Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: July 05 2007, 11:06 |
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| Quote (ImAFoolAndImLaughing @ July 05 2007, 08:25) | | I'm not very techie-minded, though, Korgscrew - what does being "mastered" actually involve? ( No S&M jokes please! ) |
It's essentially the process of preparing the album for duplication. That could be as simple as taking the finished stereo mix and adding the data which marks out the structure of the tracks on the final CD (PQ encoding in techie speak). It's generally a lot more than that, though, involving various tweaks to make sure the tracks sound right when placed next to each other (especially relevant if they've been mixed by different people on different equipment - the mastering engineer can adjust the overall tonal balance so that they sound more like they belong together), the correcting of any problems which might have been missed in the studio (not in terms of getting rid of mistakes or anything like that - that would need a remix - but more in terms of, say, bringing down the level of a certain frequency because the studio where it was mixed had a monitoring system which was weak at that frequency, which the mix engineer unwittingly compensated for...all sorts of little things like that). Compression and limiting was traditionally used to help make the mix more suitable for cutting to vinyl, but of course now it's done more because people like how it sounds (when it's done right...) and more unfortunately these days, to make it seem louder than every other album (a silly route to go down...).
Interestingly, the concept of the music of the spheres is something which David Bedford has been quite into lately. He composed a piece a few years ago that was based on Arthur C Clarke's 'The City and the Stars' which used the intervals that Johannes Kepler calculated using the angular velocities of the planets in the solar system as they orbit the sun (he went as far as having the Royal Observatory in Greenwich calculate what note Pluto would be...of course that was before it was decided that Pluto isn't a planet). He was planning on using "Kepler's Chord" in other compositions too, but I'm not sure he has done yet.
Of course, it could be said that the music of the spheres is a load of balls, but that would just be sinking to an all time low...
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Sure the Lass Mike is using will be good though.. Just a case of waiting for the "Leaks" to start surfacing for everyone to get an idea of what the CD will sound like in Reality... Im still wondering if this Halloween Idea is going to be the main theme.. 
