Mastering: Comparison to industry

So if you've been up to date with my blogs you would have seen my latest project reflection I posted yesterday. Today I just wanted to do a little follow up on that, extending on the mastering side of things and how the product stacks up against commercial work in the industry.

For me, mixing and mastering this project in terms of genre has been a totally new experience; and overall I'm pretty bloody stoked with how the production has turned out especially when listening to and comparing against music I love.

Annie J & Fusion didn't have any reference tracks they wanted us to follow when it came to the mixing stage, instead however the aim was transparency and polish.

There's a lot of great instrumental work going on in this EP, some of those sax solos especially remind me of a superb instrumental track done by Patrick Carney - who is best known as the drummer for The Black Keys.

The theme song for Netflix Original's Bojack Horseman is a fantastic composition, which was in the back of my mind throughout the mixing process of this EP - as I really wanted to get Annie's saxophone solos sounding as killer as the instrumentation on 'Bojack's Theme'.

The track 'Hallelujah' is the one I've chosen as my comparison, skipping to 2:00 will get you to the sax sections:

Before I jump into the attention to detail on instrument characteristics and tonal qualities, let's look at the dynamics and waveforms as a whole:

The top track is Hallelujah, the middle is Bojack's Theme and the bottom is another track off the EP - Wasting Time.

I've chosen to add another song from the EP to compare as well. Hallelujah as a song is much more stripped back in terms of energy and how busy it is overall. Whereas Wasting Time more closely matches the energy in terms of frequency content, whilst there was no difference in mastering settings used between the tracks.

First things to notice is that Hallelujah has a lot of dynamics going on when compared to the reference and other tracks on the EP. The performance was much more dynamic and free-flowing as the genre for this particular track sits more closely to Blues than it does to the upbeat Ska vibes of Wasting Time.

If you have a listen to the playlist in my previous reflection blog, you'll notice that leading elements such as the vocals and saxophone still stand as prominent in Hallelujah as they do other songs; however the performance of the drums and other rhythmic content played a much more subtle and guiding role to allow the vocals and sax to have their spotlight in this instance.

On a mastering front, looking at the waveform dynamics of both Wasting Time and Bojack's Theme; there's a lot of similarity there. The reference track and Wasting Time both have very strong drums in terms of positioning in the mix and how they underpin the rest of the track. When the reference producer is a drummer himself it kind of makes sense; in any case I'm quite proud that our drums stand up pretty well in comparison in terms of tightness and dynamic processing. The main differences are with the mastering itself, in that Stefan and I opted to not work the limiter too hard and got it to a level where it sounded good, and achieved around -3dB of gain reduction at most times. Bojack's Theme on the other hand is a much more compressed production, definitely more suitable for television in regards to dynamics. Utilising Ozone, the reference track read a peak RMS level of -5dB; whereas Wasting Time and Hallelujah lies around -9 to -10.

However, something to take into consideration here is that the reference track is solely instrumental. Stefan and I needed to make sure that Annie's vocals always felt present in the mix as she is the front-woman and composer of her band. Bojack's Theme has a lot more spectral space to make it's instruments feel full, warm and immersive as it has the headroom to do so without having to compete against vocals.

Looking back into Hallelujah's characteristics of its instrumentation against the reference, the saxophone really hits the mark in terms of creating that feel and atmosphere. Whilst the sax in Bojack's Theme has more body and warmth in the lower-mid ranges (this could come down to the comparison being two different types of saxophone, eg. Alto and Baritone), and Hallelujah's has more clarity and space on its own; the effects processing with the mod-delay, plate reverb and a little bit of overdrive to emphasis the raspy edge is almost spot on to the reference.

This was my first time ever touching saxophones in a production; but the chain of processing utilised that just melts into the rest of the mix to create that immersive, bluesy atmosphere really does stand up to industry professionals. I'm super glad that Stefan and I was able to give such an important instrument throughout this EP justice and the creative treatment to let it shine; especially when all of it's beautiful characteristics really pop when the mix has gone through the final mastering stage.

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I hope you found this interesting! Coming up this week will be an update on my Game audio project, there's been a HUGE amount of work done on that and I can't to show you how far its come. Also somewhere in between there will be a blog on soft skills and how I've endeavored to improve myself over the past three months.

See you soon!

- Lachy