Suggestions on Preparing for a Session:
If you are bringing audio files, please make sure that each file is at its highest individual resolution. It is not necessary to convert them all to the same resolution.
It is preferable to bring the files as data files on either a hard drive or jump drive, rather than on optical media. The files can either be interleaved or dual mono. .AIFF or .WAV/BWAV are the preferred types. It’s helpful to be organized with your content, so you don’t have to search for it at the start of the session.
If bringing an analog tape, make sure there are test tones on the tape for proper alignement, and please bring any notes you have about noise reduction, tape speed and location of songs.
Know all of your song titles, and come prepeared with at least a working song order.
ISRC codes are recommended. They can be found here for RIAA.org The application process can take several days, so plan accordingly.
Check with your manufacturer to find out what type of master they require (or prefer ). This information will allow me to make the best master possible, and will ensure your manufacturing production goes smoothly.
**********
Things You Need to Know About Mastering Your Music
The mastering engineer is the last step of the artistic phase, and the first step of the manufacturing phase. It’s the final opportunity to listen, polish, and make a change in the sonic presentation. It is also the first step of the manufacturing phase, because it prepares the master in the way that best suits the needs of the manufacturer.
The goal is to listen to the broad picture; the actual content is immaterial. The mastering engineer is paying attention to EQ presentation, to level presentation, to dynamics presentation. It’s taking a collection of songs, and creating a flowing body of work.
A Bit of History
Mastering has changed greatly since the late 1950s, when mass-produced music became the norm. At the time, record labels owned studios, and the labels employed the engineers. Engineers started their careers as apprentices, and the first stop on their path was to apprentice with the mastering engineer. This was to develop and hone their listening skills. The mastering engineer was responsible for transferring the final tapes from the mix/balance engineer, and ensuring that the transfer to lacquer (the master at the time) was as accurate as possible. The whole goal was to duplicate the tape sound on the disc. In the process of apprenticeship, the new engineer listened to hundreds and hundreds of transfers, and learned the subtleties of this art from a seasoned professional. As the new engineer gained skills, he or she typically moved to training with the mix engineer, and recording engineer.
As the studio/label relationship broke down over the years, engineers became independent, and started working in different studios. The challenge here was that each studio had a different mix environment. The engineers were then tasked to polish the results from a less familiar environment, using the tools they had at their disposal: EQ, dynamics, processing, and levels. This is the situation we are still in today, in which the role of the mastering engineer has expanded to become the final check for both the technical and artistic aspects of a project.
Preparing Your Mixes for Mastering
1) Be Prepared
When you show up at the session, it’s essential that you are prepared. You should clearly label which are the final mixes you’d like the engineer to use. You should have all the details of the file finalized such as song titles, sequencing, and metadata such as ISRC codes and CD text. It’s also important to have documentation of any known problems with the files as well. Accurately note the existence and location of glitches, digital errors, distortion, bad edits, and level problems. This will save a lot of time and money during the mastering stage.
Additionally, you should know who the manufacturer will be, and what their requirements are for type of master and method of delivery. Make sure the songs have been accurately timed out, so that they will comfortably fit the size of the intended format(s). If you are supplying the pre-master mixes on an analog format (like tape), it is very important to include full reference tones and documentation of the specifics. This assures that the material will be played back at proper levels and bias.
2) Provide Alternate Mixes
A preferable way to present files is for the mix engineer to include alternative versions of the mix: vocal up, vocal down, solo up, solo down, etc. Remember it is important keep these alternate mixes well marked, organized, and documented.
With the advent of DAWs, one question that has come up is whether it is preferable to have stems as part of the delivery. Some engineers prefer stems to allow more tweaking and flexibility in the mastering process. However, there are also several potential drawbacks to this.
Including stems can blur the line between mixing and mastering. The mastering engineer can start to lose objectivity, because he or she is now tasked with balancing the final mix. Another concern is that the character of the whole doesn’t necessarily translate to the character of each of the stems. In trying to optimize each individual stem, the result is often detrimental to the nature of the final mix.
3) Don’t Over-Compress the Final Mix
Digital audio files should be delivered at the same resolution as the recording. It’s important that the mixes include some headroom to allow the mastering engineer room to work. A good rule of thumb is to have peaks at around -3 dBfs with an average (rms) around -10 to -14 dBfs. Final buss compression should remain minimal, because it’s not something the mastering engineer can undo. A standard practice can include final compression of the mixes as a reference file to the artist, but it’s best when that’s not included in the delivered files for mastering. With high-resolution audio there is no advantage to maxing out the levels.
In a related issue, it’s helpful to not have fades included on the final mixes. The mastering engineer can make fades shorter, but can’t make them longer. Sometimes in the sequencing you realize you want it longer than you thought you did, just to keep things flowing properly.
A Note on Loudness
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of loudness. There are pros and cons to having high levels, but there’s a point where it can be too loud or too quiet. A misconception about a loud file is that it will sound louder on the radio, when in fact the opposite is true. Going through all the compressors on the broadcast can clamp onto a signal and hold it back. The louder a song, the smaller it will sound on the radio.
Similarly, a misconception about MP3s is that the louder the song, the better they sound. The purpose of an MP3 is essentially to shrink the file size, which occurs by eliminating data. The algorithms are designed to throw away data below a certain threshold. Low-level information is discarded. A highly compressed song has no low-level content, therefore the algorithm is throwing away information you can hear.
4) Gear Is Great; the Room Is Better
The most important piece of equipment for a mastering engineer, besides his or her own ears, is the room. The feedback given by the room affects the perspective and opinions of mastering engineers, which in turn influence the decisions they make. A revealing monitoring environment tells everything about the mix – the good and the bad. This is necessary for mastering engineers to be able to make accurate changes that affect the final translatability of the audio. One of the goals of mastering is to ensure that the project sounds as good as it can on a wide variety of playback systems.
It is always best if you can involve your mastering house early in the process. Get the specifics for submittal before the final mixes if possible. If they are willing and time permits, submitting your mixes ahead of the mastering session can allow for detection of problems and suggestions for improvement.
Mastering is the final creative step to take your mixes to the next level. The specialized equipment, finely tuned monitoring environment, and most importantly, the unbiased experience of a pro will help you hone your material to a competitive edge.
Following these suggestions can help you enter this final stage with confidence, and help you maximize your time for a smooth and productive session. This will ultimately save you time and money, prepping the way for a productive and hopefully enjoyable experience.
___________________________________________
A lot has been said about the comparisons between analog and digital recordings. There are a few common misconceptions about mixing in the digital domain versus the analog domain. Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) are very common these days. Much more so than analog consoles or tape machines. Something I would like to point out is the deference in approach to working with digital sound.
In an analog session, the information is stored on a tape machine and routed through an analog console. With, perhaps, outboard analog equipment such as EQs and Compressors in the signal path. This signal is the result of the flow of electrons through electrical components like resistors and capacitors, tubes and transformers, and amplifiers and VCAs. What happens to the electrons as they flow is that the nature of the resistance and capacitance create heat and distortion as the signal is affected by the physical components. The resultant signal is then combined with other similar signals to create the final mix signal.
In the digital domain, we are working only with binary digits. 1′s and 0′s. The signal in digital audio is described by its digital resolution. For instance, 44.1khz/16 bit. Or 96khz/24 bit. It is also described by its computational length. For example, a DAW calculates the change in signal as a function of word resolution; 32 bit floating point, 48 bit fixed point etc. The fixed or floating point arithmetic describes how the decimal point behaves. Regardless of the type, there is a fixed length of digital information that each DAW adheres to for is ability to represent digital audio. I like to look at this as a glass. Let’s consider a channel in a DAW that has a finite volume. In that glass is the amount of information that each channel holds. If the glass is completely empty (no signal) then the digital description is all zeros. If the glass is completely full ( 0 dbfs ) then it is comprised of all 1s. Everything in between is a combination of 1s and 0s. When you make a change to the audio, let’s say a .1db change in gain, you are adding two digital words together of equal length to create a word that is twice as long as the DAW can retain. The remainder is thrown away or truncated. In the analog domain, you would be adding more voltage to the channel which would create more lever, heat, resistance etc, ( it is not thrown away, it is like the glass does not overflow. )
Let’s look at the effects of digital summing. when each channel is like a glass that contains a limited amount of content and you combine it with another channel, you are adding those signals together and the resultant is a glass that is the same size as you started with. In the case of a drum mix, for example, that you would combing the signals of the kick, snare, hit, and two overhead mics. With these five channels, it would be like pouring the contents of each glass into one glass that is the same size as each channel. What you would end up with after you are done is a completely full glass with a lot of information “spilled.”
That information that is spilled is all of the low level, but very necessary, information that pertains to things like overtones, room reflections and detail in the instruments themselves. Now consider what happens when you do that for each of the busses in an entire mix, like guitars, keyboards, vocals etc. You are now taking all of the guitar channels and throwing away pertinent information, just like the drums. Now, what happens when you combing all of the sub mixes to the master out? The master is still like a glass that is the same size as the busses, and the channels. It hold only as much information as each of those channels.
A good question would be ” how much of the original snare drum sound is left in the final mix?” Not very much.
What happens to these signals is that we will compress and change the level of the final signal, and the busses, to accommodate for the final level. We know that we don’t want any overs that can cause distortion on the master out. So it gets compressed and limited to keep it from being too loud. But that method does not retain any of the original sound that was thrown away. It only makes what’s left not digitally distort. The sonic damage has been done.
A better way to approach digital would be to not have any dynamic processing on the final out. To not have too much level, or overs, would mean that all of the information in the busses combined would not be too much together.
…and to not have each buss have too much information without dynamic processing, each channel that is combined would need to be able to be added together such that that the respective busses would not distort.
Digital recording and mixing can really sound exceptional, as long as it is approached with the mindset of how digital functions. Analog and Digital both are excellent ways of recording and mixing sounds, but they need to be understood in how they are similar and how they are different.
