Sage Audio Articles

How to Prepare Your Mix for Mastering

When preparing a mix for mastering, your output should be peaking around -3dBTP without the use of limiters, excessive bus compression, or any other form of mastering used on the mix. Additionally, it’s best to export your mix with the same sampling rate and bit depth as the original recording.

Free vs. Cheap vs. Expensive Saturation Plugins

Saturators have become increasingly important over the past couple of decades.

How to Master a Song in 11 Easy Steps

Mastering a song can be difficult, but breaking it down into steps can keep things simple.

Top 7 Free Mastering Limiter Plugins

Whether you’re trying to maximize the loudness of your mix for demos, or you’re preparing your final mix for distribution - having a go-to limiter is a must-have for a lot of engineers.

Free vs. Cheap vs. Expensive Plugins: Digital Compressors

The right plugin is always difficult to find. Regardless of whether you’re new to audio production or have been involved for some time, finding a great plugin you know, you’ll use for a while can be a challenge.

Mastering Voice-Over Dialogue for Video

Mastering Voice-Over Dialogue for Video is the process of preparing a vocal recording for distribution - most likely on YouTube.

Top 9 Free Analog Emulation Plugins

Analog emulation has become increasingly popular. Digital processing, with all of its conveniences, misses the mark in one major way - tonality.

What is Music Mastering?

Music Mastering is a step in music production in which an audio recording (typically a stereo music mix) is prepared for distribution. How a mix is prepared for distribution during music mastering depends on the genre of the music, the intended platform it will be distributed on, and other factors.

Top 10 Free Audio Sample Websites

FreeSound, MusicRader, SampleSwap, Hip-Hop Makers, Sample Focus, Bedroom Producers, Sound Packs, NASA Audio Collection

Top 10 Free Mixing Plugins

Sete Chave - Audio Fusion Bureau / Feedback Compressor II - Tokyo Dawn Labs / Blindfold EQ - Audio Thing

Mastering Music for Film and Video

Mastering Music for Film and Video is the process of preparing musical recordings for distribution through visual media like movies, television shows, and video blog posts.

Top 11 Free Reverb Plugins

Artificial reverb is one of the most important parts of modern audio production.

What is Audio Mastering?

Audio mastering is the process of preparing an audio recording for various means of distribution - how an audio recording is mastered depends on the type of media, the client’s intentions and desired style, and the medium of distribution. Audio mastering is a complex and intricate process, best reserved for professionals.

How to Mix a Song with Samples

Mixing a song with samples means knowing how to make your samples sound the best they possibly can, and knowing the easiest and best ways for replacing aspects of your mix with samples. Mixing a song with samples means knowing some of the ins and out of your DAW.

Top 5 Free Synth Instrument Plugins

A good sounding synth can be hard to come by. Sometimes they have too particular of a sound that doesn’t exactly match the genre you’re creating.