IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing what to do before you master

Mastering with a Mac

Finding out how to share songs

There’s no mystery about mastering — you already know how to do it; you just don’t know that you know yet. You see, mastering is nothing more than applying familiar effects, such as EQ, echo, reverb, and compression, to your entire song instead of individual tracks.

Mastering is the final step in the multitrack recording process; it’s the last thing you do before you distribute your work for others to hear. In big-time major-label music production, mastering is a specialized art performed by a handful of highly paid mastering engineers with state-of-the-art mastering studios and the highest-of-high-quality audio-processing hardware and software.

Fortunately, you don’t have to go to that trouble or expense: GarageBand's built-in mastering presets harness the knowledge of a roomful of mastering engineers.

I’m only half-kidding. The GarageBand mastering presets are excellent and can give most people the results they want and expect most of the time. However, if you plan to have your song professionally duplicated in quantity, you might want to enlist a good mastering engineer to ensure that what ends up on the discs (or digital files) sounds exactly the way you want it to — or, perhaps more importantly, the way that radio programmers expect it to.

Mastering your masterpiece in GarageBand can be as easy as choosing a preset. If you’re not sure what your song needs, let that room full of experienced mastering engineers do the mastering for you, and don’t touch those dials. Or, if you prefer the hands-on-the-knobs approach, start with the preset that sounds closest to your ideal and then tweak its individual settings until your fingers bleed. Either way, you’ll end up with a song that sounds darned good to most people most of the time.

Before You Master

Mixing and mastering are different sides of the same coin, so GarageBand makes it easy to switch between these two chores. This is a good thing because everything you do to the master track affects the mix.

You can always go back and change anything you like in the mix, but it’s best to have your mixing as close to complete as possible before you master. If not, you may end up spending more time than necessary remixing and remastering.

Before you begin mastering, double-check that you are happy with the following:

• Relative loudness (level) of each track
• Ronal characteristics (equalization) of each track
• Spatial positioning (pan) of each track

You did all these things when you mixed, which I cover in great detail in Chapter 18.

You should also trim noise or extraneous sound at the head or tail of any or all tracks (if you haven’t done so already); your final product will sound better for it. The easiest way to get rid of dead space is to create a split where you want the song to begin and then delete the dead space after it’s split from the song. Check out Chapter 17 for details.

Having checked and double-checked your mix and ensured that it’s as good as it's going to get, it’s time to master it — and (I hope) make it sound even better.

Now for the bad news : GarageBand on iDevices doesn’t include the excellent mastering features and presets of the Mac version. You can add a fade-out and apply master echo and reverb to a song, but that’s about the extent of it. The sad reality is that if you want your recording to sparkle and sound more professional, you’ll have to export the project from your iDevice and master it on your Mac.

If you don’t have a Mac, are thrilled with the sound of your project already, or don’t care if it sounds better and more professional, you are pretty much finished. Feel free to skip the next section, “Exporting to a Mac for Mastering.”

Skip the next section if you like, but do not skip the “Sharing Songs” section — at least not if you care to get songs off your iDevice for others to enjoy or to use as a ringtone.

Now, without further ado, here’s how you export your project so you can master your masterpiece on a Mac.

Exporting to a Mac for Mastering

If you want your song to sound the best it can, you’re doing the right thing by mastering it on a Mac. So let’s get to it.

To export your almost finished song to a Mac, start by doing the following on your iDevice:

1. Tap the my songs icon in the control bar, tap the Select button, and then tap the song you want to export.
2. Tap Share at the bottom of the screen, and then tap Project on the Share Song sheet to export an editable song file for your Mac.

3. Tap the option you prefer on the Share Sheet to access the file on your Mac.

   I typically use AirDrop to send the file to my Mac wirelessly, but feel free to send the file via Messages, Mail, Dropbox, Google Drive, or whatever other means you like as long as it gets the file from your iDevice to your Mac.

Now, open the file you just transferred on your Mac and follow the instructions in Chapter 11 for mastering your song on the Mac.

Sharing Songs

If you don’t care to export and master your project, you may still want to send it to friends, post it online, or transform it into a ringtone.

To share your song with others, tap the my songs icon in the control bar, and then long-press on the song you want to share. Tap Share to see your three sharing options: Song, Ringtone, or Project.

Tap Song. Then tap the audio quality level you desire and edit the song info if you care to, as shown in Figure 19-1.

Scroll down in the Share Song dialog if you want to add a cover image, as shown in Figure 19-2.

After you’ve tapped a quality level and edited the song info (or not), tap Share.

The higher the quality you choose, the better the song will sound. But higher quality also means larger files. So, check out Figure 19-3, which shows the same song (around 8 minutes long) at each available quality level.

Moving right along, if you want to turn your song into a ringtone or text tone, remember that ringtones (and text tones) have to be 30 seconds or less. If your song is longer, GarageBand will warn you first and then export the first 30 seconds as your ringtone. If that’s not what you want, shorten the song before you continue.

Now, to share your song as a ringtone, tap the my songs icon in the control bar, and then long-press on the song. Tap Share and then tap Ringtone.

The Export Ringtone dialog appears. Rename the ringtone (if you like) and then tap Export. The Ringtone Export Successful dialog appears with two options:

• Use Sound As lets you choose the sound for your standard ringtone or text tone or assign it to a contact.
• OK saves the ringtone without activating it, so you can choose it as a standard ringtone or text tone or assign it to a contact in the future.

And that’s how to create ringtones and text tones for free!