Unit 9

This project was hard because the original sample of music was, I felt, already pretty good. In mastering, I definitely didn't want to overdo anything, especially given the way she sings the vocals in this song: this song isn't supposed to be heavy, hard-hitting, or overly electronic.

In mixing this song, I followed the mixing rubric to remind myself of all the steps I needed to do. I started, as usual, by ordering and coloring the tracks. The rest of the tracks were all pretty good and clear, even the drum tracks, which in the Syncronicity project were cluttered with each other. For some reason, there was one track that had essentially no sound in it, so I cut that one out (I soloed it and listened all the way through, just some waves in the very beginning but that was it). I did cmd-alt-t to match the Snare track to the tempo and used that as a template to align the others.

I looked at the stereo output multimeter and noticed that the song was bass-prounounced and the amplitude of the frequencies dropped off too much after that. I corrected this by adjusting the individual EQs and the stereo output EQ to boost high frequency material. At the same time, I went through and tried the effects of compression on every track; I used presets in the Compressor plugin for each instrument and tried to tweak them slightly for the best sound. I thought the snare drum sounded similar to the one from the Synchronicity project so I took the same compressor settings from there and applied it here, and it worked decently well. Reverb was the area that I was most cautious with, because too much reverb or delay would not, I felt, be fitting for this style of song. I noticed the Vocals track already had a reverb applied to it, so I stayed away from that. I applied very slight reverb to the Bass, Kick, and Snare tracks using the Space Designer on small room presets and the wet signal turned down. I did not mess with the panning levels as I honestly thought the instruments were pretty good where they are. Not wanting to spend too much more time on this, I bounced out at this point.

The importance of mastering audio:

• Mastering is the last step of the creative process, and the first step of the manufacturing process
• Using the skills of a dedicated mastering engineer are recommended for three reasons:
• They can offer a new set of ears to hear your music, adding a new perspective to modify the song with that is more objective than the song's creator
• They have access to multi-thousand-dollar speaker equipment and are able to use that equipment to hear things that you can't
• They are probably familiar with the manufacturing process and can optimize your song's quality for distribution on physical media
• Mastering does not change the mix, it changes the perspective of the mix
• Food metaphor: "Someone grows the food. Someone cooks the food. Someone serves the food. The farmer (recording engineer) knows his soil, water, and fertilizer needs, his crops. The chef (mix engineer) knows the balance of ingredients—the chemistry of combinations, the taste. The service (mastering engineer) is all about making the elements of the meal presentable to the diner: the proper portions (EQ) in proper places, the right timing (pacing and fades) and temperature (dynamics)."

The process of mastering audio:

1. Prepare the master mixes - bounce the file
2. Transfer - send the file to the mixing service
3. Set the song order
4. Edit - so each song flows into the next
5. Set the space between songs
6. Processing - minor compression and EQ, where necessary
7. Levels PQ and ID coding - normalize audio levels to make songs even, add necessary information into the audio file for identification, copy protection, ownership claims
8. Dithering (for physical media) - add random noise when bitrate needs to be lowered for CDs
9. Create the final production master (for physical media) - create a high-quality specialized file (.pmcd or .ddp format) to send to the manufacturing plant so they can press the CDs