J. Anthony Allen, who has a PhD in music and has taught over a million students, walks through his mastering course. You'll learn effect chains, compression settings, rendering for Spotify, and how to land mastering gigs, all in any DAW.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Complete Mastering Master class. I'm so excited to finally have this class live. It's taken me a long time to make it, just really wanted to get it right and I'm really excited to be at the point of being able to release it. If you don't know me, my name is Jay Allen. I have made over 100 classes now. I have over a million students in my online classes all over the Internet. And I'm really excited that so many people have found my classes so useful. I hear from them every day and I love it. I have a PhD in music with a focus on electronic music and a Master's in computer music. I've been producing, writing, composing for 20, 30 some years now. I've worked on some records that have been in the top CMJ charts, I've been acknowledged by the Grammy foundation for some of my educational work and I've produced, mixed and mastered tons and tons of tracks. But the most important thing is I just really love talking about this stuff and being a nerd. So if that sounds like you, you're in the right place. One of my favorite things to do is get up in the morning and read all the questions I have in the classes and answer every single one of them every morning. It's my favorite part of my day. So in this class we are going to deep dive in mastering. Everything you need to know about mastering is in this class we're going to talk about types of mastering, the theory behind mastering, what we're trying to achieve, and of course, how to do it. We're going to get in the weeds and master a track. The track we're going to master is actually a student track that I invited someone to submit. We're going to master that track throughout this class and I'll walk you through every gruesome step of it. I'll talk about all the effects you need, all the tools you need, how to build your chain, the details of what you're looking for and what you need to submit to Spotify and the other streaming services, how to control the three dimensional space that we're working in, adding additional sweeteners, and then of course, rendering to the different file types and what your perfect render settings should be in order for it to be accepted by the streaming services. Lastly, I'll talk about things you can do to make the mastering process easier for yourself in the long run and how to get gigs as a mastering engineer. So without further ado, let's dive in and start doing it. It's important for me to convey that you can do this in just about any software any audio software if you're using Pro Tools Logic FL Studio Reaper the tools we need for master just kind of sticking out See now when I stop doing it here the EQ is still okay so what we've done here is we just really pushed it really hard but that's not what we want to do obviously adjust our ratio and our attack and release times here okay so everything works the same it's slightly different interface and here's our side right so we can set compression smash up against that ceiling it's gonna distort that's what it does so what this one does is has this soft clip function so as long as we don't smash up on there too hard it is gonna let us have a little bit of distortion from doing that but it's actually kind of a nice distortion so it's okay Sa.
