Mastering - Posted on 2015-04-13 by Alexander Schug

I find myself mostly interested in future bass music where there is alot of bass morphing and just intense synth modulation with huge percussion.  My biggest interest in music right now is the Jack u album produced and engineered by skrillex and diplo. I listened to it very closely and not only did i notice how well its mixed but the master on it is so bright, wide, super loud but controlled, and its just flawless. I feel that with this kind of music i want to hear a very extreme, wide stereo image sound with proper harmonic excitation and high amplitudes. I enjoy a super wide and loud sound i just cant get that across enough. I read an interview with skrillex where he made it very clear that in the bass music scene Izotope Ozone mastering plugin is used alot and you can actually go into a stereo imaging section and  choose how wide you want each frequency range to be. I actually used it and it truly gives my song exactly what i been looking for when it comes to that stereo image sound. When it comes to mastering a track i feel that Eq, Multiband compressor, Imager, Harmonic exciter, limiter, and sometimes a maximizer are all super important to get that nice bright, wide, and dynamic sound and Ozone mastering plugin has all of that. Im sure there are plenty of other ways to get that sound im looking for but this seems to be very beneficial for the style of music i make and listen to. When i put on the headphones and there is no imaging i can hear the song sitting in the dead center of my head and its thin and boring but when i put the imager on it you can clearly hear the sounds move to the left and right headphone and it just surrounds you. I just absolutely love that kind of master and i will always do that with my songs. I find mastering to be one of the funnest parts because you can either completely change the way a mix sounds or if you do it right you can add a pleasant coating to the mix and bring life to it. I see mastering as almost this magical stage of a song. It truly is based on the engineers preference and maybe for certain genres the engineer will master the song softer or wider or brighter. For an album though you use a master from one song and base all the other songs masters on that first one so the whole album can have a consistant tone to it. It is such a touchy stage of the production that its hard to comment on it in an opinionated way. I would love to work in a mastering house one day and make my money like that. Its really all about using the right tools for certain sounds of a song.