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Mastering Your Music: A Professional’s Guide to Master Bus Processing

Reading time: ~7 minutes

Mastering, the so-called “dark art” of music production has more mystique than it deserves. Once you know what the goal is (and how to hear what you’re doing) it’s a blend of straight-forward set of technical procedures, and nuanced creative decisions.

In this tutorial series, you can follow along using our Mastering Rack by professional Mastering Engineer, Alex Braithwaite, aka SUB-human:

Download the Mastering Rack

(free for a limited time)

First, what exactly is Mastering? It is the last, crucial step before final release that makes sure the song’s mix will sound equally good on any kind of playback system. It is important that the song is fully finished, and properly mixed before applying mastering. While some producers view mastering as merely making tracks louder, true mastering is about achieving clarity, punch, and professional polish while preserving the soul of your music.

In this first part of our three-part guide, we’ll explore the foundations of master bus processing using Ableton Live’s native effects. We’ll break down each step to help you understand the thought process behind achieving a professional master. Today we are using one of Alex’s unreleased composition as the pre-master.

Master Bus Compression

Master bus compression is the foundation of a professional-sounding master, acting as the “glue” that binds your mix elements together into a cohesive whole. In dance music, where loudness is critical, rhythmic compression offers a clever solution: by allowing the compressor to work in time with your drums, you can achieve significant gain reduction while maintaining the natural feel of your track.

Here’s how the process works: As your drums hit the compressor, they trigger gain reduction across the entire mix – think of it as sidechain compression for the whole mix bus. Because this reduction happens rhythmically with your drums, the compression becomes much less noticeable to the listener. This technique allows us to achieve considerable gain reduction and add back more loudness through makeup gain while maintaining a natural, musical sound.

Steps:

  1. Locate Glue Threshold in the Mastering Chain
  2. Pull the Threshold macro down until the loudest elements (kick and snare) trigger the Gain Reduction (GR) meter
    • Tip: The GR needle should bounce back to 0dB between hits. If it doesn’t, raise the threshold to prevent compressor “choking”
  3. Attack and Release times are pre-configured to preserve transient punch while ensuring the compression moves rhythmically with your track. Don’t worry about the occasional transient peak – we’ll address those in the next stage with soft clipping

Soft Clipping

Think of soft clipping as your master’s safety net – it’s a subtle but powerful tool that serves multiple purposes. By gently rounding off the harshest peaks in your signal, soft clipping helps enhance perceived loudness while adding pleasing harmonic saturation. Since transient peaks last only milliseconds, careful clipping can control them without introducing audible distortion.

Steps:

  1. Enable the Soft Clipper on the glue compressor
  2. Gradually increase the Glue Makeup macro until peaks begin engaging the clipper (threshold is just below 0dB)

Limiting

Limiting is your master’s final safeguard, ensuring your track never exceeds digital full scale (0dBFS) while maximizing loudness. At this stage, we’re fine-tuning rather than doing heavy lifting, as most of our volume was achieved in previous stages.

Steps:

  1. Locate the Limiter Max macro
  2. Slowly increase the Limiter Max macro
  3. Since we’re using the Limiter’s ‘Maximize’ mode, increasing the macro will automatically adjust both threshold and output to optimise loudness
  4. Our limiter operates in Mid/Side mode, processing centre and side information independently. While sharing a threshold, this configuration applies more limiting to the dominant mid signal, helping preserve stereo width and spatial detail

Coming Up Next: In Part 2 of our mastering guide, we’ll explore tone shaping, multiband compression, and techniques for controlling high-end harshness. Stay tuned! Join our newsletter for updates.