J. Anthony Allen explains how mastering engineers use reference tracks, fully mastered songs that show the desired sonic character. He walks through AB listening, toggling between your mix and the reference to check volume, loudness, and frequency balance, then loading it into the session for real-time comparison throughout mastering.
Hey, everyone. Okay, on to referencing. So first, I apologize for the shift in lighting. I know it's not ideal, but I am recording this video very early in the morning and it's still dark out. The joys of doing this while you have a young child at home. So referencing this is something that's going to play into our process a little bit later. But I want to introduce it now so that we can get used to seeing it and know kind of what we're looking for. And then we'll start to use it. We'll use it right away. I'll show you how to use it right now, but it's going to be an even more powerful tool later. So by referencing, what I'm talking about here is using another completed mastered track to compare your mastering session with. So it's very common to where if you go. If you hire someone to master one of your tracks, if you like, shoot an email out to a mastering studio and you say, I need these five tracks mastered, or even just this one track mastered, they're gonna respond with like a quote, say, you know, we charge this much, blah, blah, blah. And then they may ask you, very, very common that they ask you for a reference track. They. They say, what kind of sound are you going for here? Give me an idea of what you want. Give me a reference. And so you might say, well, my track is in this kind of vein of 21 pilots and specifically this one song. And that doesn't mean that your song sounds like their song necessarily, but maybe it's a similar style and you really like the mix and the master of that other tune. You really like the way it just overall sounds. That's kind of what we're looking for here. So that's a reference track. And what we're going to do is we're going to load that track into our session and we're going to AB it on occasion. So AB means the. This. It means I'm going to solo one and then I'm going to solo the other. I'm going to solo one. Like, this is A, this is B. I'm going to toggle between the two just to see if I'm getting a similar vibe. Right. This is really helpful in the volume space, you know, to know if my volume is in the same ballpark, if I'm pushing as loud as that track pushes, but also just for frequency response, am I bringing forward the same kinds of things that the other track is bringing forward? There's not a ton you can do in that area. In the mastering part. This is. That's more of a mix thing, but there is a good amount you can do with just eqs and making sure that you're helping to clean things up. So let's find a reference track for this tune and load it into our session.
