Studio Sessions with Chase Miles

ALL ABOUT NEW GEAR, PLUG-INS, VST’S AND MANY MORE!

HOW DO I KNOW THAT MY MASTERING IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR STREAMING PLATFORMS?

The first problem that has every engineer is that you are never satisfied with your productions. You can work on it forever. And when do you say this is good enough? Quality and taste are a part of this journey. You need to have good speakers and acoustics to get it right. You can not hear what you can’t hear, so it’s very important to hear everything in a good way. Your ears are the biggest instruments but also the weakest. If you listen to long to a mix you need to take a walk or something to let your ears rest. It’s also good to do your emails and other stuff and let the track play in the background. If it’s missing something you are going to hear it when you are not concentrating on it. Also a good way is listening to the track in your car, because a lot of people will listen to it in the car. If everything is there and it sound great, don’t touch it anymore!

Loudness
We must respect the streaming levels for loudness if we look to the streaming platforms. Globally there are two different ways to measure your loudness. You have the LUFS loudness. For this one i always use the Multimeter in Logic Pro X. But there is also a good website to check out what is happening with your track called Loudness Penalty. You can drag your track in the website and after that you get the result. And what these numbers mean is how much decibels your track will be lower on the streaming platforms. Every genre needs his own interpretation. Like EDM or Hip Hop have a harder loudness than other genres. Another important thing is the EQ balance, so the high, mids and low frequencies and how i measure these is to using a spectrum analyser. It’s very important that your mix is sound as good as possible and that you like the way how the mix sounds. When your mix sounds great it’s much easier to get your master sounds awesome.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK?
DOES EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE ON THE SAME LEVEL FOR EVERY PLATFORM?
THIS DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU WILL SEE ALSO ON LOUDNESS PENALTY.
MOST OF THE TIME IT WILL BE AT THE SAME LEVEL.