Being able to master your own songs has become a crucial skill to mixing engineers, producers and home studio recordists:
Often times, budgets don’t allow to hire an external Mastering engineer anymore. So in order for our music to compete with songs on the radio, Spotify or I-Tunes, we have to learn how to master music ourselves.
Today, we are blessed to sit down with the insanely talented Warren Sokol from United Mastering.
Starting as a recording engineer and producer, Warren quickly discovered that being able to master his tracks would give him an edge over other studios and engineers. Now employed as a full time mastering engineer at United Studios, Warren has worked with Method Man, Imagine Dragons, Paul McCartney, Moody Blues, Lana Del Ray and many others.
In this interview, Warren breaks down his complete mastering chain and explains his favorite tools – digital as well as analogue.
All the way from Acoustic Room Treatment and picking the right Speakers, to Signal Flow, Converters, Clocks, EQs, Harmonic enhancers, Compressors, Limiters and Dithering. Warren goes into great detail on each of his processors, explains their unique characteristics and how you can use them to achieve full and punchy masters.
You’ll also learn how to prepare your mixes for mastering and Warren points out common mixing mistakes to avoid in order to achieve a great master.
I hope you enjoy this interview and it helps you to craft big, radio-ready masters. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us Warren! We’ll have a full list of all equipment discussed in this interview below.
More Mastering Tutorials:
Here is a full list of Warren’s favourite equipment:
Room Treatment:
Monitors:
Limiters:
Hardware:
Software:
EQs:
Hardware:
Software:
Compressors:
Hardware:
De-essers:
Converters/Harmonic Processors:
Clocks:
Monitor Controller:
Thank you ever so much for watching this video. Please share this post, subscribe to our email list for a ton of free goodies and leave a bunch of questions and comments below.
Many Thanks,
Warren