Production Advice

Imogen Heap is a genius.

A mad, crazy genius, but a genius nonetheless.

I knew this already of course, but the full magnitude of her mad, crazy genius-ness didn’t really hit me until last night, watching the live Facebook webcast of her new song – “Me The Machine” (aka #heapsong6).

And it made quite difficult watching, if I’m honest.

Because this was Immi as we hadn’t seen her before – un-prepared, un-happy and perhaps even a little out of control. As the fascinating, scary “making-of” movie that opened the webcast vividly described, this was a project with “thousands” of things that could go wrong – and they all depended at the last moment on Imogen’s slightest gesture.

And things did go wrong – as Imogen herself admitted afterwards. And it was obvious that she was unhappy about it. The performance didn’t go as she wanted it to – but how could it be ? She wanted it to be perfect.

Well, it wasn’t perfect – but it was stunning, spine-tingling, and extraordinary, all the same.

Click to continue »

Here’s the theory

People are listening to music on iPod earbuds, they’re listening to it on laptop speakers, they’re listening to it on mobile phone speakers.

So that’s what we should use to make our final mix and master decisions on, right ?

Make it sound good on what end users are listening to it on – the lowest common denominator. Simple, right ?

Wrong

Click to continue »

So, the top prize in the 2012 Dynamic Range Day competition is…

an SSL Buss Compressor.

Wait, what ?!?

The prize in a competititon intended to raise awareness of the loudness wars is… a compressor ?

Exactly the kind of tool that was used to make many of those crushed, distorted “casulaties” in the first place ?

Right.

Click to continue »

The third Dynamic Range Day is on March 16th – only a week away !

And to get the ball rolling, in collaboration with TurnMeUp.org, we’ve published an open letter to the music industry calling for and end to the Loudness War.

To read the letter and find out what the infographic above is all about, click here.

About Dynamic Range Day 2012 – The Competition

Everything is coming together nicely – there’s going to be a competition again, with prizes from Solid State Logic (SSL), Bowers & Wilkins and new supporters TC Electronic – with more supporters coming on board every day.

Click to continue »

Apple’s new “Mastered for iTunes” has been causing quite a buzz recently – and causing lots of confusion.

I’m going to try and explain it all as clearly as I can.

[Update edit: I started out sceptical, but after new clues have been discovered about Apple's plans for "Mastered for iTunes", I'm actually very excited by the opportunity it presents - check out the "Stop Press" update at the end of this post.]

There are four five ways that the term “Mastered for iTunes” can be interpreted.

1. Mastered for iTunes is a set of utilities and guidelines

The easiest to understand and least controversial definition of “Mastered for iTunes” is described on this page on Apple’s site, here:

Mastered for iTunes – the guidelines

Basically it’s a set of guidelines for people to follow, to ensure you get the best quality versions of you music files available in the iTunes Music Store. Apple also include free utilities that allow you to preview how your files will sound once they’re encoded.

The guidelines are great – they encourage you to submit the highest quality files, and suggest how avoid falling into common traps that affect the quality – for example avoiding clipping and not over-cooking the music’s level because of the so-called “Loudness Wars“.

At the moment, the final files are still 44.1 KHz, 256 Kbps AAC files – so, they’re perceptually encoded files, using lossy compression – basically like high-class mp3s.

Whether you’ll hear a real difference from submitting a 24/96 version of your music is debatable – my quick tests suggest the answer is “not much” – but Apple also hint that in future they will use the high-quality masters to offer better downloadable versions in future, which can only be a good thing.

So far, so good.

Click to continue »