This week, I managed to finish the track as a whole by mastering it with Lewis. As this was the main and only thing left to do this week, I bounced down the final mix of the track and Lewis mastered, telling me his decisions and why he is making them as he goes as I don’t know anything about mixing and was eager to learn. I could have learnt how to master myself, but this would have taken a long time given that we only had two weeks left and I still need to mix and master my other single. Before bouncing it down and putting it onto Logic, we listened to the song first to make sure it was perfectly mixed. I exported the mix, making sure I left some time at the start and end of the song, and then put it onto Logic on Lewis’ laptop. Overall, the final master sounds amazing and I am so happy to have finally finished my first official song!
Progressions And Strengths
To master the song, he used a plugin called Izotope Ozone 9 and ran me through what he was doing as he was mastering it. First, he added an EQ to the whole song, removing a little bit of low end, and slightly upping the high-mids to add brightness warmth. The imager setting allows you to change and see the stereo width of your song. We widened the mix a little bit to add some profundity. After using some other necessary effects within Ozone like the exciter which controls saturation, finally, we used the maximize effect. This is essentially a limiter that allows you to increase the volume of your mix without letting it clip or decrease the dynamic range. This is great as you don’t want your track to be too quiet or loud, and you want the volume to stay consistent throughout without losing any dynamics. After this, we listened to the track once more and decided it was finished, so we exported it and had a listen through different devices such as headphones and my laptop speakers to make sure it sounded good through different speaker systems that might not be as great as the monitors.
Improvements
After mastering the track and making sure that I have multiple copies of the finished track in different places, I now need to put the track on Distrokid so it will be released in time for the release date, which is the 28th. You can see my research and work I did on distribution here, and this is also where I will be evaluating how I distributed the track alongside my other single as well: https://digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk/10626680/distribution/. I need to ensure that I credit the right people, have the right artwork, and make sure I release the track legally by filling in all the necessary details correctly. After I’ve done this, I need to start to promote the single and the other track as soon as I can to gain traction, as the more people hear about it, the more they are likely to stream it.