Have you ever wondered how you can make your songs stand out and sound exciting on Spotify?
This is probably the most common dilemma to solve for many artists and producers. You want your songs to stand out next to other music or at least blend in. It’s easy to think that this is all about loudness since that is often the most apparent difference between songs in a playlist.
However, if you have dealt with this for a while, then you know that the loudness doesn’t seem to matter that much. You can follow the common advice to aim for a loudness target of -14 LUFS. You can also ignore that and instead crush your master to -6 LUFS. Or you can do the most sensible thing and just make your master as loud as possible without sounding bad. (That’s the only loudness target you should be aiming for by the way.)
It seems like no matter what you do, the basic problem may still be there: Other songs still sound more present and exciting on for example Spotify.
This is when you need to shift focus from producing and mixing and listen to the mix from the perspective of mastering!
There are a lot of things that a mastering engineer listens for. Two of the most important things are tonal balance and transient clarity. If you get these things right, then the master will sound great. But what does it mean? Let’s break it down!
Tonal balance is, simply put, the relationship between the lows, mids and highs in your mix. If you have too much bass, this will make the mix sound boomy. Too much highs will make the mix sound brittle or overly bright. Too little lows will make the mix sound thin. And so on.
Getting the tonal balance right is key to letting your mix present itself in the best possible way. If you want your song to sound full, fat and present next to other songs, then you want the tonal balance to be spot on.
Most of the time you will tweak the tonal balance using an equalizer with wide filters. Sometimes you will need to use narrow filters or dynamic EQ to deal with resonances or build-ups as well.
Transient clarity is how well you can hear the onsets or attacks of the sounds within the mix. If the transients are unclear or buried in the mix, then the overall clarity and presence of the mix will suffer greatly. If the transients are clear and pronounced, then the song will almost pop out of the speakers.
When mastering you want to make sure that there is enough transient clarity. A compressor is often used for shaping the transients and improving transient clarity.
You also want to keep sharp, spikey or overly dynamic transients in check since they tend to mask everything around them and make the mix sound grating and fatiguing. This can be done in several ways, for example using compression, dynamic EQ, deessers or multiband compression.
To conclude, if your music isn’t quite sounding the way you want compared to other songs, then the tonal balance and transient clarity could be the two first places to look.
But how do you actually do that? In the next article we begin by diving deeper into tonal balance!
See you then!
💚 Sofia & Thomas
- Part 1 – How to make your music stand out on Spotify
- UPCOMING – Part 2 – Tonal balance – The key to a natural sound
- UPCOMING – Part 3 – How to use compression for shaping transients
- UPCOMING – Part 4 – Getting that smooth high-end
- UPCOMING – Part 5 – The most important thing when learning mastering
