If you’re like most producers, chances are that the last element of your mastering chain is a limiter with a ceiling at 0dB. Unfortunately even though in our DAW such a track isn’t clipping, it can distort after conversion to analog audio. Today I’m going to show you how to avoid this problem caused by a phenomenon called ISP (inter-sample peaks) I used to master my tracks with the peak volume at 0dB, which was the ceiling of my limiter. „Why should I give my track more headroom if audio distorts only over 0dB?” - I thought. One time I...

For the last few decades, the music industry has been fighting on producing loud records, as they assumed that people prefer loud music over music with more dynamics. Not only today’s research proves that to be false, but also a new tool is being implemented by streaming services, which makes the loudness war pointless. The loudness war has led mastering engineers to use heavy compression and limiting on albums to the extreme. Metallica’s 2009 album „Death Magnetic” is the loudest album in music history, and in my opinion it sounds terrible. As a response to the loudness war, a mastering...

There’s a lot of misconceptions about mastering. Some confuse it with the mixing process, some treat it as a „magic spell” to make your track shine. Today we’re going to bust the myths about mastering, so that you can apply it well. Think of mixing and mastering like this: Mixing is getting individual parts or instruments to work as a song. In the mixing process we are processing individual tracks in order for all the tracks to sound good together. Think of it like building a car. All the parts of the car need to be assembled properly in order...

Tutorial: Subscribe to Production Music Live on YouTube What we used: Ableton Live 9 Standard In this video we are walking you through a complete Mastering Chain for a Future Bass track in the style of Virtual Riot, Odesza, Flume, etc - only using Ableton Live 9 Standard stock effect elements. You can grab the an Ableton Project file including this chain from our "Free" section.  Mastering Chain - Free Download   More Info: Grab a free Ableton-only Mastering Chain from our Freebie section 5h+ Online MASTERING COURSE (from start to finish)    keywords: Mastering Future Bass, Mastering a Future Bass Track, Mastering chain...

Definition of Dithering Dithering or to dither means adding noise to the audio signal. Noise is being added on purpose to trade a little bit of low-level hiss for a great deal of distortion. The distortion is first caused by using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 16 bits) to represent our sample points as accurate as possible (in the analogue world, there are infinite or continuous sample points available, whereas they are finite (discrete) in the digital world).  So, in our DAW for example, "dithering is done by adding noise of a level less than the least-significant bit before...

In this video, Deadmau5 and Steve Duda (developer of Xfer Serum) go through mastering and routing using Ableton Live 9 and Serum among other tools in Deadmau5's freshly finished new mint studio environment.         Check out our Future Bass presets for SERUM: 75+ hand crafted amazingly rich sounding future bass presets, see details:

If you're new to music production / Ableton Live 9, we've put together a little course that might help you starting out - watch this youtube playlist:         Additionally, if you're looking for a profound in-depth course on how to produce a track in Ableton from "Start to Finish" - we've put together an extended 21-studio session paid class with Francois. You can enroll right here:     

The guys of zeitgeistmastering.com mentioned some helpful tips on how to prepare your tracks for mastering in a youtube video. We are quickly summing them up: Here are 8 essential tips: 1. Make sure that there are no effects on your master channel when you bounce (export) In case you have essential effects on your master, send 2 versions: fx mix, giving your engineer an idea of the effect no fx mix, giving him the opportunity to apply his effects however: don't leave any limiter in place 2. Make sure the level of your track peaks somewhere between -6 and -3dB  3. If the...