MASTERING YOUR TRACK
When you think you got your track finished from A to Z. And then i mean really finished. Finished involves the effekts, the stereofield nicely enhanced, Frequency's nicely seperated.
When you got this covered it's time to master your track.
What you might want to do is export each channel individually. Using Reason you do this the following way:
Mute all channels except channel 1
Now export it to wav (preferably 24 bit 48 khz)
Now you have 1 channel exported ready to be loaded in into cubase or a similar program wich supports the use of (DX) Plugins.
Repeat the proces for each channel but don't forget to mute the right channels
When you have done this you load all the channels into audio channelsin Cubase (or similar program). After loading in all the channels you will have you'r arrangement in cubase in audio.
Now you can apply effekts such as the Mastering Compressor from Steinberg. This is a very good and professional plugin with a very high quality alghorythm. You could also apply some HQ reverb's to some channels. Or a nice vocoder on a vocal line wich you can record a long side you'r arrangement.
For mastering you don't want to use severe compressor settings because you probably allready have enough compressors in your mix when you composed the song. So only use compression when needed. The mastering compressor lends itself perfectly to compress certain frequency's.
Also a well known studiotrick is to apply a certain amount of reverb to the total mix. Really just a little bit. You don't have to hear it but it will make all the sounds blend with each other nicer.
What i allways do is i export the final track and then i load it into a soundeditor (Soundforge v5.0 in my case) and i look at the wavform. And usually there will be a few peaks wich are noticably higher then the rest.
What i do then is, i select the portion of the sound (size depends on the sound, i usually select a complete sound) and i lower the volume. After i straightend the track out and all the levels are even. I will normalize it and maybe add some more compression.
After doing all that the track will be smooth sounding and will be playable on most systems.
Note that not all music is playable at all systems. Some ppl build soundsystems with very loud subwoofers and they forget about the mid and high. Logically your track won't sound good on them
I Hope this helps some of you out on mastering your tracks. It really is worth the effort and your music will sound better when you do it.
hehehehe:)