Make the transitions pop

Here’s another good little mastering trick. You know how sometimes you can have a moment in a song you’re working on where there’s a little breakdown and then it comes back strong on the downbeat? Something that can be amazing is to grab a little bit of the buildup to the downbeat, and the downbeat itself, and to goose their clip gain a little bit. Like this:

This is a stretch of a song I was working on the other day. As you can see in the waveforms, it’s chugging along, then there’s a pause, then there’s a little pickup guitar riff (panned to the right), then everything comes back in on the downbeat.

What I did was I separated out the pickup riff and the downbeat — they’re highlighted in the waveform in white. And I gave that clip a +1.5 dB gain boost on the waveform.

(Giving the clip the gain boost, as opposed to automating volume for that moment, is key. Because the waveform is before any subsequent processes, boosting it pushes that little moment a bit harder into any compression / EQ / saturation / clipping / limiting / etc that you have going on, which makes it kick a tiny bit more ass for that moment. Volume automation is post plugins and doesn’t have the same effect.)

The end result is that that little pickup guitar riff gets a spotlight moment, and that downbeat has an extra pop, and we’re off and running. Killer trick.

Still being manipulative — jamie