Preparing Your Music For Mastering If you're looking to release a record that you've produced at home, it's a good idea to have the product professionally mastered, but it's not always obvious if a mix is adequately finished. We find out how to prepare your songs for the mastering house, and what the engineer can do for you. Tom Flint One of the questions Sound On Sound is asked by its readers most frequently goes something like this: 'Why don't my recordings sound as polished as a commercial record release?' In the following pages we'll find out by talking to a top mastering engineer. Like a typical SOS reader, I've been recording and producing an album at home in a flawed acoustic environment using less than perfect monitoring and some budget gear! For monitoring my mixes I used a pair of B&W DM303 speakers, which, although designed for hi-fi use, are known for their fairly neutral response. My chosen mastering engineer was Ray Staff at Alchemy Soho, in London. Spotting Mistakes Preparing The Ingredients
Music Thing: A Radio Sequencer, How to Get Into DIY Synth Modules, How to Have Fun Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store? For years, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech. Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. Hey, isn’t that what the drug dealer said in those just-say-no instructional videos we watched in the 80s? Since buying a Eurorack modular synth a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time building DIY synth modules and reading about synths and the people who build them. The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. There’s a lot to buy – a kind of infrastructure you need before doing anything – soldering kit, a multimeter, and a stock of components. Reading List
Free books: 100 legal sites to download literature The Classics Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here. Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Textbooks Math and Science Children’s Books Philosophy and Religion Plays
Mastering Engineer - Matt Colton Matt Colton, mastering engineer at London’s legendary AIR Studios, talks about the highs and lows of the job, outlines the skills required to become a world-class mastering engineer and sings the praises of a good lunch. Name Matt Colton Place of work AIR Studios, Hampstead, London Job Mastering Engineer How long have you had the job? I’ve been at AIR for three years but I’ve been a mastering engineer for 15 years in total. Describe a typical working day Hectic! I like to get as many clients to sit in as possible so I’ll usually have people with me at various point throughout the day. If I’m mastering an album then that’ll probably be the only session I do that day – we’ll hang out and spend all day EQing and tweaking the audio until it sounds as good as it can, then later on in the afternoon or evening I’ll run out the parts. If I have a day of mastering singles and 12-inches then sessions may only last two to four hours each, so I’ll have lots of different people in and out during the day.
Exclusive Interview with Diego Stocco, A “Sound Magician” | Sonic Terrain You probably have heard about Diego Stocco, a composer and sound designer with a pretty particular way of creating sonic experiences mostly using rare instruments, found sounds and by doing special explorations of the sonic environment. He has done a lot of fantastic videos exploring different perspectives of field recording, sound design and experimental composition, actually creating its own instruments or using the whole environment as an instrument. He has recently finished a work called “Diego Stocco – Sound Magician” for DTS company, where he did small but interesting projects on exploring sonority and reality in a very interesting way. I recently did an interview with Diego for the Spanish site Hispasonic and he asked me if I could publish the interview in English as well so it can reach more people. He is a really nice person with a fantastic imagination and approach to sound and I thought his view and experiments would be something Sonic Terrain readers would enjoy.
Digital Marketing Jobs & Social Media Talents: Firebrand Ideas Ignition 20 Tips On Home Mastering Now that so many musicians are completing the entire album-making process in their own studios, mastering is becoming an increasingly important skill. Paul White offers a few pointers to becoming a Master of mastering. There's a world of difference between what happens in a professional mastering suite and what the average project studio owner can do at home. But as more computer-based mastering tools become available it's quite possible to achieve very impressive results with relatively inexpensive equipment. Certainly there's a lot more to mastering than simply compressing everything, though compression can play an important role. Every mastering engineer has preferences regarding the best tools for the job, but if you're just getting started I'd recommend a good parametric equaliser, a nice compressor/limiter, and perhaps an enhancer, such as an Aphex Exciter or an SPL Vitalizer. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
The guide to sound effects I like to think of such sounds as having two general components: a ‘defining’ one, and an ‘impact’ one. The defining one is what sounds up front and tells the listener what the sound is, especially if combined with picture. The impact one can be anything at all, designed only to pump up the sound to hyper-real. For defining sounds, simply record what things really are: For a face slap for example, record a real slap, hand clap, slap on thigh, etc. For a body kick, record a fist on chest thud, etc. For impact sounds, anything goes. Other purely impact sounds: kick drum, fist-pound on closet door (tapered), car door slam (tapered), kicked or stick-hit cardboard box, leather belt snap, whip crack, etc. In my opinion, especially what I’m loosely calling the “impact” component can and often should be gain-maximized and mixed with the “defining” so that the defining is still the part that gives the information as to what the sound is. - Clint Bajakian
25 Killer Websites that Make You Cleverer It’s easy to forget that we have access to a virtually limitless resource of information, i.e. the Internet. For a lot of us, this is even true at our fingertips, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and an ever-increasing push for online greatness by tech engineers all over the world. As a result, there are countless websites out there that are geared to make you smarter and more brilliant for either a low or no cost. 1. This isn’t the first time I’ve recommended this language-teaching website (and app), and it certainly won’t be the last. 2. Have you ever wanted to pick up a subject you’re not well-versed in, but you didn’t have the money to invest in a college course? 3. Guitar is one of the few instruments out there that’s actually pretty easy to learn if you’re a little older, making it one of the most accessible instruments. 4. Founded by Michael Chu, Cooking for Engineers goes further than just providing recipes. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 19. 20. 21. 22.
CD/Audio Mastering - Recording Studio Tips - Compression I have experimented with Cakewalk but I don't think I fully understand compressor and EQ settings. Can you help? -Shannon Compression and limiting are simple to understand with just a bit of explaination. The first setting is the threshold - which is the point at which the device works. How much it's turned down is determined by the compression ratio. 4:1 compression ratio means that for every four dB of signal that goes into the unit, it turns it down so that only 1 dB comes out. 8:1 means that for every 8 dB that's put in, an increase of 1 dB is what goes out. The attack time is when (how soon or how fast) the gain reduction unit starts altering the sound. Limiting (which is really just more compression) starts up at 10:1 and goes up from there. Since 2:1 - 6:1 is a more subtle amount of alteration to the sound, it can be used for more containment, for instance on vocals, bass, etc. Limiting can serve to keep you out of the red, but often I prefer it used on individual tracks.
The sexiness of ambient sound design: How inFamous: Second Son leverages next-generation audio Brad Meyer is the audio director on inFAMOUS: Second Son, and he’s excited about the possibilities that the next-generation systems offer developers. We don’t often talk about sound when we fantasize about what the extra CPU, GPU, and RAM will do for game development, but Meyer took the press through a series of demos about what is now possible in the game’s audio design. We stood in a small room covered in recording equipment and expensive looking microphones, as he played sounds and explained the complexity of the game’s audio. Including the microphone built into the Dual Shock 4. He also admitted that this was a trick we’ve seen before, but the PlayStation 4 will do it better. Next-generation sound, not just graphics Meyer walked us through the creation of the sound that plays when you throw smoke from your fingertips in the game. “We’re getting way more detail, because it’s next-gen, we have more memory,” he explained. This is what you get moving from 512MB of RAM to 8GB. Ambience