Do I need to Master in Logic for TV?

First of all, don't experiment. If you sit in your bedroom, playing around, the that is fine, but if you are doing something where you deliver your professional product (Theme) for a profession product (TV Show), then you should make sure that your song is not only musically great, but also perfect on the technical side (level, frequency response, misc. specs, etc.).

In that case, you should first start to LEARN the craft to some extend and not experiment and stumble over some stuff by accident. We are not talking about experimenting with a new effects plugin to get a specific sound, we are talking about delivery specs.

Your original question "Do I need to Master" is most likely based on all the hype on the Internet around "Mastering". Everybody is talking about, giving advice while it seems that 80% of that advice about mastering is utter bullish!t. The old excuse "Let's fix it in the mix" seems to have shifted to "Let's fix it in mastering"

Here is a simple advice: Forget about mastering and try to record/mix your song as good as possible. If you can't or don't know how to do it, then hire someone who can. You don't become a sound engineer by watching a few YouTube videos and buying a few Plugins. There is a little bit more to it.

About the Loudness Meter. There are a few comments from Lippeth  where my red light would go off. If you want to learn bit more about Loudness Normalization and Loudness Meters, here is a tutorial I posted on my website.

http://logicprogem.com/Logic-Pro-X-Tutorials/Entries/2017/6/23_Loudness_Normaization.html

However, the good news is that in your case, you don't have to worry about Loudness Meter at all. The reason why there is no "Mastering" for music delivery for film/TV is because the music will go to the dubbing stage where it is only a part of a lot of other elements that are mixed together. That mixer has to know about Loudness Levels because that is nowadays the requirement for any broadcast/film delivery. Just make sure you deliver based on the required specs (i.e. 24bit, 48kHz, Stems yes/no, etc.). Your job (or the engineer you hire to take care of the mix) is to make your track sound as good as possible, based on what your client wants.

You always can play your track to a friend to make sure that it sounds ok and there is nothing that you overlooked. The last thing you want to end up with is to get a call from the dubbing stage and the engineer or producer complaining about some technical  issues with your track.

Especially, if this is your first gig, you want to make sure to leave a good impression so hopefully they consider you for the next project. So don't blow 😉 it and good luck 👍.

Hope that helps,

Hope that helps,

Edgar Rothermich

Graphically Enhanced Manuals (GEM)

www.LogicProGEM.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/MusicTechExplained/

Exactly as Pancenter says. The main job of a mastering engineer has many tasks and goes even more back during the vinyl years. Those engineers had to process the mixes so they get around all the restrictions of vinyls or cassette tapes (it is not all about the great analog sound). THe distorted picture of "mastering" nowadays is having a Mastering plugins and make it louder or sprinkle some magic dust over it and a bedroom recording sounds like 1Mio budget production.

For film music you are not concerned about loudness (in the sense that your track has to sound louder than a competing mix), there are other aspects your music mix has to pay attention to, i.e. dialog or machine guns. For a theme music it is even easier because the music plays without any other sound (disturbances), you have center stage. Main objective is to make it sound great and if there are dynamic adjustment required, then the mixing engineer at the dubbing stage can take care of that. If the producer likes the track (as you said), then you are good and there is nothing to worry about it.

The only time you have to think about Loudness is if you decide to put that theme son up on streaming services. For that you have to understand the concept of Loudness Normalization and the various Target Levels of the streaming services.

You'll need to hire a mastering engineer for the best result, but a poor man's mastering solution would be to load that wav file into a new session, add a limiter to the stereo out, as well as a meter that reads in LUFS. Logic's multimeter will work just fine. Raise the gain on your limiter until the meter reads about about -10 long term LUFS. Make sure to knock the limiter's output gain to around -1dB so you don't clip the system. If everything sounds too squashed, you might need to make adjustments to the levels in your mix.

<<<< continue from Part 1 <<<<<

PART 2

Even for broadcast I would bring the levels to around -10 LUFS.

Don't do that! No matter if it is for broadcast or streaming service. Unless you are ok that your track might be turned down by 4 to 6dB.

If you do use the multi-pressor, I would put it before the limiter, though multiband compression isn't necessary unless you need that extra glue and control for certain frequencies.

One of my favorite words, "glue". The great promise of the marketing department. Many seasoned DAW users are overwhelmed with the proper use of all the electronic gear, who can blame them. Downloading a plugin and watching three YouTube videos doesn't replace a 4-year education as a sound engineer with many years of added practice (would you expect that every mastering engineer can write a song, play the instrument, or arrange a composition?) Think about all the mistakes someone can make with a compressor by misaligning the threshold, ratio, gain, release, and attack. Now use a Multiband Compressor and you can multiply the potential damage by a factor of 4.

How about spending more time on the mix of the individual tracks to make them sound better "glued" together, and only if you feel that the track still sounds "unglued", then try the Multiband Compressor (if you know what you are doing and know what you are hearing).

The short term is the loudness coming in moment to moment, sort of like a peak meter but not really

The technical term for "moment to moment" is "integration time", and the integration time (like "rolling window") for the Short-term Loudness Meter is 3s. That has nothing to do with a Peak Meter. Even the Momentary Loudness Meter (I-M) has an integration time of 400ms, which is still longer (slower) than an RMS meter (300ms). A Peak Meter (PPM), on the other hand, has an integration time of 5ms.

Basically play the loudest section of your song, and read the LU-I meter after a few bars, or even let the whole song play and see what the meter says at the end. If your goal is -10 LUFS, after playing the loudest section or the whole song, the LU-I meter should be no closer to 0 than -10.

This statement is completely wrong. The purpose of the LU-I (that measures the so-called "Program Loudness") is to measure the entire track from the beginning to the end to get an integrated level, averaged over the entire length of the program. No matter if it is a 3min song, a 45min podcast or a 2h movie. That measured LU-I level is then used against the Target Level (at the streaming service or broadcast station) to determine at the end if your track will be played back with Gain change (plus the consideration of your TruPeak level).

---- HOWEVER -----

As I mentioned in my previous posts. All these Loudness Level considerations are not needed when delivering tracks of your score to the dubbing stage. The only criteria should be, do the cues sound good, and with "do they sound good" I mean in the context of the other sounds that are going on during that scene. If your tracks fights again a raging gun battle with helicopters, sirens, and explosion, you might have a different approach to limiting than a quiet scene where only your gentle, beautiful acoustic guitar is playing.

Once you decide to release the music cues of your score as individual tracks (CDs, or streaming) then you can consider the mastering stage. In big productions, the music might be even remixed for a music-only release anyways.

Hope that helps,

Edgar Rothermich

Graphically Enhanced Manuals (GEM)

www.LogicProGEM.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/MusicTechExplained/

So depending on the network or platform, the broadcast loudness standard will be different and vary around -24 to -18 LUFS. But typically when they use music, the songs they use are already mastered for CD audio which is anywhere from -10 to -6 LUFS. I imagine that whatever volume you deliver will be adjusted by their mixer. Even for broadcast I would bring the levels to around -10 LUFS. But more importantly, I would make sure that the sample rate is 48kHz.

So on the right side of the multimeter you should see the LUFS meter, and under it should be two different readouts: One being LU-I and the other LU-S, meaning Integrated and Short Term. The short term is the loudness coming in moment to moment, sort of like a peak meter but not really, and the integrated is the average level over time, some call it long term. The LU-I is the main one to keep an eye on. Basically play the loudest section of your song, and read the LU-I meter after a few bars, or even let the whole song play and see what the meter says at the end. If your goal is -10 LUFS, after playing the loudest section or the whole song, the LU-I meter should be no closer to 0 than -10.

Mastering as it was originally conceived and applied had nothing to making something as loud as possible. It had everything to do with making an album's worth of songs cohesive. Often an album's worth of music was recorded in more than one studio, different microphones were used, different engineers..etc. The mastering engineer's job with to bring all the songs under one umbrella, a consistent volume and EQ. Ballads we're brought down in relation to the rockers, this is from a time when there were more than two dynamic levels. :-)

Just get a good mix at a moderate volume lever, as Edgar mentioned it will be loaded into a digital video editing machine and mixed with other tracks, voice overs, sound efx. At broadcast time it will go through a couple of leveling amplifiers.

If you do use the multipressor, I would put it before the limiter, though multiband compression isn't necessary unless you need that extra glue and control for certain frequencies. But after the limiter should be the multimeter, or at the very least the loudness meter because they both read in LUFS. The limiter should be the very last stage of processing, and then a meter to read what the limiter is doing. If you put a meter before the limiter, the meter won't be able to see what the limiter is doing, so it's best to keep the meter last.

Pancenter and Edgar are on the money, particularly the point about cohesion. The loudness escalator is something that IMO has had a very negative impact on recorded music and a generation of mixers and producers who believe it’s all about limiting music to an inch of its life, routinely put compression on everything, have a zillion plugins on every track........phew, I best go and lie down.

I do occasionally use this reference site when I need to upload to cloud services though, as Edgar says it can be useful to know some of the streaming service target levels.

https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/

hope it goes well Kerochan.

Liipeth asked me what part of the statements in his comments I had an issue with. To be more specific, I list those quotes and add my comment to them individually. 

Warning, long post ahead.

Didn't know that there is 5000 character limit, so I split the post up in Part 1 and Part 2

PART 1

Raise the gain on your limiter until the meter reads about about -10 long term LUFS

This is a dangerous cookie-cutter advice. Inexperienced users will follow that without listening to the damage of the sonic quality of their track. They would not know how to set the Attack or Release, which could make a track from sounding ok to completely destroyed. BTW -10LUFS Integrated Loudness will lead to gain penalties on most streaming service.

Make sure to knock the limiter's output gain to around -1dB so you don't clip the system

First of all, setting the output gain of "a" limiter to -1dB doesn't guarantee that you won't have any clipping. There are a few more aspects about that:

_ You have to use a Treu Peak meter to make sure that you are not clipping

_ Better, use a Limiter that has oversampling in its detection circuit

_ The reason to keep -1dBTP is not only to avoid clipping on your system, it is to provide headroom for any data compression later (mp3, AAC) that could result in a clipped output signal even if the input signal is 0dBTP.

_ Although -1dBTP is the requirement in most Loudness standards, some recommend to keep a -2dBTP, especially with highly compressed material that could have a higher chance to result in clipping after encoding or on cheap DA converters.

If everything sounds too squashed, you might need to make adjustments to the levels in your mix

Your main objective when mixing is to achieve a good sound, whatever you consider a good sound. The reason to use any Plugin in your mix should be to achieve the sound you want and not because someone told you to use it. If your mix sounds good without any plugin, good. If your mix sounds good with five Compressors and Limiters on a Channel Strip, good.

That whole "mastering, mastering, mastering" movement over the last few years did more damage to tracks than anything good. It shifted away from concentrating on a good sounding mix to showing plugins at a mix with the false promise that it sounds louder (=better) while completely side-tracking the ultimate goal of a good mix, i.e. dynamic, transients, no distortion, no pumping, etc...

So depending on the network or platform, the broadcast loudness standard will be different and vary around -24 to -18 LUFS

First of all, the term "broadcast" refers to some sort of national (or regulated) institution broadcasting TV program like the BBC, CBS, NBC, but also Netflix, etc. The Target Level for the two main standards are -23LUFS (Europe, EBU R128) and -24LUFS (America, ATSC A/85). This also applies to some spoke words channel.

Target Levels for streaming services (iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc.) is a different story because these are private companies that choose their own standard (often without revealing the details). They us a Target Levels between -16LUFS to -14LUFS.

But typically when they use music, the songs they use are already mastered for CD audio which is anywhere from -10 to -6 LUFS

All the tracks that are played on streaming services that were released before the Loudness Normalization standards are mastered for CD (or vinyl). If you measure them (especially the loudness ware casualties), then they could go up to -10LUFS and -6LUFS. That's were the achievements in "Loudest" will haunt them and they are get turned down by a few dBs. Nowadays, all professional releases are mastered for multiple platforms, paying close attention to the individual loudness requirement. BTW, this is one area that makes a good mastering engineer, to know all these details and follow up the ever changing landscape (or let's call it what it is, a mess.

Instead of piling limiter on your master track when you self-master your track, maybe you should consider to listen to it when it is encoded with lossy compression. Do you know the used Bitrate, with or without VBR. There are so many variables and that is the were the mastering engineer should add his or her expertise.

>>>> continues on Part 2 >>>>>

Have they not said how they want the music at all?

Iaamusic wrote:

The loudness escalator is something that IMO has had a very negative impact on recorded music and a generation of mixers and producers who believe it’s all about limiting music to an inch of its life, routinely put compression on everything, have a zillion plugins on every track........phew, I best go and lie down.

Agreed, even the last part. :-)

Trying to imagine the travesty of limiting/compressing Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" to current standards, every drop of subtlety lost in time, like tears in the rain. We always seem to run to the lowest common denominator.

Plus means they will add that to your level, so + means "it can be this much louder". Minus means "it is too loud".

It says so in the short explanation below the results: