The Audio Blog

You've just finished a mix. You've been sweating hours - no, days - until it's just so. Your levels are good, you've tested everywhere you can and it seem to translate well, from the phone speaker to a full range PA. Hopefully you haven't mastered it yourself, but you like the result that comes from the mastering house (or the mastering friend) and you begin to think the track may be worth publishing. But then you get a little cold feet. You've been listening for hours to the

A short post today about something very simple, but sometimes overlooked. The prevalence of DAWs, plugin effects and digital recording has given us amazing tools to play with, and the possibility to reach exceptional quality even with modest means. DAWs and plugins are amazing. Both DAW and plugins, however, are computer applications. Specifically, personal computer application. So what? say you. Well, personal computer applications tend to use a screen. For DAWs, often two o

As Yoda would have it! Or maybe not. Ahem. Let's start. In the post "What is mastering?" we looked at (you guessed) what digital mastering is. And turns out that a big part of it is correcting imperfections in the mix, where "imperfections" are not so much about sound, balance or genre choices, but about how a mix keeps (or not) its distinctive sounds on different playback systems. An obvious followup question is: "Can I do it myself?" (as opposite to sending the mix to a ma

There's few subjects that seem to provoke as much confusion and misunderstanding as mastering - and this post is about shedding a little light on the subject. Confusion seem to exist on what mastering does and is - especially with digital recordings. As a consequence, misunderstandings abound on how and if it makes sense to apply the step. You find all sort of definitions: some plausible ("mastering corrects errors in your mix"), some quite off ("mastering is where you get th

You may have read the post about how DAWs destroy your recordings (if you haven't, there's worse ways of spending five minutes), so you already know that - when using a digital recording system - the right thing to do is to set gains so that levels hover around the middle the dynamic range scale (say an average level of -18 dBFS and peaks around -12 dBFS). And if you've read my post, you'll have set up your DAW GUI so that its visuals match the good quality of your recording

This is a blog about all things audio, so it may seem odd to talk of something that apparently hasn't much to do with audio. We want to make music, don't we? Thing is, so much of music making nowadays is processed by using computers that is very useful for an engineer to know a little computer science, and understand why certain things are the way they are. No math required, I promise! A little arithmetic at most :) When using a DAW for recording, mixing or any other audio-re

In a previous post we've been looking at how a "good sounding" room for recording means, essentially, a room with controlled and low reflections. But when it comes to mixing, is it the same story? That is, if we have a good sounding room for recording, is it good for mixing as well? Broadly, the answer is yes (and it's certainly better than a bad sounding room!), but with a few important qualifications. First of all, let's get the cat out of the bag: when mixing, it is perfec