Audio Recording Tips

The following are the important requirements that a mixing engineer should do before submitting any mix to mastering facilities for audio CD or track mastering. These are a sort of check list to make sure that your mix is ready for mastering.

Check List #1: Is your mix final? Has it already been approved by the concerned artists and recording producers?

Purpose: If you create a mixdown, the final approval is done by the artist and the recording producers. You need to make sure that there is no other request for changes from them in the mix, it is because once the material will reach the mastering studio, there is no turning back. If you turn back, you need to do a separate mixdown again with the artist/producer requested changes that can take time and destroy your schedule.

Check List #2: You SHOULD mix down to highest audio resolution as possible.

Purpose: You need to create a very high quality mix, isn’t it? If you mixdown to low resolution such as 16 bit 44.1Khz (by applying dithering for example), you are destroying your mix.

Do not apply any dithering during mixdown. Leave that to the mastering engineer. Also if your audio mixing software/DAW is capable of mixdown at 24bit 96Khz (common in most professional studios), then use it. After all that high resolution will be VERY favorable to the mastering engineers when they do the mastering work of the track.

The minimum bit depth should be 24 bits (you should never mixdown to 16 bits, ever!). The sampling frequency can be 44.1Khz, 88.2Khz or 96Khz. Using 192Khz is not recommended and neither it is beneficial in contributing to the sound quality. But again, 24 bit, 96Khz or 24 bit, 44.1Khz are the standards. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re an artist, band or songwriter; are you about to hire music producer/record producer? Think twice because you may or may not need a record producer at all.

Source: Jeremy D. Silverman

Below are the conditions when you “really” need to have a record producer:

1.) If you desperately need a high quality recordings of your single. This assumes you write the song. Only a record producer can “professionally” transform your completely written song into professional recordings. This single may be used for promotional purposes such as demo submission or to radio, etc.

2.) If you drastically need to release an independent recording album which will compete with major label artist or other good independent recording label artists; then you surely need to hire a recording producer to supervise the recording sessions, create artistic sonic vision of the album and to produce a complete master CD.

What if you really need a record producer as your need falls in either two of the above conditions? Now, hiring a record producer is not an easy task because you need a “perfect” man to do the job which should pass in all these qualifications:

1.) Attitude – this is the most important. Treat music producer like your Dad, what attitudes do you like from your Dad. It is the same attitude requirement you require from your music producer. You need someone who is: supportive, honest, creative, strong and someone that has the potential to love and believe in your musical abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

This guide is useful for anyone wanting to know how to get a permission to record a song. Before you read further, this guide is helpful for any of the cases below:

a. You are planning to cover a song which is written by someone else but it is not released (or not popular).
b. You are planning to record a song which is written by your artist.
c. You’re planning to re-record a popular song written by a popular writer.

Let’s examine what music rights are exploited:

a. Mechanical rights – this is right to reproduce the song in the physical medium such as CD, Video Tape, cassette tape, etc. If you exploited this right, you need to contact the music publisher of the song and asked for mechanical license.

b. Printed sheet rights – this is the right to reproduce the lyrics of the song.

Those are the only two possible rights exploited when you are going to record a song. The “printed sheet” rights assumes you are going to include the song lyrics your production. However this can be skipped in most cases.

If you are record producer, you are in-charge of producing the album that includes songs owned and NOT owned by your artist.

For songs owned by your artist; you simply need a written mechanical license from your artist. For the payment it needs to be arranged and there is no standard rule.

In US, the mechanical royalty rates are around 9.1 cents per song (http://www.songwriteruniverse.com/mechanical.html ). If the artist is writing the whole 10 songs in the album, the mechanical royalty due is 91 cents or 0.91 US dollar. If there are about 1,000,000 albums to be reproduced, the total amount of royalty due is:
Read the rest of this entry »