How to do self-made mastering to give a song to friends?

Aretius Klosa

Sep '24 (edited) • Resources

Hi @General Midi

@Filippo Cimatti

@Andy Immerman

@Christoph Eike, some mates here talked to

@General Midi

about taking the black magic out of the mastering process.

Let´s say I want to play a track to friends or upload to soundcloud as a "demo version". So I´m not talking about a decent release on all platforms. In the latter case personally I would try to consult a person who does this every day. But if I want to do it on my own for the purposes mentioned above. I also really want to do this handmade hopefully without third party plugins (I´m on Live 12) to get the basic idea of it.

In a course by John Tejada I learned if your an amateur in this topic like me: Don´t overthink it.

He pointed out some other details but if I had to strip it down to make it uploadable to soundcloud or play it on a DJ set, really fast and rough amateur style: It would go like this:

Take the loudest part of the arrangement.
Take a limiter with a ceiling of -0,3 dB and an RMS meter and adjust the loudness so you get around -6 dB RMS.
Check back your exported wav.-file e.g. at https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/
Repeat step 2 and 3 until you get max. -1dB loudness penalty.

I know there can be a whole lot of more to mastering but if you had to strip it really down the tiniest necessity would that be it?

Unfortunately I´m still a bit irritated though: I checked back two of my files at https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/ that I gave to a mastering engineer a while ago. He returned two versions: One for soundcloud and another one for all of the rest. I´m a bit irritated, because I got more than -1 dB loudness penalty though it has been mastered by a pro (see two attachments here).

If someone could take their time to post your opinion to this reflections one day, I would be very grateful. Maybe this can also be beneficial for some of us in session 5 of the "Circle Of Sound"

@Lex Christopherson

started a few days ago.

I really don´t want to overthink it 🧠😅!

18 comments