Well, I send all of my drums to a sub prior to going to the master so that I can raise or lower the gain of all of the drums at once.  Maybe that's what he meant by sub-master?

I think youre thinking the old analog console mixers 32X8X2 where the individual channles can be sent to one of the 8 sub s which are then sent to the two or one
that's live mixing   grat for grouping things and and in mixing down can find a use

A1MixMan

bitflipper


amiller, it sounds like you're just getting your feet wet with mastering. If that's the case then Ozone may be your best bet - it's specifically targeted for users who want good results but don't quite know what they're doing yet. That describes most of us here!

I have Ozone and it scares the hell out of me.  groove3.com has a new 3 1\2 hour tutorial on Ozone that I might pickup.
 
Brandon, you sound hungry with all this talk of cooking with salt and sausages. Damn, now I'M hungry...

I'm going through the ozone video's right now and learning so much.   For example, how to use EQ matching is so desired, or how to apply mastering reverb just to the sides, and not to the main mix.   Plus a whole lot more.  

Highly recommended if you do your own mastering IMO

I like Ozone's mastering reverb, but man is it a resource hog. Whew. It increases my CPU usage by 30%, that's a lot!

I didn't know you could apply it to just the sides, I'll have to check in to that!

You can actually do that with most of the effects in Ozone 4 I think.

Ozone is my favorite plugin of all time. Although I really like the Nomad Factory SC 226 channel strip. I got it in a no brainer deal for $20.  Best $20 I ever spent. Though Ozone is always in a mix some where.  BTW I don't see that much CPU usage with it. In the past I usually used it on a exported mix to stereo in my mastering template. Don't need to do that now.  Multi core ya have to love them! 

I've been using the Alloy a lot too.   It's a great little channel strip.

I think that any bus that feeds the master can be referred to as a sub master but what I'm thinking about had a specific 'sub master' bus set up for a very specific reason but I can't remember the details. Had something to do with fades applied to that sub master instead of the master, or maybe the final fade applied to that sub master instead of the master giving more control or? It made sense when I saw/heard it but I should have paid more attention. I believe it was on a Groove 3 video but it's long gone from memory now. If I learn more I'll post.

Here's a link to a great thread that links to a mixing template that utilises a couple of "sub-master busses" one for the left channel one for the right.

It's probably a little dated now in some of the plug-ins it uses but it was a big help to me when I first started mixing. I'm sure even experienced mixers may pick up something from it. I've cherry picked a few ideas from it.

it's well worth a look IMHO.

Thanks guys for all these great tips!!