Visual references when mastering

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about a topic that ties together our mastering article and the one about frequency analyzers: how to use visual references to help us when mastering!

The first tool I want to talk about is Izotope Tonal Balance Control, a tool that is available for separate purchase and that is also included in other Izotope bundles, which is very simple: they have analyzed thousands of record, divided by genre, and have found the average eq curve of the tunes, so you can compare your master to this average to see where you're at: does your master need more low end? Less? Does it need more air? 

This product is as simple as brilliant, and probably is the most useful mastering tool that came out in the recent years, because sometimes your room is not treated, or your monitors or headphones are not the best, and certain areas of your mix can go unnoticed: this way you can easily find where there is too much (or too little) energy compared with the average of the other commercial recordings, and it's a great starting point also just to go back to our mix project and correct there.

The second one, for much more precise adjustments, is Voxengo Span, a free plugin (click here to download it): with this frequency analyzer not only you can see in great detail the analysis of your spectrum, but you can zoom to the extreme, and this is interesting because it's like looking at our mix with a magnifying glass: if we want we can easily go resonance hunting and with an eq lower, surgically, all the parts in which there is an accumulation of energy (for example too many instruments in the same frequency area, which produce a spike in volume), this way we can mix some of those instruments differently, or lower with an eq these spikes: in any case the aim is to free headroom without harming the mix, cleaning up the troublesome areas so that this way we will have more room to push our master, and have all the available volume in the areas we want.

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