Why mastering your audio is vital

Mastering is the most mysterious and least understood of all audio processes. Sometimes referred to the “black art”, there are many misconceptions around it. Many budding audio producers and composers confuse it with mixing. Mixing and mastering are 2 separate processes and have completely different processing goals. Mastering is a final and the most important step in getting your audio to sound like a million dollar.

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In Wall Speaker Placement, Finding the Optimal Sound Field

Now that you’ve spent money on that 5.1 surround sound, you want to find the perfect place to put those speakers, and because you don’t want to take up any precious floor space, you have chosen to also buy In Wall Speakers. Taking the following five tips into consideration when placing a 5.1 channel speaker system can help you get a great-sounding home theater system experience.

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How EDM Is Changing Mixing And Mastering

EDM creators are finding less of an need for a separate mixing and mastering engineer, and much of that comes from the old school industry failing to embrace change.

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Why peaking near 0dBFS is unnecessary when mixing audio

Modern digital audio workstations can operate at 24 bit resolution and above, this provides a theoretical dynamic range of 144dB. This in practice is usually limited to around 120dB due to the limitations of the analog circuits that convert the audio to and from digital. The small analog operational amplifiers in the sound cards will produce a noise floor slightly above the digital noise floor. With this in mind it comes as a surprise that many people mix with their DAW meters peaking very close to the top of the scale.

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Digital Mixtape promotion, easy and beautiful

Re-caught  is a new and easy app that lets you create your own digital mixtapes from music you find on youtube. Whether you find music and want to remember and play it for your own or create mixtapes for friends as a gift. One thing that was important when designing re-caught was to make sure that tapes cannot be modified later on and are created anonymously. You don’t need to sign up or register to create mixtapes or play them ! 

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The basics of side chain compression

This is a post by mastering engineer Barry Gardner who operates SAS Mastering
http://www.masteringmastering.co.uk/onlinemasteringservices.html

What is side chain processing?

Side chain compression is often seen as a complicated production technique but assuming you understand the basics of compression there should not be any troubles understanding how it works. Most audio compressors work by controlling the input signal using the same signals dynamics, so for example when there is a loud section in a vocal recording the peak in the vocal gets reduced in volume. This has the effect of evening out the level of the singing. It is a very common and useful technique for many types of instrument and most modern music mixes will have a reasonable amount of compression occurring.

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Unit Audio Announces the “New Unit” 16 x 2 Analog Summing Mixer

Unit Audio recently released the New Unit 16 x 2 analog summing mixer. The New Unit features 16 channels of actual physical Analog Summing for less than $300.00. That’s less than the cost of plug-ins designed to emulate analog summing. Like all Unit Audio mixers, the “Unit “ it is completely hand assembled, tested, and wired point to point in Nashville, TN using only the highest quality components like Neutik connectors and Xicon resistors.

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Joe Solo: Commonsense advice sprinkled with gems

The more emails and tips I get from this guy, the more his great advice sinks in - and I’m not a working/recording musician. It’s just damned good advice. A mix of “DOH! slap me up side the head” commonsense stuff that we need to be reminded of constantly - sprinkled with brilliant gems of creative advice. I heard him speak at a couple of different songwriter workshops and conferences within a 3-month time span, and then I signed up for his free email tips and video nuggets. It’s THAT good that I suggest y’all do the same at his website joesolo dot com. Did I mention that it’s FREE!!!!  End of public service announcement. :-)

How to produce a louder mix

We know the ‘loudness wars’ is a constantly hot topic in music production circles and one common belief is that a loud master is produced in the mastering stage. Certainly mastering can increase the perceived volume of a mix down. However there is often a limitation to how loud a mix can get before it starts to produce undesirable side effects such as distortion, loss of detail, loss of dynamics etc. I am occasionally asked how you can produce loud mixes and I would in the very first instance suggest mixing to sound good and not just loud. People should also consider the genre they are working in, the needs for a drum and bass/dubstep track are very different for a folk or ambient piece so be sensitive to the musical genre within which you are working. Also consider that software like iTune Soundcheck is also making “loudness” somewhat less relevant as it tries to even out perceived volumes of tracks in the playback domain.

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How to get your bass line and kick drum to work together

We all like great sounding bass, right ? We all agree on that, however a number of producers and engineers have some difficulty in getting the low end frequencies in an audio mix to sound just right. This is going to include your kick drum and your bass line. Getting these instruments to marry nicely can be hard work and these top tips will definitely help you improve the sound of your tracks low end.

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Starting to mix music tracks

Starting to mix music is exciting and I wanted to produce a short document that gives some good starting advice. Of course it will be impossible to teach someone how to mix perfectly in such a short time but this guide will point you in the right direction towards important concepts to understand.

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Stereo bus compressor

You often hear that people like to use a compressor on their stereo master bus. Historically large format mixing consoles often had a high quality compressor built in that you could assign to the stereo master bus. A classic example would be the SSL compressor as found in the master section of the mixing console. This is a well known compressor and it has a fairly clean yet aggressive character when set to it’s fastest time constants. This is a stereo bus compressor that is often used on rock mixes to give them a little extra drive and punch. It can however be set just to tickle the music and gently apply gain reduction on peaks in the programme material.

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Music Without Labels Seeking Submissions for New Web Series!

Hello Everyone!

I am the spokesperson for Music Without Labels & Beat-Play LLC.  MWL is an umbrella for many music projects, ideas and conversation. The MWL Live just wrapped up a on a 15,000 mile cross-country video tour covering the hottest summer musicians and artists across the country. We featured several great bands such as Portugal. The Man, Datsik, The Lonely Forest, Yann Tiersen, Carina Round, Vintage Trouble, Dry the River, Washed Out, Gardens & Villa, Fun. and many more! Check out the MWL Live Tour 2012 videos here. 

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Using a reference track during mixing

If you are a musician who is also doing your own mixing and recording you are likely to need as much help as possible achieving a good mix down. One way of understanding how your mixing is holding up against professionally engineered records is to listen against a reference which you admire the sound of within the genre of music you work with. There are a few pointers which can make this much more successful.

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