What is mastering? Is it putting every processor on your mixed song and hoping for the best? Is it making it as loud as possible and hoping it song? (No, it isn’t. Sorry Lars Ulrich…) Well, if that’s not what mastering is, what is it really? And more importantly, how can you learn how to...
Got this interesting question about normalization in mastering: Well, if I’ve got a bunch of tracks and I want to get them all in the same range and everything, I make a CD of them using Windows Media Player, then rip the tracks back off the CD. Why? Because Windows Media Player uses Normalization on...
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...
I’m dedicating this week to fighting The Loudness Wars. What war is that? The war where everyone is competing to be the loudest kid in the room. It’s similar to yelling at you at the same time. Who are you going to listen to when everybody is screaming for you to hear their spiel? You’re gonna...
You might have noticed more mastering posts than usual last week. hope you got a kick out of it too. But the reason I focused more on mastering than usual is because my buddy Ian Shepherd just came out with an amazing ebook about Multiband Compression in Mastering. It’s called, simply enough, “Mastering with Multiband...
He didn’t do it, I swear! I stand before you today to argue the case for the falsely accused. The limiter is being charged with high crimes of loudness and dynamic squashing. Even though music is louder and less dynamic than ever, the fact is that it wasn’t the limiter’s doing. He was just a...
What are you scared about this Halloween? If you’re like most us, chances are you’re scared of mastering. Mastering is like black magic. Especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. You just insert the typical processors that the mastering engineers use and then you pray for the best. Usually, the results are less...
As a musician it is highly recommended that you use 24 bit resolution in your digital audio workstation. This affords a number of real advantages and not just when processing the audio with plug-in software. Why 24 bit Recording? When you set your DAW to 24 bit you have allowed yourself to record at a...