What is Mastering? Mastering is a vital part of the recording process, so much so that a substantial amount of ‘mystery’ is associated with it. We've all heard stories of high-priced mastering engineers with mystical, proprietary gear based on vacuum tubes salvaged from ancient Russian...
Compression The human ear uses compression for pretty much the same reasons that we do in music, that being to control the level of an audio signal. As you may already be aware, the concept is to simply boost those signals that are quiet and...
Equalization is the process by which an equalizer is used to either boost or cut different frequencies in an audio signal in order to change its tonal character. In mixing, the aim is to have the entire frequency spectrum shared comfortably by all instruments,...
The Stereo Field The term stereo, short for stereophonic, involves the reproduction of sound using two separate audio channels that are then presented to a pair of speakers far apart to recreate a natural panorama of sound that is analogous to how we perceive sound...
Now we have an environment that isn’t coloring what we hear we can start to look at how we can improve the mix itself. Subgrouping When you have finished recording all your parts and are ready to start mixing, it is a good idea to subgroup sections...
Room Shape The diagram depicted below illustrates three of the more typical room shapes: square, rectangular and L-shaped rooms. The most favourable positioning of the speakers within each space is shown. Uniformly square rooms are the least desirable room shapes for speaker orientations, since the production...
A Quick Note on Gain Channel level is another important aspect of mixing, which begins to flesh itself out during the EQ’ing process. As each new element is introduced for EQ’ing, it is first imperative that you set a preliminary fader level to get the...
Starting From Scratch To start at the beginning, always make sure the mixer is 'zeroed' before starting a new project. By that, I mean make sure the input gains are at their minimum settings, the polarity reversals and high-pass filters are switched off, the EQ...