Groove3 Stem Mastering Piano House Explained [TUTORIAL]
If you’re looking to improve the mastering of your piano house tracks, you should take a look at stem mastering. In this one-hour video course, Groove3 instructor Larry Holcombe walks you through the process of mastering a piano house track from the beginning, allowing you to hear and see the benefits provided by using stems. Many of these same techniques and concepts can be applied to other genres as well. These videos are designed for beginning mastering engineers.
Throughout the videos Larry uses the following 3rd plug-ins, but you can use similar plugins for similar results:
3rd Party Plugins:
- Waves NLS Bus
- Waves Kramer Tape
- Waves SSL Comp
- FabFilter Pro-C2
- FabFilter Pro-Q3
- iZotope Exciter
- iZotope Imager
- iZotope Maximiser
- iZotope Ozone
- Soundtheory Gulfoss
- Kazrog Audio – KClip3
Larry begins with the subject of stem preparation, guiding you through the procedure of creating stems from the mixdown project, with which we’ll work for the mastering procedure. You’ll also learn how to route parallel and spatial effects into busses for each instrument. Then, discover how to make some macro changes to the individual stems for stereo width, volume, and tone before diving in with more specific processing.
Next, explore various techniques for dynamics with channel strip emulations and tape saturation applied to the busses for some drive and saturation. You’ll also learn how to use musical release times on pre-mastering bus compression to enhance the groove and tie the mix together. Hard clipping with Kazrog’s KClip 3 is then applied to the busses, which will help relieve some of the stress placed on the final limiter at the end of the chain.
With the bus processing out of the way, Larry shows you how to create a customized mastering chain with EQ, parallel compression, and harmonic excitation. The course concludes with some final thoughts on clipping and limiting, as they relate to loudness.
What’s even better is that you’ll have access to the same stems Larry uses throughout the course, so you can follow along every step of the way and hear the results for yourself and tweak them as you see fit! For more information on the contents of each stem mastering piano house video, check out the descriptions below. It’s time to hear what stem mastering can really do for your piano house projects… watch “Stem Mastering Piano House Explained®” today!
