Tuesday, August 2, 2022
I joined a Bitwig Discord, and the conversation at the time was about mastering. I watched the recommended YouTube videos and wishlisted some chunky books on my way down the rabbit hole, and this project reflects a loose attempt at working with some of those ideas.
To put it in my own words, I'd say that mastering is a late-in-the-production-process set of activities to prepare the track for modern consumption. I didn't really expect to touch this topic at all—I'm having enough trouble composing/arranging/performing something interesting—and yet, part of the "gap" between what I'm making and what I'd like to hear feels like it could be bridged by mixing/mastering techniques. To describe the situation really simply, the recordings I'm producing feel too quiet and pretty muddy, and this arcane skillset might help me climb out of the goop.
I configured a big-sounding Polysynth device and tapped out a basic drum pattern, and then used EQs, saturators, compressors, and the Bitwig mixing view to try and fill the spectrum and make it loud.
I don't let my channels clip—a habit from bygone days as a DJ on various kinds of analog gear. But my very loose understanding is that what looks like "clipping" matters less in an all-digital, single-DAW workflow because the underlying mathematics permit the proper handling of audio signals that exceed limitations in all other contexts. To quote the first Google result for "gain staging": "We’ve demonstrated that in the domain of floating-point, you can push above 0 dBFS and not harm the signal, so long as you dip back down on the track’s corresponding destination."
[LUFS LUFS LUFS]
So, here's my first attempt. It was measuring in Bitwig at -0.2 dB and (at around -16 LUFS if I remember correctly):
And here's an attempt that was absolutely clipping in Bitwig, but had a "true peak max" of -0.2 dB as measured by TBProAudio's dpMeter5 (at like -11 LUFS):