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Nickel and Dime Studios
106 N. Avondale Rd
Avondale Estates, GA 30002
CD MASTERING
CD Mastering is the process of fine tuning
your completed final mix. Mastering includes
all the steps needed to give tracks that
powerful, warm and professional sound that
you hear on your CD player. You will want
to have it mastered so that it sounds balanced
and equal from track to track.
In the mastering process, your songs are
copied off the original recording media
and placed into an order that is pleasing
to hear. Spacing between songs is set along
with fades in or out. Your music levels
are adjusted, and the mastering engineer
may equalize or compress parts of your tracks
to enhance your music. The engineer will
also remove clicks or pops and warm up any
digitally recorded music that sounds "thin"
or artificial.
Mastering will create a powerful and balanced
recording that can compete with other commercial
tracks. Your finished track will sound better
on CD or on radio. Here are some helpful
ideas for bringing in professional or home
studio recordings for mixing and mastering:
- Make clean, noise free recordings with
no compression.
- Don't do any normalizing or editing
of starts and ends of songs at this point.
- Your mastering engineer needs logs.
A log is your list of the full song title,
abbreviated filename on the media and
lengths of tracks. You can also include
notes about parts of songs that you feel
need adjustment.
- Don't put the songs in any order in
the studio by creating copies. This can
be done in the mastering stage.
- Make a high quality back up copy of
your master recording.
- If you are recording on DAT leave a
minute of tape free at the start, then
ID your first track.
- Label your recordings by writing "Session
Tape" on the media and include your
name and phone number
- Your media can be digital audio tape(DAT),
cd or analog tape. Analog tape is still
used for mastering most commercial recordings
because of the warmer sound.
- On the beginning of the tape, put an
audio tone for 30 seconds at 0 dB. This
will help the engineer to align his machine
with the one that recorded your tracks.
- On CDs, leave silence before the track
starts to avoid glitches. Use only AIFF
or WAV formats.
- Record all the files at the same sample
rate if possible, note different rates
in your log. Use high quality CD-ROMs,
and record at the lowest speed on your
CD burner.
- Call us if you have more questions about
your recordings.
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