This is the first blog I start, and it will be amazing…. 

When you are a musician and , as most musicians, in the process of producing your music to
let the world know what great music you have to offer, than this blog is for you!

Being working as a  producer, engineer and coach in  the recording industry for over 25 years,
 you could say I bring some experience and knowledge.
This experience and knowledge I want to bring now available to all musicians interested.

And yes there are benefits for you if you follow this blog.

For instance Mastering: When I was around 16 I begon spelling out the old vinyl records liner notes and was always wondering what mastered by meant, I knew quite a lot about the recording and mixing process and I even visited a record manufacturer (and was soo impressed) but I could not picture myself what mastering exactly was.
after some years I learned that the mastering engineer took the final mix and applies some compressing and limiting tweaked some bands with a expensive equalizer and made the pre-production master from which the mold was made in those analoge days. What I also noticed was that on a lot of records (from the famous artists) some names stand out.

Bernie Grundman for instance was very busy mastering records and was obviously very good at it (I start noticing when I bought my first record from Gino Vannelli, Powerful People)
Over the yerars I became more familiar with the term  mastering, when I start recording records in my own project  studio with a 16 track 1 inch multitrack recorder. I made my final mixes on a 1/4 inch master tape complete with reference tones,  so the master engineer could bias his recorder and I was keen on bringing the tapes myself.

“Please be carefull with the highs, there are some mexican bells on it that are pretty hot” and “can you please add some low end around 80 HZ?”
Well, in those times the local mastering engineer had a lot of cutting to do and they were busy. So sometimes you ended up with  some distortion in the high frequencies or some rumbling low frequencies  but most of the time you got a pretty decent product and there was still some magic to having your production printed on Vinyl….

Today Musicans can produce their own recordings in the digital domain and mastering studio’s are  widely available..althought the really big artists still using  Bernie Grundman mastering or Bob Ludwig.
Still there are a lot of musicians that spend quite a lot of money on producing their Cd but  only a few of them recognize the importance of  the final touch, mastering.

Mastering can bring out the fine details, enhance the stereo image, add depth to the mix, finetune the EQ or give an overall  uniform sound to an album and, yes also  cranck up the average level.

A good mastering enigineer will maintain the original dynamics and listen carefully to the details and make sure the character of the mix is maintained (unless the assignment is to create an specific, wished sound )
The mastering engineer knows what to do; he knows the boundaries of the  medium, knows what will work when a product is aired and knows that just normalizing won’t do the trick.
The mastering engineer is involved in a totally different way with the product than the engineer who did the mix, he has fresh ears and is less emotionally involved, unbiased and perfectly cabable of making the right decisions (althought he should give some feedback to the client)

 There are a loot of good mastering studio’s and suites out there and they can bring out the best of your music and
whether they are reasonable priced or quite expensive, a good and well performed Master of your music can turn out to be priceless!

Stay tuned and learn how I became involve in Mastering and can help you to bring your music to the world!

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