I got this great advice yesterday about mastering that I have to share with you. It was in the form of a comment to last Wednesday’s post. Glen Stephan of IndependentRecording.net shared two great methods of approaching a mastering session. His first method is starting with the quiet song: The first method, and the one...
…mastering more than one song at a time. You see, making one song sound good isn’t that difficult. We’ve talked about this before, and you should be familiar with the steps needed to get a good sounding master. But when you throw a few more songs into the mix it becomes trickier. Because the goal is...
I feel your fear. Not only is home mastering a little scary, but it’s even worse when you’re unfamiliar with the genre. I’m not especially good at synth-techno-euro-dub-rock, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t either. However, mastering is the easy part. It just takes a little extra effort and care. You just need...
Want to EQ Your Guitars so They Cut Through the Mix? Get the Free EQ Hacks With 71 Tips to Improve Your Mixes Right Here Where can I pinpoint that annoying tinny sound from my guitar? What guitar frequency is that? How do you cut that boomy and muddy sound out of your guitar production?...
Many of you have this simple problem. The guitar keeps getting in the way of the vocal. It drowns it out with the rocking riffs or spacious chords. Not that the guitar isn’t sounding absolutely amazing. It’s just that the vocal is kind of the main point here. It’s all about the vocal. Unless there’s...
This is a guest post from mastering engineer Barry Gardner who operates SafeandSound online mastering From time to time I hear a mix that has a dubious stereo image. This can affect both acoustic or electronic mixes. For acoustic mixes it is often the mic technique that creates a problematic stereo image. For electronic mixes,...
There hasn’t been much going on at the website lately, as you might have noticed. Don’t worry. I haven’t quit and I didn’t die. In fact, I’m recharged and ready to rock. When life happens and everything piles up at once, there are two things you can do. 1. Fail Steven Levitt, one of favorite...
Say hello to my little friend! Or rather, say hello to my three little gangsters that do your dirty EQ work for you. 1. The Thug The thug is like Joe Pesci from Casino. He’s the hired hand that does all the dirty work for the family. He doesn’t hesitate to get rid of you...
Homemade dollars and feel accomplished about your carpentry abilities. Homemade absorbers are a popular DIY project engineer. They’re fairly simple to make and really effective in the corner of your studio. Diffusers are more complex, but you can get away with a really simple design. This weekend I created five 2×4 bass traps to go...
Two quick announcements today for you, although they are very related. 1. The Best of Production Advice My friend Ian Shepherd over at Production Advice has come out with a new ebook, It’s exactly what it says in the title. It compiles all the best posts from his site into one convenient ebook package. I...