Production Advice

Just a very quick post to wish you a very Merry Christmas from Mastering Media !

We hope you’re able to take some time out over the next week or two, spend some time with family and loved-ones, and generally relax and be merry : )

Here are three of my favourite musical suggestions for this time of year – hopefully there’s something for anyone’s taste:

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The message of this post is simple, short and sincere. In fact, it could almost be an open letter:

Dear Peter Jackson,

PLEASE ask your audio engineers to stop auto-tuning the dwarves.

Please.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Shepherd

PS. Please…

What the hell am I talking about ? Well, check out the first official trailer for the new film of the “The Hobbit”, above.

It’s a great trailer. As a massive fan of both the books and the films of “Lord Of The Rings”, I’m very excited. But after seeing this trailer, I’m also now very nervous.

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The most popular post on my site right now is this one:

How to make your music loud

The video above is a “sequel” to that post, in a way, because it demonstrates many of the techniques I talk about in the original post.

(I’m not saying you should make your music really loud, by the way – far from it. But if that’s what you’re going to do, I’d prefer you to make a good job of it : )

The video was inspired by an email from Brendan Zacharias, a musician and producer who recently bought a copy of my eBook and video package Mastering with Multiband Compression.

(Multiband compression can be an invaluable tool for getting loud, punchy mixes without crushing the life out of your mix – to find out more, click here.)

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Another great old documentary about the recording of a classic album from YouTube – this time of Peter Gabriel’s fourth album.

I’ve written before about how much I love the sound of this great-sounding album, so finding this video and being able to see the songs actually being written – well, I got a bit over-excited, actually.

There are so many fascinating and enjoyable things here that it’s hard to know where to start, but one thing that jumped out at me straight away was – look at the studio ! If you can call it a studio. In fact, you can’t – it’s just a room with a load of gear in it – a far cry from the facilites at Real World today. And all the vocals were recorded on… a Shure SM57 !

Another is the inspirational use of early sampling technology – in this era of gigabyte-sized multi-sample sound libraries, it’s easy to forget that you (and should) build the sonic signature of an entire song around the sound of nothing more than someone blowing across a metal pipe…

And finally, who knew it was so hard to smash a telly ?

Enjoy

I’m signed up to the Facebook group “End the Loudness War“. Last week Harman Aaron Loučka posted a heads-up that an example of the vinyl release of the new Red Hot Chile Peppers album, “I’m With You”, had been posted on YouTube.

I headed over to check it out, since vinyl releases often show as having better dynamics (“crest factor”, to be strictly correct) than their CD equivalents in the Dynamic Range Database. I don’t have a record deck though, so hadn’t had a chance to check it out, until now.

The results were pretty clear, and I’ve made my own short YouTube clip to demonstrate the difference. Take a listen, and see if you can hear a difference, and which one you prefer.

This is not a vinyl versus CD thing

Whatever you decide, it’s important to know – what you’re hearing is NOT some inherent limitation of the quality of the CD format.

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