I didn't explain the reason EQ cuts make tracks 'louder', because I intended to link to the video already done by #DanWorall, but now I can't find it! its the one where he rebuilds a saw wave by stacking sine waves, does anyone remember which video that was? EDIT: I just made my own in the end : ua-cam.com/video/Y1Y2-tpMAek/v-deo.html
Haha thanks that's because I'm trying to do my best impression of him! He's got far better diction though. I'm from the north where it's common to heavily abbreviate words or not annunciate which is terrible for the intelligibility of international audiences so I have to make a real effort to speak clearly! Whereas it sounds like it's natural for Dan, I'm convinced he's from further south in the country.
@Bthelick Since I am not a native English speaker, I have never had any problems with this while watching your videos. So I think you did a good job! And thanks for the great content!💪💪💪🔥
This is hands down one of the best technical dives into audio engineering and DSP with direct applications for music production / mixing / mastering. Thank you!
THANK YOU. I had to learn to stop using hi passing in the master the hard way. So many established UA-cam edm music educators still show that, even some with over 100k subscribers. I have reached out to them couple times, they ignored me. We shouldn't hi pass/low pass on the master because we see a UA-camr declaring it's part of a pro-level mastering chain.
I am so happy when one of your videos pop up, just helps me get through my 9-5 and I also learn so much that I can apply them for my music afterwards. Thank you so much!❤️
Explaining “difficult” music theory while the related music is playing is the USP what makes this channel good and very understandable. It is easy to forget alot of info when someone is ranting for 10mins in a facecam and giving 2 mins of examples, … usually even after the short plug/sponsor announcement. This workflow of explaining with the music is very easy to follow along. Big up bthlick
It took a while before I realized “clipping” doesn’t always negatively impact audio quality, I just never fully understood why. Some of that went over my head, but was still good information. There’s so many things that can impact “loudness,” It’s overwhelming. I try not to obsess over it and be patient with myself though. I appreciate your videos btw. You’re really good at breaking things down. It can get confusing with all the information out there.
Sensational video. As a self taught producer I have always been confused by the need to master - why not just get it right in the mix? Thank you and keep the videos coming!
You're right, it doesn't make sense, not today anyway. Mastering was originally for other necessary reasons. Putting the album in order, making sure it fit onto radio, tape and vinyl without distortion or groove skipping, meeting certain broadcast standards. These days it still has value from the lending of a 2nd pair of ears alone, especially if those ears are more experienced and in a good room, but it's no longer technically necessary.
I instinctively been doing the same since the 80s, just with the analog hardware. Carefully choosing and shaping all your initial sounds, arrangement and the mix, then driving the outboard gear and the recording console hot and using all the headroom and then some is a thing.
I'm currently studying a multimedia audio production course and this video needs to be taught to students! Keep coming back to it now and again and it's one of the most important and information filled videos I've watched regarding production since I started this journey. You sir are a legend!
I'm conflicted by the advice too, since the loudness illusions appear to suggest that my ears (indeed most human ears) cannot be trusted. If track B sounds louder than track A to my ears, but the LUFs meter says the opposite is the case, I find it very hard to "trust my ears", because my ears are easily fooled. Since my eyes are also easily fooled, I think I'll try mixing with my nose! ;)
In all my years of learning/producing thus far (7.5 ish - self-taught through UA-cam etc.), I have to say that you are by far the most enjoyable and fluid engineer to share your knowledge. I came across your one of your other videos randomly when I was looking for something to watch while eating (as we do haha) and I loved it. While I know/am familiar with a lot of what you have posted so far, I have watched a few of your videos now and am happy to say that I have learned something new with each one. The way you explain and share things is incredible. So clear and easily digestible. 10/10 recommend to anyone wanting to learn/learn more about music production/sound engineering. Bthelick knows his stuff. You're a legend my guy.
Thanks for compliments macca! Great to hear even those with years at it are finding value 👊 it just goes to show we're always learning I'm sure I can learn much from you too 🙏
Lots of good information here! The first half of your video is something I thought about yesterday and came to the conclusion that having everything sit in the mix and blend nicely is more important that what the meter says. Trust your ears! Mr. Bill has also touched on your last part before on some UA-cam videos. Great video as always! Thank you!
It's really refreshing to see videos like this. We're forever bombarded with so many different ideals on how to produce. Not to mention the plugins we should be using. So often I've been guilty of adjusting tracks based on the headroom/ the dreaded red, it's ironic that it sounded so much better prior to all my tweaking. Square peg round hole. I'll try trusting my ears now. Love you channel. Keep it up!
What u say just makes sense for electronic music Production and mixing. A lot of advice is from a live recording view point and some live instruments. I've totally changed my buss set up based on what u do a it works. I was compressing the hell out of my music,now took it all out,and work on sound design,and EQ especially low shelf on stuff to clear the frequency range and things sound much better now. I'd see red but i couldn't hear distortion,now i know why.👍🏿👍🏿✌🏿
Eeee that were a grand video lad. On the subject of not hearing things in actual music: I kept getting told by a couple of audiophile friends that tube/valve amps sound better because they introduce even harmonic distortion. So I used some of my VST plugins to introduce this harmomic (supposedly "euphonic") distortion. I personally didn't find it actually improved anything, to my ears. But what I did discover was that I, nor anyone else I did the experiment on, could hear ANY distortion until the distortion knobs on various plugins were over 50%. When you think of the money spent on hifi to avoid insanely low THD numbers, it really opened my eyes and ears.
this answered some questions i was having about mystery master clipping on a track where i was confident all the individual elements were solidly not clipping, thanks man!
I love how you explain this stuff! I did all the maths and technical stuff shown here on audio uni and I remember how hearing that technical info felt super empowering. It's super fun to watch the topic being slowly introduced and explained, it's like re-living that aha moment! Just here's my constructive criticism....... I would still recommend against mixing near 0 dB FS even if you intend in getting a perfect mix that don't need no mastering. First reason being that if you work near zero and somethings too loud by accident you can blow out your own ears 😂 Also, if your monitoring situation is not 100% proper you could run so hot out of Ableton that in an accidental burst of noise you could damage your speakers. Another issue with mixing near zero is the fact that when you upload your track after mixing / mastering it will be converted into a lossy format like MP3, and Spotify actually streams those lossy files. On the conversion process the peaks actually change, intersample peaks that used to last for 3 or 4 samples will then be exaggerated into noticeable distortion. That's why mastering engineers that know their shit will try to leave 1 dB FS of headroom even if the mix is squared off. Coz you want the master to be clipped and limited like the artist intended, not like spotify's mp3 encoding wanted. A good alternative would be to put a clipper plugin at (let's say) -10 dB FS and mix into it as if that was the ceiling. This is to "emulate" that Spotify will turn down your master to be around -14 LUFS. That would make your master sound exactly like a turned down by Spotify type of deal. That will mean you can clip intentionally into the ceiling instead of letting mp3 encoding do extra clipping. But at that point you might as well mix at any other level other than at zero ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's the issue with missing at zero, those pesky intersample peaks, but the thing is you can avoid them by mixing with any amount of headroom.
Good point, My interface obviously isn't running zero to my monitors / monitor station. I forget people might not know that. Regarding lossy conversion yes I'm aware of what happens post conversion. I used to check that more often, but It's not been an issue for over 8 years now though so I've stopped checking as often. That's why I don't recommend it lightly. I'm only clipping mostly inaudible transients and those take ear training to appreciate. I had one client try to do their own mix once when I was ill and couldn't make the deadline, it was a distorted mess! They just couldn't hear it and thought going onto the red was fine in general after seeing me work 🤦. They released on time at least! 🤣
@@Bthelick yeah of course no one should ever run at max volume from the interface into your speakers, and it's supper cool to see this level of good advice on UA-cam. Just the audiophile in me obsessing over distorting at Spotify 😅 Plus if you stopped checking it's provably because you can actually hear the subtle distortion as it creeps in and thus you end up with a loud but clean song, stamp of great engineering 😎👍
I've been reading about the Clip to Zero strategy lately and some people do that by putting clippers on every track or group bus and let it get as high as -9 LUFS and even 0.1 true peak. Don't know the tech side of it but I guess it works for them.
Would love a video on how to do Tom basslines and more of that square tough style with the 1/8 hi-hat pattern I feel like that’s the foundation for every track that I’m really into.
Great video, but you forgot a very important explanation. The reason why the signal went into red after cutting some lows and highs with EQ is because of phase rotation, which modifies the waveform. To see how an EQ or multiband compressor changes your waveform you need to use an Oscilloscope. EQs work by copying the signal and rotating the phase of some frequencies then adding it back to the original signal in order to add or reduce volume of some frequencies. So if you have a waveform that does not clip or activate a limiter, by adding some EQ to it you change that waveform and it might end up clipping or activating the limiter.
well, it's more accurate to say that all minimum phase filters create post-ringing artefacts through phase rotation, with high pass filters being among the worst offenders
Correct, but that's not what i'm talking about in my above post... post-ringing wasn't the cause of the waveform going into red @@UnfortunatelyTheHunger
Yes correct. It's the result of constructive harmonic interference via phase rotations caused through the pass band! I didn't explain that because I intended to link the great video Dan Worall did on that, but then I couldn't find the video! Can you remember which it is? He reconstructed a saw wave on it with sines and showed the phase interference in a very clear way.
Great vid, I always struggle with volume, usually moving down track volumes not to clip in master and the final result is just very low volume even though master shows ~0 level, now I understand I should better trust my ears first, thanks!
The more I learn the less I know! I love having a simple technical solution but there is none! Thanks for teaching me. Just gonna go by vibes now, trial and error. Listen to my track on studio monitors, headphones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers.
At the start of the video I said to myself “well I usually use my ears rather than having set numbers to aim for” glad to see by the end of it I felt relieved I might actually know what I’m doing
Fuck yeah. Love your videos man. Thanks for keeping this going. Big success is coming for you on this channel- you got me into making music which i will always appreciate.
Coming from an intermediate, the only piece of advice I'll give you to remember for the next couple of years is enjoy the journey! Its not all about the destination, take pride in the progress you make and the things you learn 😊
Thanks again for making this video. I understand a teeny bit more about clipping the master ("it is a visual sign that 3 consecutive samples are in the red, which is more accurate than a limiter, but ultimately trust your ears"). What I still want to understand is how far you can push the clipping, or more accurately why you can push it so far with certain tracks and not others (even when trusting your ears). I appreciate the answer is still 'trust your ears'. Also, I was experimenting earlier this week with bouncing a clipping track to a new track (via direct routing not resampling via the master), and it also clips to zero which is weird given tracks are 32 bit floating (just another anomaly I discovered that reveals my lack of full understanding). Buying you a coffee, now ☕ ❤
In a nutshell keep it dynamic. Don't use compression, limiting or saturation on dynamic elements so the only things that clip are transients too fast to detect aurally
@@Bthelick Awesome! I haven't been using limiters lately. And I have been using compressors less and less (Pancz and Glip have been getting more use in their place). I'm getting happier with my mixes (cleaner and louder) mixing into the master like this. And I now have more of an understanding, 'why'... But upon recent self-reflection, I need to focus more on the song writing / creative side (as per your recent video referencing Kush) because I have noticed I am spending more time on mixing than creating... (ie it's important and I love learning about it, but I need to prioritise creativity, arrangement, and referencing so as to match the mixing skills I have recently developed...).
reminds me of a lecture from electronic engineering course days. Police force was always blowing out speakers, they tried better speakers but no change ... suggestion was to increase power of the amplifier driving. Turned out the original amp was clipping and producing square waves with lots of energy which would blow the speakers. Bigger amp ... original sine wave ... no blown speakers.
Minor quibble and some additional info if anyone wants to investigate further: The two data types are floating point and integer. Fixed point does exist, but it’s not common and not really used in DAWs. Thanks for another solid video.
Ah right thanks for the clarification it's been a while since I learned this and have used them interchangeably for a while, I forgot they were separated. Fixed point JUST sounded much better as laymen's term to explain the concept than integer so I went that way. So integer is wholly integer based? effectively 'no point'? All bits used as non-decimal?
@@Bthelick I think the video got the main ideas across really well, especially the critical parts, like clipping detection and that the amount of headroom provided by floats is astronomical. And yep, the integer type can only represent integers. There can be a bit for the sign (signed integers). That means the range for 16 bit signed integers is −32,768 to 32,767, and the values can never be fractional.
First off, thank you so much for these videos. I am blown away by the depth and quality of these tutorials. You're the best. Secondly, I want to watch that Dr. Dre interview! Is it still available somewhere?
I did try to find it so I could link in the description but can't sorry I distinctly remember him talking about how he would swap out snare samples and then resend the track to the mastering engineer to see which survived best. And the clipping they were describing was obviously not a DAW but clipping the converters , which is technically different but I ran with the concept anyway. I'll let you know if I find it.
If you aren’t redlining you aren’t headlining has been my new favorite saying lol. I used to fear it while DJ’ing too but realized it’s not the end of the world and on occasions necessary depending on the setting.
Hmmm never thought of the conversion from internal 32bit float to external 24bit for the dac, pretty logical after your explanation. I am by the way surprised the audio engines are still 32bit as we left the 32bit era long time ago in other software. Checked the specs of my own dac, seems to have a range of -129 to +120, a lot less than the internal fader channels 😂 Really enjoyed the experiments, cool to see how the brain reacts on stuff like this. As usual, many tanks!
I think it's because largely any errors at the least significant bit of 32 float are so far down the resulting noise is still way below the self noise of any analog system at the output. so any further precision is just a waste of CPU.
That you can't clip channels other than the master is actually nothing new to me. I still remember when it was different and they introduced that feature. However, you mentioning this made me think about what that implies. As you explained, it's not really about only the master can clip. It's about that it can only clip when it's sent out to the audio interface or rendered to a fixed point file. Okay, imagine this scenario. You made your mix, you mastered everything (because you still do that because you're not a mixing god), you rendered that master to a fixed point file and everything sounds fine. Then you ask someone if he wants to make a remix. So you tell Ableton to render out all the individual channels to a separate file. You don't change the settings of the file format, since it worked fine last time you rendered. You send him the stems of your song that sounded completely nice when you listened to the master and get a message back like "Hey, sorry. I can't use this. It's clipping like hell." The individual channels, those nice sounding channels that would have been clipping like hell if they could, suddenly became the channels that are rendered out to a fixed point file.
Yeah I occasionally send out for stem mastering. I make groups and put a -10db utility on each. If you are collabing and need to swap parts maybe it's too much hassle yeah. I just swap Ableton sessions with my collabs so we don't have to mix anything down.
Love this and definitely learned a lot. Would love to know why the band pass filter you added to the master track caused the clipping to happen? Even with all this tech my brain can't tech it out haha
This is perfectly competent. What do you think about doing the clipping at a higher sample rate to avoid aliasing, and then downsampling at the mixdown?
It's a thought sure, I've never deemed it necessary though. Given that I'm only clipping mostly inaudible micro transients I don't think it would make an appreciable difference. If I had ever experienced a rough sounding master hindering the performance of a song then I would be a lot more precious over the sound quality in general and wouldn't be clipping at all. Luckily in the real world that's not the case!
unreached depth and excellence! thank you sir! I have a question though. Do you render those tracks finally just like that or do you throw a clipper on the master to shave off anything above 0dB?
@@Bthelick awesome 👍 that means also I actually understand now completely what you were elaborating on in this brilliant piece of educational video (and art!)! Thank you so much!
Thanks again for this great video! Can you please explain the process and theory on how to improve a mix in such a way that the limiter becomes unnecessary because the clipping gets inaudible? You mentioned it when tlaking about mastering the hiphop album and the quotes from Dr Dre and Bob Katz. Cheers! Is it all about getting the transients "thin and short" plus the body, or sustain of the sounds so leveled out that none of them are being affected by the clipping?
That's basically it yeah. The key is really sub frequency management as that's where all the headroom is. In my video on how I process bass I show splitting the bass into sub and other bass so I have full control over their side chains. Vocals can be tough , I sometimes add a limiter on vocal heavy tracks in the offending sections but that's only a last resort. Getting that low end managed well should govern the head room for the rest of the track
Sounds similar, but not the same at all. Pre clipping channels is far far worse imo. Much more audible and kinda defies the point of that I acheive here. Clipping to save clipping just creates more clipping ironically!
@@PatAllers Did not dig into it that deep, I guess it's a mix of different strategies, they use clippers on all tracks I believe, while the TechnoBrit guy here just no clipper 🙂
19:53 Speed it up and you’ll have a Gabber track 😅 You traversed this minefield of a subject with the grace of a Metropolitan Opera dancer. There’s nothing like having a debate with an audiophile engineer that owns $20,000+ dollar amplifiers, converters, and cable risers.
You just dropped some serious knowledge! Can you make a video on how analog summing doesn’t make a difference? Had a few industry professionals tell me it was a “game changer” for them. Coffees coming thru! ☕️☕️☕️
Thankyou 👊. Analog Summing? That video has already been made! ua-cam.com/video/wVp4syrFkE0/v-deo.htmlsi=3HJ3B7UE8poo55k3 I don't find anything to argue with here
Excellent video Ben, I had been wondering about your red master fader for ages! I was going to ask whether you did a just a -1dbfs cut or something after your 24 bit export but then I noticed you had linked to one of those hip hop masters so I ripped it from SoundCloud, purely for educational reasons of course. It came out as 320k mp3, it's absolutely smashing the meters but it sounds superb! So I think I will try this one my next tune, full bareback is the way to go. Do you go this way for absolutely every track you release? I take it from your other comments you have no truck with all the spurious LUFS requirements of the various streamers.
Bareback lol. Yeah for all modern edm/ pop/ rock / hip-hop I use this. I will lean on a good limiter occasionally when there is audible distortion on soft sections if I don't have time (ozone's max is pretty transparent and appears to be intelligently clipping anyway) But by that point all the hard work is done and it barely has to do anything. For softer or acoustic material like solo piano / orchestral I don't use this method. That hip-hop mix/master is a good 10 years old now, glad to hear you liked it though 👊
I know some old BBC dubbing mixers and that's what they always used to call mixing without the limiter. But in those days they had to hit PPM 6 in telly, now it's -23 LUFS! pretty tricky to bareback.... But it's so true, don't trust your eyes. When I looked at the waveform of the Sonix track I thought it was going to sound LOUD like that dreadful early 2000s period when everyone was hard limiting. But no, just sounded great.
trying to guess the edm track! -6 is loud af, so that might make it bass house, and it looks like it might have an offbeat bassline (that seccond peak frequency seems to be hitting opposite to the kick (asuming the lowest peak is the kick). the frequency tilt seems to be pretty dark tho (shifted to the lows, so i by that i would guess more tech house or uk bass.... IN THE END, no idea of the track, the first song that came to mind was fisher- losing it, even though it meetsnon eof those criteriea (this was made before finishing the vid! curious af on what the track is) (the offbeat bass is rare in hosue so it could also be slow eurodance or techno/psyteck whatever housepeed genres are crutching on the 1/8 offbeat bassline)
Great vid again! I seen another engineer advising to turn off True Peak Limiting on your final master limiter to preserve the punch on the drums. Would you recommend this? He said a lot of popular tracks taken off beatport would show as clipping as they don’t have TPL on either.
Yeah, well I take it the extra step because I don't use a limiter. If I have to use a limiter though, true peak Is a fine theory using upsampling and interpolation to pre-empt over shoots after conversion, but it always sounds worse to me on transient heavy material. when you see what kind of 'true peaks' digital is capable of (and analog actually that eq cut phenomena is not a digital thing) then it makes sense why true peak sounds worse. Technically 'safer' but doesn't work nicely with music
Thanks for the great explanation! But what are saying the streaming services, when you deliver > 0db peaks? i made by accident a mixdown in the red, but without hearable distortion. This track was not accepted from the distribution service. Therefor i insert always a limiter.
I've been doing this nearly 10 years , not had any problems yet. Not with streaming services anyway. There is sometimes an issue with the player inside Dropbox for some reason but no where else. Like I say though I don't recommend it lightly. I've had clients of mine try it themselves and what they thought was inaudible distortion was far too much to my ears it still takes skill to get right and a trained ear for detail.
@@Bthelick Ah, i see, that was the problem. My distributor suggest to upload the best quality as possible, so that the streaming services habe the best basis to convert the track in different streaming formats. So i upload 32 bit float wav. When open the track in Audacity, you see the red peaks. So it is better to deliver in 24 bit. Thanks!
@@Positive_Tea The distributor (recordjet) rejected the track. They are bit more strictly, i think. They want to avoid trouble with streaming services.
Good question, it was a good 10 years ago now! I did try to find it before finishing the video, but unfortunately couldn't. I'll keep you posted if I find it.
I didn't explain the reason EQ cuts make tracks 'louder', because I intended to link to the video already done by #DanWorall, but now I can't find it!
its the one where he rebuilds a saw wave by stacking sine waves, does anyone remember which video that was?
EDIT: I just made my own in the end : ua-cam.com/video/Y1Y2-tpMAek/v-deo.html
Man I'm always think of you as a Edm Dan Worrall. Collab will be super cool. You even got similar tones of voices.
Haha thanks that's because I'm trying to do my best impression of him! He's got far better diction though. I'm from the north where it's common to heavily abbreviate words or not annunciate which is terrible for the intelligibility of international audiences so I have to make a real effort to speak clearly! Whereas it sounds like it's natural for Dan, I'm convinced he's from further south in the country.
@Bthelick Since I am not a native English speaker, I have never had any problems with this while watching your videos. So I think you did a good job! And thanks for the great content!💪💪💪🔥
Great to hear, thanks for letting me know 👊
Would be awesome if somebody could find this video
This is hands down one of the best technical dives into audio engineering and DSP with direct applications for music production / mixing / mastering. Thank you!
Came here to write exactly this! Thank you!
I just got into music production after years of wanting to try it out. This channel has taught me more than all others combined!
Stick w this guy…music is the focus, and backed up by years of releases so it’s WHAT you NEED to have fun asap. All the details will come. 🖤😎🍭
Click the Thanks button and buy him a coffee. He deserves it
if you ain't redlining you ain't headlining
I JUST sat down for a quesadilla and this pops up. Perfect timing. Sup B 😎🖤🕺
Nom, Enjoy!
THANK YOU. I had to learn to stop using hi passing in the master the hard way.
So many established UA-cam edm music educators still show that, even some with over 100k subscribers. I have reached out to them couple times, they ignored me.
We shouldn't hi pass/low pass on the master because we see a UA-camr declaring it's part of a pro-level mastering chain.
I am so happy when one of your videos pop up, just helps me get through my 9-5 and I also learn so much that I can apply them for my music afterwards. Thank you so much!❤️
Explaining “difficult” music theory while the related music is playing is the USP what makes this channel good and very understandable.
It is easy to forget alot of info when someone is ranting for 10mins in a facecam and giving 2 mins of examples, … usually even after the short plug/sponsor announcement.
This workflow of explaining with the music is very easy to follow along. Big up bthlick
It took a while before I realized “clipping” doesn’t always negatively impact audio quality, I just never fully understood why. Some of that went over my head, but was still good information. There’s so many things that can impact “loudness,” It’s overwhelming. I try not to obsess over it and be patient with myself though.
I appreciate your videos btw. You’re really good at breaking things down. It can get confusing with all the information out there.
Sensational video. As a self taught producer I have always been confused by the need to master - why not just get it right in the mix? Thank you and keep the videos coming!
You're right, it doesn't make sense, not today anyway.
Mastering was originally for other necessary reasons. Putting the album in order, making sure it fit onto radio, tape and vinyl without distortion or groove skipping, meeting certain broadcast standards.
These days it still has value from the lending of a 2nd pair of ears alone, especially if those ears are more experienced and in a good room, but it's no longer technically necessary.
Pretty sure Noisia said something in an interview once, that if it sounds good surely that’s what matters! Nice one B
I like science. One of the best videos I have watched lately.
I instinctively been doing the same since the 80s, just with the analog hardware. Carefully choosing and shaping all your initial sounds, arrangement and the mix, then driving the outboard gear and the recording console hot and using all the headroom and then some is a thing.
I'm so glad I found your channel. I learnt more in the last 24mins than I have in 10years of other tutorials. Thank you
Ah that's great to hear (I think haha)
Welcome!
I'm currently studying a multimedia audio production course and this video needs to be taught to students! Keep coming back to it now and again and it's one of the most important and information filled videos I've watched regarding production since I started this journey. You sir are a legend!
I think this left me more confused then I was before. I am really unsure how to go about mastering or mixing now if all those illusions exist.
By using your ears!
I'm conflicted by the advice too, since the loudness illusions appear to suggest that my ears (indeed most human ears) cannot be trusted. If track B sounds louder than track A to my ears, but the LUFs meter says the opposite is the case, I find it very hard to "trust my ears", because my ears are easily fooled. Since my eyes are also easily fooled, I think I'll try mixing with my nose! ;)
context is everything .... thanks for this video ... that explanes me what i learnd in the last years and now i truly understand
In all my years of learning/producing thus far (7.5 ish - self-taught through UA-cam etc.), I have to say that you are by far the most enjoyable and fluid engineer to share your knowledge. I came across your one of your other videos randomly when I was looking for something to watch while eating (as we do haha) and I loved it. While I know/am familiar with a lot of what you have posted so far, I have watched a few of your videos now and am happy to say that I have learned something new with each one. The way you explain and share things is incredible. So clear and easily digestible. 10/10 recommend to anyone wanting to learn/learn more about music production/sound engineering. Bthelick knows his stuff. You're a legend my guy.
Thanks for compliments macca! Great to hear even those with years at it are finding value 👊 it just goes to show we're always learning I'm sure I can learn much from you too 🙏
@@Bthelick much love my man! 😎
This channels is the one of the best in the field of music production. Thank you for all the pragmatic and helpful knowledge that you share!
Lots of good information here! The first half of your video is something I thought about yesterday and came to the conclusion that having everything sit in the mix and blend nicely is more important that what the meter says. Trust your ears! Mr. Bill has also touched on your last part before on some UA-cam videos. Great video as always! Thank you!
Perfect timing. I am in the middle of mastering a project and always struggle with volume.
That was epically good! Never seen anyone explain things in so much depth like this..
Thankyou sir!
It's really refreshing to see videos like this. We're forever bombarded with so many different ideals on how to produce. Not to mention the plugins we should be using. So often I've been guilty of adjusting tracks based on the headroom/ the dreaded red, it's ironic that it sounded so much better prior to all my tweaking. Square peg round hole. I'll try trusting my ears now. Love you channel. Keep it up!
on Football Sunday lets go!
What u say just makes sense for electronic music Production and mixing. A lot of advice is from a live recording view point and some live instruments. I've totally changed my buss set up based on what u do a it works. I was compressing the hell out of my music,now took it all out,and work on sound design,and EQ especially low shelf on stuff to clear the frequency range and things sound much better now. I'd see red but i couldn't hear distortion,now i know why.👍🏿👍🏿✌🏿
Kicking myself after the reveal of what the mystery track was in the video description. So obvious from the Span analyser now watching it back!
Bass 2 goes hard 🔥
lmao the british snark is epic in this one, i love this channel
This is very useful, everyone should see this
Eeee that were a grand video lad.
On the subject of not hearing things in actual music: I kept getting told by a couple of audiophile friends that tube/valve amps sound better because they introduce even harmonic distortion. So I used some of my VST plugins to introduce this harmomic (supposedly "euphonic") distortion. I personally didn't find it actually improved anything, to my ears. But what I did discover was that I, nor anyone else I did the experiment on, could hear ANY distortion until the distortion knobs on various plugins were over 50%. When you think of the money spent on hifi to avoid insanely low THD numbers, it really opened my eyes and ears.
this answered some questions i was having about mystery master clipping on a track where i was confident all the individual elements were solidly not clipping, thanks man!
I love how you explain this stuff! I did all the maths and technical stuff shown here on audio uni and I remember how hearing that technical info felt super empowering.
It's super fun to watch the topic being slowly introduced and explained, it's like re-living that aha moment!
Just here's my constructive criticism....... I would still recommend against mixing near 0 dB FS even if you intend in getting a perfect mix that don't need no mastering. First reason being that if you work near zero and somethings too loud by accident you can blow out your own ears 😂
Also, if your monitoring situation is not 100% proper you could run so hot out of Ableton that in an accidental burst of noise you could damage your speakers.
Another issue with mixing near zero is the fact that when you upload your track after mixing / mastering it will be converted into a lossy format like MP3, and Spotify actually streams those lossy files. On the conversion process the peaks actually change, intersample peaks that used to last for 3 or 4 samples will then be exaggerated into noticeable distortion. That's why mastering engineers that know their shit will try to leave 1 dB FS of headroom even if the mix is squared off. Coz you want the master to be clipped and limited like the artist intended, not like spotify's mp3 encoding wanted.
A good alternative would be to put a clipper plugin at (let's say) -10 dB FS and mix into it as if that was the ceiling. This is to "emulate" that Spotify will turn down your master to be around -14 LUFS. That would make your master sound exactly like a turned down by Spotify type of deal. That will mean you can clip intentionally into the ceiling instead of letting mp3 encoding do extra clipping.
But at that point you might as well mix at any other level other than at zero ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's the issue with missing at zero, those pesky intersample peaks, but the thing is you can avoid them by mixing with any amount of headroom.
Good point, My interface obviously isn't running zero to my monitors / monitor station. I forget people might not know that.
Regarding lossy conversion yes I'm aware of what happens post conversion.
I used to check that more often, but It's not been an issue for over 8 years now though so I've stopped checking as often.
That's why I don't recommend it lightly. I'm only clipping mostly inaudible transients and those take ear training to appreciate.
I had one client try to do their own mix once when I was ill and couldn't make the deadline, it was a distorted mess! They just couldn't hear it and thought going onto the red was fine in general after seeing me work 🤦. They released on time at least! 🤣
@@Bthelick yeah of course no one should ever run at max volume from the interface into your speakers, and it's supper cool to see this level of good advice on UA-cam.
Just the audiophile in me obsessing over distorting at Spotify 😅
Plus if you stopped checking it's provably because you can actually hear the subtle distortion as it creeps in and thus you end up with a loud but clean song, stamp of great engineering 😎👍
I've been reading about the Clip to Zero strategy lately and some people do that by putting clippers on every track or group bus and let it get as high as -9 LUFS and even 0.1 true peak. Don't know the tech side of it but I guess it works for them.
Absolutely fantastic! The bit about the master bus was the final piece of the puzzle for me. Love tihs! :)
**bthelick white glove slaps the wannabe mastering engineers** flies away to make more great content.
Wasn't expecting a video at half past midnight but I'm here for it! 🤣🔥
8:55 this whole bit had me giggling like a child
WOW What an ''Eye'' opener! THANKS!
This is by far the best one in this field on UA-cam. Master craftsmanship!
Would love a video on how to do Tom basslines and more of that square tough style with the 1/8 hi-hat pattern I feel like that’s the foundation for every track that I’m really into.
Great video, but you forgot a very important explanation. The reason why the signal went into red after cutting some lows and highs with EQ is because of phase rotation, which modifies the waveform. To see how an EQ or multiband compressor changes your waveform you need to use an Oscilloscope. EQs work by copying the signal and rotating the phase of some frequencies then adding it back to the original signal in order to add or reduce volume of some frequencies. So if you have a waveform that does not clip or activate a limiter, by adding some EQ to it you change that waveform and it might end up clipping or activating the limiter.
well, it's more accurate to say that all minimum phase filters create post-ringing artefacts through phase rotation, with high pass filters being among the worst offenders
Correct, but that's not what i'm talking about in my above post... post-ringing wasn't the cause of the waveform going into red @@UnfortunatelyTheHunger
Yes correct. It's the result of constructive harmonic interference via phase rotations caused through the pass band!
I didn't explain that because I intended to link the great video Dan Worall did on that, but then I couldn't find the video!
Can you remember which it is? He reconstructed a saw wave on it with sines and showed the phase interference in a very clear way.
Thank you, this blew my mind..
Great vid, I always struggle with volume, usually moving down track volumes not to clip in master and the final result is just very low volume even though master shows ~0 level, now I understand I should better trust my ears first, thanks!
Great content, please make a video how you mix, balance levels and more. Your videos are gold and practical. :)
x2 🙂
The more I learn the less I know!
I love having a simple technical solution but there is none! Thanks for teaching me.
Just gonna go by vibes now, trial and error. Listen to my track on studio monitors, headphones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers.
At the start of the video I said to myself “well I usually use my ears rather than having set numbers to aim for” glad to see by the end of it I felt relieved I might actually know what I’m doing
Fuck yeah. Love your videos man. Thanks for keeping this going. Big success is coming for you on this channel- you got me into making music which i will always appreciate.
Coming from an intermediate, the only piece of advice I'll give you to remember for the next couple of years is enjoy the journey! Its not all about the destination, take pride in the progress you make and the things you learn 😊
Congrats on 25k mate, your going from strength to strength.💪💪💪
So true, thanks for this excellent explanation!
Thanks again for making this video. I understand a teeny bit more about clipping the master ("it is a visual sign that 3 consecutive samples are in the red, which is more accurate than a limiter, but ultimately trust your ears"). What I still want to understand is how far you can push the clipping, or more accurately why you can push it so far with certain tracks and not others (even when trusting your ears). I appreciate the answer is still 'trust your ears'.
Also, I was experimenting earlier this week with bouncing a clipping track to a new track (via direct routing not resampling via the master), and it also clips to zero which is weird given tracks are 32 bit floating (just another anomaly I discovered that reveals my lack of full understanding). Buying you a coffee, now ☕ ❤
In a nutshell keep it dynamic. Don't use compression, limiting or saturation on dynamic elements so the only things that clip are transients too fast to detect aurally
@@Bthelick Awesome! I haven't been using limiters lately. And I have been using compressors less and less (Pancz and Glip have been getting more use in their place). I'm getting happier with my mixes (cleaner and louder) mixing into the master like this. And I now have more of an understanding, 'why'... But upon recent self-reflection, I need to focus more on the song writing / creative side (as per your recent video referencing Kush) because I have noticed I am spending more time on mixing than creating... (ie it's important and I love learning about it, but I need to prioritise creativity, arrangement, and referencing so as to match the mixing skills I have recently developed...).
Excilent breakdown⚡
Thanks for re-replying! 🙂
Thanks. Great video.
Very insightful stuff!
Great video and clever title!
reminds me of a lecture from electronic engineering course days. Police force was always blowing out speakers, they tried better speakers but no change ... suggestion was to increase power of the amplifier driving. Turned out the original amp was clipping and producing square waves with lots of energy which would blow the speakers. Bigger amp ... original sine wave ... no blown speakers.
Outstanding info. Again
Oof, gonna have to give this one a few spins. Tons of info 🤓
Minor quibble and some additional info if anyone wants to investigate further: The two data types are floating point and integer.
Fixed point does exist, but it’s not common and not really used in DAWs. Thanks for another solid video.
Ah right thanks for the clarification it's been a while since I learned this and have used them interchangeably for a while, I forgot they were separated. Fixed point JUST sounded much better as laymen's term to explain the concept than integer so I went that way.
So integer is wholly integer based? effectively 'no point'? All bits used as non-decimal?
@@Bthelick I think the video got the main ideas across really well, especially the critical parts, like clipping detection and that the amount of headroom provided by floats is astronomical.
And yep, the integer type can only represent integers. There can be a bit for the sign (signed integers). That means the range for 16 bit signed integers is −32,768 to 32,767, and the values can never be fractional.
First off, thank you so much for these videos. I am blown away by the depth and quality of these tutorials. You're the best. Secondly, I want to watch that Dr. Dre interview! Is it still available somewhere?
I did try to find it so I could link in the description but can't sorry
I distinctly remember him talking about how he would swap out snare samples and then resend the track to the mastering engineer to see which survived best.
And the clipping they were describing was obviously not a DAW but clipping the converters , which is technically different but I ran with the concept anyway.
I'll let you know if I find it.
If you aren’t redlining you aren’t headlining has been my new favorite saying lol. I used to fear it while DJ’ing too but realized it’s not the end of the world and on occasions necessary depending on the setting.
Well, live is a different animal. Redlining live can destroy speakers!
This is so valuable, thank You
Wow must watch again
hahaha you are a joker. these videos are gold my man glad youre finally getting some subs
I get the feeling I'm going to need to watch that one a few times.
I'm making a follow up to this video, is there anything you still don't understand? I'll try to include it.
wow very interesting . thank you
13:50 ah, everyone loves a drugs story!
Fucking brilliant. I continue to wish I’d had you back in 2005… but obviously you’d not have as much experience 😂 curse my age!
amazing video!
What a perfect lesson
Game changing knowledge!!!!!
i'm not british, but all i can say is ..... brilliant, innit.🍺
Great 👍 video. Subscribed.
Hmmm never thought of the conversion from internal 32bit float to external 24bit for the dac, pretty logical after your explanation. I am by the way surprised the audio engines are still 32bit as we left the 32bit era long time ago in other software.
Checked the specs of my own dac, seems to have a range of -129 to +120, a lot less than the internal fader channels 😂
Really enjoyed the experiments, cool to see how the brain reacts on stuff like this.
As usual, many tanks!
I think it's because largely any errors at the least significant bit of 32 float are so far down the resulting noise is still way below the self noise of any analog system at the output. so any further precision is just a waste of CPU.
Magic video thanks
That you can't clip channels other than the master is actually nothing new to me. I still remember when it was different and they introduced that feature.
However, you mentioning this made me think about what that implies. As you explained, it's not really about only the master can clip. It's about that it can only clip when it's sent out to the audio interface or rendered to a fixed point file.
Okay, imagine this scenario. You made your mix, you mastered everything (because you still do that because you're not a mixing god), you rendered that master to a fixed point file and everything sounds fine.
Then you ask someone if he wants to make a remix. So you tell Ableton to render out all the individual channels to a separate file. You don't change the settings of the file format, since it worked fine last time you rendered. You send him the stems of your song that sounded completely nice when you listened to the master and get a message back like "Hey, sorry. I can't use this. It's clipping like hell."
The individual channels, those nice sounding channels that would have been clipping like hell if they could, suddenly became the channels that are rendered out to a fixed point file.
Yeah I occasionally send out for stem mastering.
I make groups and put a -10db utility on each.
If you are collabing and need to swap parts maybe it's too much hassle yeah.
I just swap Ableton sessions with my collabs so we don't have to mix anything down.
This video blew my mind man
Your intelligence blows my mind 😮
Supreme knowledge
Love this and definitely learned a lot. Would love to know why the band pass filter you added to the master track caused the clipping to happen? Even with all this tech my brain can't tech it out haha
Thanks! I linked a video in the description.
Thank you so much 🙏
You literally post this 2 hours after I finished my first track and was stuck on the mastering stage🤣🤣🤣
Clipping is your friend! ❤
This is perfectly competent. What do you think about doing the clipping at a higher sample rate to avoid aliasing, and then downsampling at the mixdown?
It's a thought sure, I've never deemed it necessary though. Given that I'm only clipping mostly inaudible micro transients I don't think it would make an appreciable difference.
If I had ever experienced a rough sounding master hindering the performance of a song then I would be a lot more precious over the sound quality in general and wouldn't be clipping at all.
Luckily in the real world that's not the case!
unreached depth and excellence! thank you sir! I have a question though. Do you render those tracks finally just like that or do you throw a clipper on the master to shave off anything above 0dB?
I render as is, it's basically the same thing though. Stores don't accept 32bit files so rendering at anything less clips off at zero anyway.
@@Bthelick awesome 👍 that means also I actually understand now completely what you were elaborating on in this brilliant piece of educational video (and art!)! Thank you so much!
Thanks again for this great video! Can you please explain the process and theory on how to improve a mix in such a way that the limiter becomes unnecessary because the clipping gets inaudible? You mentioned it when tlaking about mastering the hiphop album and the quotes from Dr Dre and Bob Katz. Cheers! Is it all about getting the transients "thin and short" plus the body, or sustain of the sounds so leveled out that none of them are being affected by the clipping?
That's basically it yeah.
The key is really sub frequency management as that's where all the headroom is. In my video on how I process bass I show splitting the bass into sub and other bass so I have full control over their side chains.
Vocals can be tough , I sometimes add a limiter on vocal heavy tracks in the offending sections but that's only a last resort. Getting that low end managed well should govern the head room for the rest of the track
This is a good reminder that LUFS, RMS, true peak, and FFT spectrum analyzers, etc are just abstractions from sound. They are not the sound!
Great video.
Top G
Great user name 😁 👊 (except the presumption of gender of course)
lol love this and needed this
Thanks!
Thanks John! Appreciated 🙏
Reminds me of old Baphometrix clip to zero stuff!
Sounds similar, but not the same at all. Pre clipping channels is far far worse imo. Much more audible and kinda defies the point of that I acheive here.
Clipping to save clipping just creates more clipping ironically!
@@Bthelick so its the same but your just clipping straight into master instead of pre clipping?
@@PatAllers What I just commented above, I guess also Luca Pretolesi uses similar strategy
@@lennyblandino just clipping into master channel?
@@PatAllers Did not dig into it that deep, I guess it's a mix of different strategies, they use clippers on all tracks I believe, while the TechnoBrit guy here just no clipper 🙂
19:53 Speed it up and you’ll have a Gabber track 😅
You traversed this minefield of a subject with the grace of a Metropolitan Opera dancer.
There’s nothing like having a debate with an audiophile engineer that owns $20,000+ dollar amplifiers, converters, and cable risers.
You just dropped some serious knowledge!
Can you make a video on how analog summing doesn’t make a difference?
Had a few industry professionals tell me it was a “game changer” for them.
Coffees coming thru! ☕️☕️☕️
Thankyou 👊.
Analog Summing? That video has already been made!
ua-cam.com/video/wVp4syrFkE0/v-deo.htmlsi=3HJ3B7UE8poo55k3
I don't find anything to argue with here
Excellent video Ben, I had been wondering about your red master fader for ages! I was going to ask whether you did a just a -1dbfs cut or something after your 24 bit export but then I noticed you had linked to one of those hip hop masters so I ripped it from SoundCloud, purely for educational reasons of course. It came out as 320k mp3, it's absolutely smashing the meters but it sounds superb! So I think I will try this one my next tune, full bareback is the way to go. Do you go this way for absolutely every track you release? I take it from your other comments you have no truck with all the spurious LUFS requirements of the various streamers.
Bareback lol.
Yeah for all modern edm/ pop/ rock / hip-hop I use this. I will lean on a good limiter occasionally when there is audible distortion on soft sections if I don't have time (ozone's max is pretty transparent and appears to be intelligently clipping anyway)
But by that point all the hard work is done and it barely has to do anything.
For softer or acoustic material like solo piano / orchestral I don't use this method.
That hip-hop mix/master is a good 10 years old now, glad to hear you liked it though 👊
I know some old BBC dubbing mixers and that's what they always used to call mixing without the limiter. But in those days they had to hit PPM 6 in telly, now it's -23 LUFS! pretty tricky to bareback....
But it's so true, don't trust your eyes. When I looked at the waveform of the Sonix track I thought it was going to sound LOUD like that dreadful early 2000s period when everyone was hard limiting. But no, just sounded great.
trying to guess the edm track! -6 is loud af, so that might make it bass house, and it looks like it might have an offbeat bassline (that seccond peak frequency seems to be hitting opposite to the kick (asuming the lowest peak is the kick). the frequency tilt seems to be pretty dark tho (shifted to the lows, so i by that i would guess more tech house or uk bass.... IN THE END, no idea of the track, the first song that came to mind was fisher- losing it, even though it meetsnon eof those criteriea (this was made before finishing the vid! curious af on what the track is)
(the offbeat bass is rare in hosue so it could also be slow eurodance or techno/psyteck whatever housepeed genres are crutching on the 1/8 offbeat bassline)
🤯
Great vid again! I seen another engineer advising to turn off True Peak Limiting on your final master limiter to preserve the punch on the drums. Would you recommend this?
He said a lot of popular tracks taken off beatport would show as clipping as they don’t have TPL on either.
Yeah, well I take it the extra step because I don't use a limiter. If I have to use a limiter though, true peak Is a fine theory using upsampling and interpolation to pre-empt over shoots after conversion, but it always sounds worse to me on transient heavy material. when you see what kind of 'true peaks' digital is capable of (and analog actually that eq cut phenomena is not a digital thing) then it makes sense why true peak sounds worse. Technically 'safer' but doesn't work nicely with music
Thanks for the great explanation! But what are saying the streaming services, when you deliver > 0db peaks? i made by accident a mixdown in the red, but without hearable distortion. This track was not accepted from the distribution service. Therefor i insert always a limiter.
I've been doing this nearly 10 years , not had any problems yet.
Not with streaming services anyway. There is sometimes an issue with the player inside Dropbox for some reason but no where else.
Like I say though I don't recommend it lightly. I've had clients of mine try it themselves and what they thought was inaudible distortion was far too much to my ears it still takes skill to get right and a trained ear for detail.
@@BthelickI also was wondering about true peak over zero being rejected by streaming services.
I'm not delivering > 0 rememeber. > 0 doesn't exist in the usual 16 or 24 bit final format, which is what I deliver to stores
@@Bthelick Ah, i see, that was the problem.
My distributor suggest to upload the best quality as possible, so that the streaming services habe the best basis to convert the track in different streaming formats.
So i upload 32 bit float wav. When open the track in Audacity, you see the red peaks.
So it is better to deliver in 24 bit.
Thanks!
@@Positive_Tea The distributor (recordjet) rejected the track. They are bit more strictly, i think. They want to avoid trouble with streaming services.
Once again spreading truth in a universe full of BS. Thanks for that!
Illuminating content! Which Dr. Dre interview are you referring to? Would love to read that!
Good question, it was a good 10 years ago now! I did try to find it before finishing the video, but unfortunately couldn't.
I'll keep you posted if I find it.
@@Bthelick yes, please! Thank you very much!
At the time we were also in touch with and getting help from his then-engineer Focus, so I made have heard it through him