance producer, you should watch this video and then watch it again and again until you can recite every word from memory. You could also print it out and put it somewhere that will be seen by you often. I normally put printed stuff like this on the back of the bathroom door so I have something to read while on the throne. I learnt the circle of fifths this way. See you in the morning sir. Thank you.

    Reply
  17. Another great video! Just to note, i think the -14 lufs measurment for Spotify has more to do with their "Auto levelling" option in the app settings on some, but not all, platforms (my built in car app doesn't have it for example),in my tetsting this is usually on by default.

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  18. Interesting Vid will probably save me a lot of head scratching & chasing my tail, I have a mix I thought was as good as I could get it at the present time, and to save me working with so many clips I decided to export each group as a track & mix them, and to include the full mix print for some parallel power(still yet to discover if I get any cancellation happening or other issues) & so I can simplify the project & apply some other FX to the group prints, and introduce new synth parts as I've freed up some cpu/processing, for live dub type alterations, but I've been exporting 24bit no dither perhaps I need to do it again. I also wonder if I am creating more issues doing it this way, as for example some tracks/groups duck other tracks, but I'm soloing the groups and exporting, so they may not be being ducked or sidechained as I had them, so I'm in the process of checking those issues out and perhaps re doing the sidechaining on the new track prints. (RU Dan.W? you sound the same)

    Reply
  19. This process reminds me of a time about 7 years, a friend asked me why I like using LANDR. I told them when I upload a track, and set it to the highest loudness option, the result shows me what needs fixing in my track ie I can hear it distorting. I’ve realised now I could have been doing this in my own DAW all along! Thanks Bthelick as always, your content is incredibly helpful!

    Reply
  20. you mentioned at the end "turn off compressors/limiters, don't squish your non transient sounds".
    what about sends? mainly the drum bus and main synths bus ? I've been using mild compressors and soft clipping on drums to glue the sounds together, and I like how it sounds?
    what do you use on your buses? do you really not use any volume attenuation there and just fix everything with proper mixdown?

    Reply
  21. Dear Mr BeTheLick, love your channel real knowledge here. Like you I have been teaching myself this over the past 10 years and sometimes still don't know what im doing wrong but like you say shit in equals shit out and its usually a wrong key , also input equals output . Being a dumb fl user I changed the sound driver instead of simply removing that hard clip tick . I thought I broke something 😅but I had done it before made those broken computer noises 😂watched the end of your video again and did the correct thing . So thanks for everything I didn't know that was the hidden limiter, I always thought people were talking about the fl limiter, so I used to remove that or not use it in empty projects. When I've made i ow you Douwe Egberts coffee jar . That stuff is brain massaging, haven't had that in awhile myself

    Reply
  22. Also I have an excuse I watched the video abit late at night 😅secondly holy moly I removed that limiter tick and my groove improves in the low end 🙃 there where random spikes even after cutting bellow 42hz , maybe something else changed idfk but the spikes are gone . It's that limiter was causing another phase shift that I only see on the spectograph ? Just hardcliping at 0db for fl studio phase shifts ?

    Reply

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