Mastering Tutorial 1: Master bus compression, Soft Clipping and Limiting

LiveschoolDecember 12, 2024Mixing and MasteringMusic Production Skills

Music Production SkillsMixing and Mastering

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 technical procedures and nuanced creative decisions.

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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.

Master Bus Compression Settings

Steps for Master Bus Compression

Locate Glue Threshold in the Mastering Chain
Pull the Threshold macro down until the loudest elements (kick and snare) trigger the Gain Reduction (GR) meter
Attack and Release times are pre-configured to preserve transient punch while ensuring the compression moves rhythmically with your track

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.

Soft Clipping Settings

Steps for Soft Clipping

Enable the Soft Clipper on the glue compressor
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.

Limiting Settings

Steps for Limiting

Locate the Limiter Max macro
Slowly increase the Limiter Max macro
Since we’re using the Limiter’s ‘Maximize’ mode, increasing the macro will automatically adjust both threshold and output to optimise loudness
Our limiter operates in Mid/Side mode, processing centre and side information independently

Next Steps

Up Next: Check out Part 2 of our introduction to mastering, where you’ll explore tone shaping, multiband compression, and techniques for controlling high-end harshness.

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