Holy Simple Mastering Rack, Batman!

This tutorial we will set out to make a decent mastering rack. I call it “simple” because you can pretty much drop it on an premaster and get high quality sound! The process is a bit long, but if you stick with me and go through with making the entire thing I promise you will learn a few things.

Of course, you can just download the rack below. This might be good for comparison or for those of you that don’t have time to do the tutorial class now.

First grab a new audio effect rack and slap it on the master channel. Inside that beautiful little box we will set up a dry/wet chain selection system that goes from the dry single to the wet channel; 3 separate chains containing 3 different bands of the audio spectrum; low, mid, high. We will be using the EQ 3 to isolate each band on its respective chain. Once that task is completed and the gains plus frequency selectors have been assigned macro knobs we will add a compressor to each chain.

The compressor settings are meant to be simple and get a good average result. As with everything you ever learn, different settings will be better for different situations! However, I find that taking the compressor and leaving all of the settings as is while only adjusting the threshold works rather well. The threshold values should be set to about the following:

low band – ~-18 db

mid band – ~-9 db

high band – ~-13 db

After that we will add a utility to each band as well. We do this to utilize the stereo field parameter. The low band should be cut down depending on the frequency range you have selected for that filter, but I have it set to 25% stereo width for everything below 250hz. Mid band I boosted just a tad to 102% and the highs are boosted just a bit more to 110%. Once we map the stereo parameter to the two remaining macro knobs we are done with the main mastering rack.

To get a little extra kick I threw a limiter outside the rack then grouped them into a new rack. Mapping the limiter’s gain to the first macro knob and then re-mapped all 7 of the initial racks knobs, with the exception of the dry/wet. I wanted to have it in the main rack, because it might be useful, so just remember it’s in there if you need it! 😉

Check Out the Updated Version After You Follow Along and Build / Download This One!

Download the Free Mastering Rack

Download Here — MediaFire/SimpleMasterRack

Watch the Video Tutorial