If you’re ever worried about your mixes being turned down by streaming services like Spotify or Youtube, you’ll love this new free tool. It’s a loudness penalty analyzer, and it will tell you instamagically whether your music will be turned down by YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, Pandora and Apple Sound Check. You’ll get a so-called Loudness Penalty score, and...
Tourists are so hot for Iceland right now it’s exhausting. Whenever somebody excitedly tells me they’re going, I tell them, Don’t. It’s overpriced and full of tourists. It’s a combination of a joke and a warning. I tell them: if you’re going, treat my country well. There are too many idiot tourists out there with...
If you mix your own music, you might be worried about whether it’s dynamic enough. How do you know if your’re compressing your mixes “just enough?” Your mixes can’t be too hot, where they sound squashed an over-compressed, like Papa Bear’s porridge. And you can’t have your mixes too quiet either because they’ll just sound thin and weak,...
If you’ve ever mastered your own mixes, you might be familiar with the sense of confusion you have for trying to make something better that you already think is pretty kick-ass. I mean…you mixed it and you’re happy with the mix so you don’t really know exactly what you’re supposed to do? Maybe some multi-band...
It’s the best feeling. You send the band their final mixes, mastered together in a nice playlist that plays seamlessly from one song to the next. Even though we did the songs throughout the course of the year, they all sounded nicely balanced from one to the other. And man do they sound aggressive! The...
Got this question from a reader about mastering. Since Ian Shepherd just opened up his Home Mastering Masterclass I thought it was a great question to answer this week. As per my knowledge, Mixing means to adjust volume levels, EQ, compress, etc to make the overall track sound good. Mastering means to polish or give...
Hey everyone, I hope you’re having an awesome Wednesday! I don’t know about you but I do all my mastering in the box. All inside my computer, with only plug-ins. I’m sure you’re the same way? Well…ok, maybe not all of you. Some of you might be holding out until analog becomes the standard again?...
Ian Shepherd just sent me a couple screenshots of the mastering EQ he used on a couple tracks of The Long Wait album. Even he thought they looked a bit scary! But the thing is, and I’ve been listening to the album masters multiple times, it sounds great! We often get worried about whether we’re boosting...
I’ve got some exciting stuff for you today. I sat down with Ian Shepherd of Production Advice and we talked about his process of mastering The Long Wait’s debut album. In case you didn’t know, The Long Wait is my band. We recorded the album in the last year and after producing, recording and mixing the entire thing...
Ian Shepherd wrote a great post called Do You Make These 6 Home Mastering Mistakes. I’ve been guilty of a few of them in the past, especially #1, but continuous improvement is the way to mastery (no pun intended). Learn Home Mastering in 8 Weeks If improving your mastering is something you’re interested in I...