The Mastering Show

Time for another Q&A episode ! As always you’ve been asking great questions, so in this episode we discuss:

* Why Ian talks too much

* How dynamic is too dynamic ?

* Fade-outs - before or after compression ?

* How has the loudness war changed production and arrangement styles ?

* Mastering for gaming streams (like Twitch TV)

* Mastering in different genres

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-66

Mentioned in this episode:

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Can you make money from mastering ? And if so, how ? If you’re already charging people for your work, how can you be more effective and productive ?

Our guest in this episode is Graham Cochrane from the Recording Revolution website, which has been so successful that he’s started helping other people use some of the same ideas and strategies to get them started making money in the audio business themselves.

You don’t have to be an audio blogger or YouTuber to achieve this - in this episode we talk about strategies anyone can use:

* How to get started charging money from mastering

* How to decide how much to charge

* What makes you different - why people really might choose you to master their music, even though you don’t have a million-dollar studio or a legendary credit list

* Simple strategies to become more effective and efficient with almost everything you do in your business

* Why telling some clients to use online mastering instead of you might actually be a good business strategy

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-65

Mentioned in this episode:

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

There’s been lots of buzz and discussion about aliasing online recently, and lots of confusion, too.

Is it a flaw in the whole idea of digital audio ? Does it explain why analogue modelling plugins can never sound exactly like the real thing ? Or is it just inaudible mathematical theorising ?

In this episode we try to answer all these questions, plus Ian attempts to give an easy visual explanation of what aliasing is and how it relates to audio, with - er… questionable results.

Along the way discuss:

* What wagon wheels have to do with audio sampling

* And vinyl turntables

* And digital audio

* How (and why) to avoid aliasing

* Why high sample rates may help and

* Why all this is important when using plugins

Full Show Notes

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-64

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

Usually on the show we’re talking about mastering music for CD, download and streaming, but there’s another important final destination for the audio we work on - broadcast.

And the difference with broadcast audio is - there are standards. Having said that, there often isn’t a dedicated mastering stage !

In this episode we dig into the whole fascinating topic with our guest Dallas Taylor from Defacto Sound, and host of the superb Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast. Dallas has a wealth of experience in sound design and mixing for broadcast on trailers and ads for shows like Game Of Thrones and games like Fallout, amongst many others.

In a wide-ranging conversation we talk about:

* Why sound design is like being a conductor

* American versus British mixing style in drama

* What are “emotional FX” ?

* The loudness wars in broadcast

* Dialnorm - what and why ?

* How to make dragons talk

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-63

Mentioned in this episode:

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Everything gets streamed these days, and almost all streaming platforms use lossy data encoding: mp3, AAC, OGG etc (OMG!)

And these lossy codecs do a pretty remarkable result of preserving the quality, considering they strip out anywhere between 60-90% of the original data. But it’s not perfect - far from it ! In this show we talk about:

* How your audio can be damaged by lossy data encoding

* Why this happens

* How you can test for it yourself

* Why it’s worth doing

* How it can help you hear the artefacts for yourself

* Whether we should optimise our audio to avoid them and (most importantly!)

* The two simple steps you can take to minimise these problems and help your audio SURVIVE streaming

Full show notes on our website

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-62

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

You might argue that reading about audio is like dancing about architecture. Or something. But you’d be wrong! In these days of podcasts and YouTube it’s easy to forget how many great books there are about audio, and what a fantastic resource they are for getting inspiration, ideas and learning new topics and techniques. in this show we share some of our favourites, including:

* The book that took Ian several years to read, how to access it's Secret Bonus Content, and why

* A book that tells you how to use a potato as a filter, amongst other things

* Books about a band that Ian says you NEED to read

* The only two books about mastering (that we know of)

* The books we haven’t read but know we should

* Invaluable writing about audio that isn’t in books

* Several things that aren’t books at all

See full show notes on our website

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-61

Mentioned in this episode:

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

This show is short & sweet - but essential listening if you’re interested in getting better results with online loudness - and balanced, musical dynamics for your masters.

In this episode Ian describes:

- How he increased playback loudness on Spotify by 3.3 dB for a song by reducing it’s overall loudness by 1.5 dB, and why it sounded better afterwards

- What to do if your song gets turned down more than you expect online

- Why you have to be careful with contrast on Spotify

- How reducing dynamics can make your music sound more dynamic

- Why musical decisions work better than technical ones

full show notes at http://themasteringshow.com/episode-60/

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

It’s been a while since we had a Q&A episode, so - here it is ! In this show we discuss:

* Can a spectrum analyser make up for poor monitoring ?

* Is allowing peak levels up to -0.1 wrong ?

* Do speaker isolation pads work ?

* Handling client payment issues

* What to do when songs overlap (segued)

* Do dynamic masters sound worse on a PA ?

Full show notes on the website

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-59/

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

We’ve all heard it - “the music is in the mid-range”. But what does that mean, exactly ? And if it’s true, is there anything we can do about it in mastering ?

We’ve talked about bass and high frequencies, but in this show we dive into the muddy, murky mess that is (often) the mid-range, and talk about how crucial it is for a great-sounding master.

Including:

* How the mids help us hear bass

* Common problems with the mid-range, and what causes them

* How to open up cluttered mids in mastering

* Our least favourite mid-range frequencies

* Mids versus dynamics

* The importance of linear phase EQ for the mids

full show notes

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-58

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins

…comes great responsibility. And mastering engineers need to accept that.

If you take on the challenge of mastering someone’s music, you also accept a huge amount of responsibility for that music, and In this episode we tackle the question - what are the responsibilities of a mastering engineer - and even the ethics ?

Including:

* Should a mastering engineer have a “signature sound” ?

* Why the “B” word is at the heart of mastering - in many different ways

* Something you should probably never do

* How to supply files - for CD, online and vinyl pressing

* Ensuring transfer integrity online

* The golden rule of mastering

full show notes on our website

http://themasteringshow.com/episode-57

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn to master !

Click HERE to see Ian's courses and mastering resources

Leapwing

Find out more about Leapwing's plugins