Nineteenth Lesson - Posted on 2015-08-01 by Nicolas Anderson

     OMG!  One week left!  How the heck did I even get to this point.  I'm amazed at myself.  lol.  This it the final academic lesson in the textbook, Mastering.  It was a very brief chapter, beginning with a "Crash Coarse" in mastering, & in the first paragraph, they explained there really wasn't such a thing.  Ironic right?  lol  All jokes asside, it's my understanding that the RRFC offers coarses in mastering as well, but because I'm in the Audio Engineering program, an extensive knowledge of mastering would just not be pheasable.  There's another textbook just for that, I think.  But they did give a good rundown of what it is, & even posted some very helpful videos on how other audio engineers mastered their songs on DAWs.  Another irony: DAWs don't offer a lot of mastering tools, even plugins that you can buy aren't nearly as good as the analog mastering gear that can sometimes cost upwards of $100,000.  My mentor explained to me that if you were just recording a mixtape, you could possibly get away with just mastering on Pro Tools, but if you're realeasing an album, you can't afford to flake on the mastering.  That is most important.  So essentially you can only pre-master on a DAW (like Pro Tools).

      To make things clear, mastering is pretty much the preparation of a song, album, EP, etc. for duplification; it's the sweetening of the mix, to make it sound as great as possible, to make it sound perfect.  Easier said than done.  So the textbook went over it's "crash coarse" & also reviewed Redbook CD Standard (16bit/44.1kHz).  Something very cool to keep in mind: always apply a dither to a mix, if you have to lower the bit depth of a track.  It fixes quantization errors by randomizing the values of bla bla bla........ smart people stuff. lol.  Just don't forget to apply dither if you reduce the bit depth.  So I was given one more mix assignment, I have to master a song on Pro Tools.  It's a classic style big band jazz song.  I think you'd like it.  It's my job to make you like it even more.  Wish me luck, & thank you for spending all your time reading my sometimes drole, sometimes, boring posts.  Cheers!