Mastering The Metal
Manda Ulibarri
The louder you master your metal, the more it's likely to be turned back down by YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, and the rest. Loudness has a crucial impact on the way things sound to us, so this is another factor that needs to be considered when mastering metal in the 21st century.
No matter the genre, you need a high-quality, accurate monitoring and listening environment for mastering, plus some time and space after mixing to help you get a clearer perspective. Having said that, let's look at each point in more detail.
For me, the key to making this work is achieving enough clarity and separation between the elements, while keeping them glued together. The very best approach is via a great arrangement and mix, of course, but even so, there's plenty we can do to enhance this in mastering.
Using mid/side processing can be an extremely powerful strategy in metal mastering. Often guitars are panned hard left and right for example, so it's possible to add extra muscle by boosting the low mids only in the side signal, without cluttering the vocal or bass sound in the center. Or, perhaps there's a build-up in the snare, and precisely cutting it in the mid signal only can help reduce this, without affecting the warmth of the synth pads or guitar tones near the edge of the image.
The solution in my experience is to use a little of both. Share the load between the compressor and the limiter, so that neither is working too hard. This approach with a balanced EQ is highly effective at achieving higher levels with minimal side-effects.
The metal scene is incredibly rich and diverse. Mainstream metal is typically cleaner and more melodic, whereas doom metal is often far slower and more atmospheric. Technical genres favor super-precise, accomplished musicianship, whereas the exact opposite might be true for a Black Metal band, and so on. Dealing with this kind of variety can be a real challenge in mastering!
Distortion is a crucial element in almost all metal. Even the most precise technical genres can be aggressively distorted, whereas some mainstream or progressive metal can sound exceptionally clean and clear.
Maybe the most important point to make is that distortion doesn't have to depend on loudness. A limiter like the one in Ozone's Maximizer can achieve fearsome LUFS levels without distortion, if that's what's called for, but creative use of the Exciter module can give you incredibly detailed control over exactly how much crunch, fuzz, or grit you choose to add to the sound, and still retain plenty of dynamics. This is a more flexible, powerful approach, in my opinion.
The topic of loudness keeps coming up in mastering, and that's because it is fundamental to the way we hear sound (psychoacoustics!). Simply turning something up, even by a small amount, can make it sound more exciting to most listeners, even though nothing else in the sound has changed.
Beyond a certain point there are inevitable compromises to achieving super-high LUFS levels, that might even make your music sound less exciting. The higher you push the LUFS, the less room the music has to breathe, and the harder it becomes to maintain clarity, space, depth, and impact.
But mastering metal is also incredibly rewarding. The satisfaction when you get it right and achieve the results you're looking for, taking a mix from good to great, or even great to outstanding, is second to none. Hopefully, something in this article will help you get closer to that goal!
While these are all true, mastering is really the optimization of a mix in order to hear it in its most translatable form. This is primarily guided by two important factors: objectivity and translation.
Mastering a mix requires great attention to detail and, in heavy metal, is especially important in creating a final copy that invokes an emotional impact from the listener without ripping their heads off and garnering the song unlistenable.
These sonic profiles are integral to the structure of heavy metal music and leaning into them allows the consumer to relate and compare your music to some of their favorite artists in their favorite genre. Dismissing the fact that your music is different and should not adhere to these standards is a mistake that will make you less relatable and ultimately hard to market.
Typically, the mastering engineer will be thanked for their objectivity in keeping the mixing engineer in check. After all, it is their names that will be printed on the release. They want to be proud of their work, as should you!
This is typically why mastering engineers are usually engineers who have a great amount of experience, whether that was in mastering or any other part of the production process in order to be in a position that grants them authority over how the final product should sound.
Note: Every mastering engineer has their own workflow. The following mastering chain is just an example of one you may use or derive inspiration from, but remember that every song requires a different approach. This is not a one-size-fits-all situation.
This can be dangerous for a mastering engineer, since we would essentially be exciting standing waves and imparting muddiness rather than providing clarity and punch. Filtering and multi-band compression become inseparable tools here. You can tighten up the low-end by putting a high-pass filter to take away the rumble, but beware: the tricky part is when to stop carving out bass.
Use the transient designer to your advantage here. Drums are heavily transient-dependent. It is there to either soften or accentuate this information into the clipper (or limiter, should you not have a clipper) so that you have total control over the impact and punchiness of the mix.
Vocals in heavy metal are some of the most interesting parts of the genre. Ranging from luminous opera to guttural roars, they are dynamic, extreme and most of all the element that tells a story. Therefore, this is an extremely delicate part of the process that we need to give our upmost attention towards.
Mid-side can also be helpful here, but use it sparingly. For background vocals and reverbs, the sides could use a dose of high end boosting to make them more exciting, but the mid-section should be a little more relaxed, otherwise you run the risk of emphasizing sibilance too much. That being said, this is a great way to keep those trampling distorted guitars separated from any vocal EQ.
A tool like RX can have a significant impact on your deliverable. Converting master files into their deliverable counterparts for distribution is a step you should never overlook or take for granted. This is your final chance to perform QC (quality control)!
Here on Metal Mastermind we help metal musicians and producers find their own way through the independent metal music space. Click below to enroll in Metal Producer Overlord, a course taught be a seasoned veteran, Nic Z, on mixing and mastering this incredible genre we know and love. He provides many examples, tips and tricks, and in-depth workflow demonstrations to show you exactly how to do it.
Mastering for Heavy Metal Music is the process of preparing metal music for distribution while upholding the sound fans of metal music love and expect. Both transient retention and a cohesive glued-together sound are prevalent sonic aspects of metal music that are created when mastering metal music.
With that said, trying to define the exact qualities that make a great metal album may be a bit of an exercise in futility - but what can be said for certain is what makes a great metal master.
It seems that despite the sub-genre of metal, there are characteristics that stay common amongst all great metal music masters. In short, a metal master will need to be loud, powerful and dynamic, retain its detail and transients, all while establishing a cohesive, glued-together sound.
Creating a loud metal master means adhering to how loudness normalization affects perceived loudness during streaming playback. This means that dynamics should be preserved as much as possible and that severe or excessive limiting and compression should be avoided if this compression is needed at all.
In short, if you plan to upload your metal album or track onto a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, or maybe you simply plan to upload the record to YouTube, loudness normalization will alter the loudness of your master.
The less unnecessary compression you use, the more impact your drums and guitars will have. The more impact your drums and guitars have, the louder your master will sound after loudness normalization.
Creating a dynamic and powerful metal master means augmenting percussive instrumentation and its relative dynamics while establishing impactful passages in a composition. This means that when a group of instruments is introduced, their presence is immediately impressive to the listener, differentiating that aspect of the composition from other aspects.
As you can probably tell, attempting to describe some of the more ineffable aspects of metal music is difficult - but when you hear a powerful and impactful section of a metal song you know it.
Typically these passages are characterized by simplistic and subdued instrumentation being followed by more complex and aggressive instrumentation. When that aggressive instrumentation hits, it needs to be impressive and evoke an emotional response from the listener.
Lastly, you can employ subtle automation and amplify louder sections to further differentiate them. When using automation in this way, you could increase the distortion function of a plugin, or maybe enable a small EQ boost - or you could simply increase the volume of the entire section.
The best way to create a detailed and transient metal master, or master in general, is to minimize the use of compression while introducing transient shaping. By utilizing specific compressor settings, and using transient specific expansion, you can create a highly detailed and transient metal master.
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