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In today's highly competitive world the highest
sound quality is very important for success of a
recording. If you want the really good sound
quality after mastering process you should take
care about certain things in the mixing stage
and in preparing tracks for mastering.
How to
prepare the sound recording for mastering
When you prepare your material for mastering you
should follow certain rules, which should be
applied in order to get as good sonic results as
possible, which is important for your CD.
1 When you perform your final mixdown the 24 bit
resolution gives better and more error free
results. While CD-quality, that is 16 bits 44
100 khz is satisfactory, in professional music
production world
we use every opportunity to get a better sound,
and the higher resolution is one of them.
Digital mixdowns of 32 bit float resolution are
also accepted, but the 24 bit mixdown will do
the job. The higher sampling rate of 96 kHZ is
also very desirable. While the standard, 44 100
Hz rates are theoretically providing the
frequency response of up to 22 050 Hz, which is
quite enough for human hearing, some researchers
claim that the listening process is taking place
not only with ears, but also the whole body and
those higher frequencies can significantly raise
the perceived quality of the music. Anyways, it
will not hurt if you make your mix at 24 bits 96
kHZ. It means double precision in volume and
frequency.
2 Make sure all of your mixes are carefully
described and contain all the necessary notes on
special versions, fades, and the sequence of
songs, and also your special requests such as
making the solo guitar louder, vocal more up
front or to the back, leveling a synthesizer in
the mix.
Remarks on compression in the mix:
The problem of too much compression in
recordings is growing bigger and bigger. Very
high levels often lead to distortion, making
your carefully worked out track hard to listen
more then once or twice.
It is worth knowing, that compression is
something easy to add, but very difficult to
remove and to reverse its negative artifacts.
Therefore it is much better to leave the
compression and final level of the recording to
professional mastering engineer. If you send a
heavily compressed and limiter treated mix which
is already very loud you
will leave very little room to a professional to
maneuver. The final effect will be WORSE then
after sending the right, moderate in the level
and uncompressed mix. Send mix with lower volume level, but
with nicely worked out track levels and equalizer
relations (tonal characteristics) between them.
The well shaped mix should be done the way all
the tracks complement each other- there is a
niche for the vocal and leading instruments, the
bass is working nicely with the kick drum and
the cymbals are not interfering with other
instruments in any way, rather they are
complementing them. For more info about proper
mixing see our article on
mixing.
Avoid using compressor or limiter on a master
bus during mixing. It often causes
irreversible damage to the material and
bounds specialist's hands limiting the full
potential of mastering process. Professional
sound engineers use special mastering processors
and have their proven methods worked out over years
of experience that bring out far better results
than unprofessional "master during mix" tries. The mixdown does
not have to be loud, final level will be
professionally set in our studio and will
successfully compete with level of any
commercial recording. Try to leave about 3-6dB
of headroom in your mixes, wherever it is
possible make your mix quieter, not louder. You should not use normalization
process, also. Each change to digital sound is
recalculating the digital word and can cause
errors, especially when working in lower
resolutions. The only thing really worth working
on is tracks levels and track equalizer setting along with nicely
positioning them in stereo panorama, and giving
them some effects like reverb, or echo. Also, the
FX are very important in achieving best sound of
mixdown. Nicely and carefully done mixdown will
always give far better final master, therefore spend
your time on it.
Vocals in recording
Vocal should be mixed loudly and clear, up
front, even when it seems to be too loud in
relation to other tracks. In a typical rock, rap
or pop song vocal should fill about 50% of
acoustic space of the mix, being definitely up
front. Only the drums and bass should be almost
as loud. However, there are exceptions from that
rule, for example, when we want vocals to have
only background character, or if the vocals
have many effects on them, which make them more
of an ornamental sounds. Heavily processed vocals
or backing vocals may stay in deep, barely
audible background of the mix if such is the
artistic goal of the recording.
Drums and bass in a recording
Drums should be mixed loud, but bass should not
be too heavy or loud. In the good mix it should
rather be felt than heard. The right mastering
will pull it out and set the correct level and
dynamics of it. When bass is too strong it takes
up too much space from other instruments and is
certain obstacle in the process of mastering,
especially in setting the high average level of
loudness of the whole recording. It is also
important to set the kick drum and the bass
slightly differently using equalizer. You can read more
about it in a separate article of this page on
mixing. The point is to make bass and kick
playing on slightly different frequencies and
complementing each other. This is the only way
to make them perfectly audible in the mix. For
example, if we boost 55 Hz for the kick, which
is very low, the
bass should be set in slightly higher register,
say 88 Hz. It will positively give better
definition of those instruments in the whole,
mastered mix. Plus, there is two ways of
mixing kick and bass-one approach would be to
make the kick more of a sharp hit and the bass a
low cushion giving the fundamental to the whole
mix, or vice versa. It is no good when the bass
and kick play on the same low frequecy.
Cymbals in recording
You have to watch their level, they can not be
too loud in the mix! They should only complement
the mix, give some upper end and not go over any
other instrument. Cymbals tracks work well with
their panorama set to both sides, leaving the
center for the vocals or lead instruments. The
cymbals should have the lower end of spectrum
removed with use of high pass filter or just
regular equalizer. this way they will sit it the
mix much better not taking any energy from other
instruments.
Moreover:
It is
worth to resist the widely spread on the music
market temptation of making everything loud as
possible, at any price. It is result of "level
wars" that started in the late nineties and last
up till this day. Bob Katz writes about it, just
like many other mastering specialists or just
pure enthusiasts of good sound and they point it
out as one of the most serious
things impairing music quality today. nobody
wins in such war- the loser here
is both the listener and the artist! Therefore it is
a very nice idea to leave yourself a few
decibels of space on your meters and concentrate
on great track balance, the sound and the
artistic performance. For detailed
tips on mixing see another articles that you will find in
article section of this page.
Formats accepted
Preferred
medium is CD\DVD-R with your recorded material in
.wav format. Other formats accepted include
.aiff, .ogg-vorbis and other popular digital formats. We also
accept mixdowns and tracks on 1\4 inch
reel-to-reel tape with
the speeds from 9.5 cm\sec (3.3\4 inch per
second) up to 38 cm\sec (15 inches per second).
There is a possibility of sending down the material for
mastering via Internet, using file sharing
services such as Rapid Share. While sending many
tracks for mixing a good idea would be compress
them to make them smaller and faster to upload
and download. The most appropriate
format for this is Monkey Audio as this app
ensures completely lossless compression of
files. The sound loses absolutely nothing when
transferred back to .wav format. Using file
exchange portals such as Rapid Share instead of
sending music on CD\DVD using regular mail has
one major advantage- money and time saving. You
can do that, it will allow us to quickly download
your music and start working on it.
Mp3 is actually accepted in its better quality
settings such as 256 or 320 kb\sec but we do not
recommend it as it is a lossy compression format and
always, at least theoretically it will cause our
recording to lose some of it's quality. However
the .mp3 format is very useful when it
comes to exchanging ideas or giving us a hint of
your music style.
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