Features a collection of articles from the Disc Makers blog that relate to music mastering, including advice from post-production engineers from the SoundLab at Disc Makers.
To license your music, you need to understand the role of the music supervisor as well as how to prep your music. Follow these steps to increase your chances of getting your music licensed. Read the post.
From potato chips to preamps, decoupling to drum heads, these 13 tips can help you get better tones when you’re recording in your (not-acoustically pristine) home studio. Read the post.
Choose the vocal tuning and pitch-correction tools, techniques, and workflow that will give your music the finished vibe you’re looking for. Read the post.
Perfecting your song order when you sequence an album can mean the difference between a great artistic statement and a nice mixtape. Read the post.
Here are three of our most popular Indie Music Minute videos so far, tackling the topics of being your own record label, mixing vs. mastering, and getting a mechanical license for YouTube. Read the post.
I listen to a lot of music and listen to a lot of streaming when I drive or while I travel — and I also listen to vinyl. And while I love all of it, when I want the best audio quality, nothing sounds as good as a CD. Read the post.
Independent artists rely on the tangible media that is the music CD. As a physical representation of their hard work, a means of increasing revenue, and to establish their brand, independent musicians use CDs in ways major label artists don’t. Read More.
Making decisions that improve the quality of your final product – based on what you’re hearing – is the basic skill underlying all successful music production. Here are some strategies for improving your listening skills. Read More.
In our July Disc Makers Twitter chat (#DMchat), Brian Lipski, mastering engineer and manager of The SoundLAB, gave us an introduction to audio mastering for musicians of all genres. Read More.
Do you have questions about what mastering engineers do and how they achieve their results? This introduction to the mastering gear in The SoundLAB gives you a glimpse into our mastering suites and the gear we use to make your music sound great. Read More.
Using stereo widening plug-ins in audio mastering to try to expand your mix’s stereo width won’t sound natural and could cause major issues with your finished track. Read more.
Supplying audio files in compressed formats or applying heavy limiting or compression during mix down can compromise your master and negatively impact your audio mastering results. Read more.
If you focus too much of your work on a single instrument in a complex arrangement, you likely will miss the fact that even if you have improved the sound of that one instrument, everything else may have been impacted negatively. Get the mix you want, mix down to a stereo file, and then perform mastering as a separate last step. Read more.
If the music program is sibilant overall, the audio can be cut at a lower amplitude, which can help with the distortion caused by the high frequency information. The result, though, is a vinyl record that’s at a lower level, and the surface noise will be more prominent – not to mention, it’s not going to be comparable to other vinyl albums. Read more.
Vinyl record sales are 26% from last year, and this vinyl record revival can be a sales driver for independent artists. According to Dan Faughnder of Sledding With Tigers, “Once we announced that our first vinyl record was in the pipeline, we received enough pre-orders to break even on the pressing cost before we got them from the plant.” Read more.