Prometheus

What I mean is that by the time you have the skills to record and mix a song, you also have the skills you need to master it. Mastering is the easiest part of the process which is why it takes far less time to master an album than it does to record and mix one. In the old days it took a hell of a lot of experience and responsibililty because you had to use a very expensive mechanical cutting needle that could be damaged by low end phase issues. That is no longer the case, but as a former pro engineer it is plain to me that other pro engineers are trying to maintain the myth that mastering is still something that no ordinary human being should attempt. It's a load of rubbish. To be fair, trying to remaster an old damaged reel of tape with serious oxide shedding is hard. Mastering a track made in any half decent studio by any half decent engineer and musicians is easy. Any pro engineer who thinks otherwise has led a very sheltered life. I don't know any sound engineer who would take business to record and mix a track but then refuse to master it because that's too technical for them. Any that would do not have the right stuff to be a pro engineer. All the mastering process really amounts to is turning a track that is not suitable for stereo playback into one that is. This will almost invariably entail stone wall limiting and some EQ changes to flatten the track. It may also involve the application of band variable compression or multistemming (basically applying different effects to elements of a multitrack that have been allocated to group busses). It takes practice and prestidigitation, but anyone can learn to do it.

If you're going to record it and mix it yourself, you'll have to develop the skillset a mastering engineer requires anyway. That is the thing that so many people don't seem to get. Unless you get a pro engineer to record and mix your product or learn how to produce a record yourself, he's only going to be polishing a turd when you send it to him to master it.

Young people should be writing music that has old farts like me reaching for the blood pressure pills. The only thing about current music trends that offends me is how bland it is. So bland, it'll go with anything. It's a sad day when you have to switch from Radio 1 to Radio 2 to hear any music with balls. For those of you outside the UK, Radio 1 is meant to be our cutting edge channel and Radio 2 is meant to be for people over 35.

It's a matter of preference. Both have all the capability that any competent sound engineer would need to create a broadcast quality product. In answer to the original question, for me personally neither. I like Cubase Nuendo.

Do you have a link to both of the songs? Not promising anything, but I can certainly give you a qualified musicologist's opinion on whether the note combination overlaps between the two tracks can be explained by coincidence. As far as your chances of succesful legal action I'm pretty certain you're on a hiding to nothing, but at least you might have some backup if the other party ever tries to take action against you. The thing is, if you prove that your wrote your song before January the 10th, 1989, the other party can still claim they wrote the song in 1988 and it is basically nigh on impossible to disprove this. Anyhow, that is for lawyers to worry about. I can give you a report on the similiarities between the two songs. To give a very simplistic example of how this might be quantified, the chances of two note intervals in a diatonic major scale and in the ionian mode being the same could be taken as 1 in 7. In practice it will be lower than that since certain notes are more likely to follow certain other notes, for example, some notes more urgently need resolving than others, but correcting for this, if two consecutive notes are the same, three, four, et cetera, the odds can be ascertained using a simple mathematical function.

Just buy a Proel cable and it'll be good.

You're mistaken... I have a Fostex that allows 4 channels simultaneous that I got for around $300 two years ago. I also have a Yamaha MD8 that does 8 Channels simultaneous, although it was rather more expensive when I got it in 1999 at around $1,300. http://www.zzounds.com/item--FOSMR8HD http://www.dancetech...did=1799&lang=0 If 4 channels isn't enough, here's a link to an MAudio Delta 10 10 that costs around $500. http://www.studiospa...390G3q9uxRGQ== Here's a nice Motu Traveller as well, for under $1,000. http://www.studiospa...vyFyOqHnFzpQ== and an 8 Track Tascam for around $1,000. http://www.studiospares.com/recorders-media-card/tascam-dr680/invt/228920/?htxt=XrgUJutFSUeXvykTtn35B9pr9k3QQu9ItDVYVzaeiZvarRaVnLFH06HRrotkr5oy8HXfYPg8%2Bx46%0AMiDq6CatJA%3D%3D

That's not actually true... Spend a couple of hundred quid in a Moto Unit and you can have sixteen tracks of simultaneous recording or even more if you want to open the purse strings. The unit I use is an MAudio Delta 10 10. It cost me £300 (around $500 US) and gives me 8 tracks of simultaneous recording. This MAudio Unit is by no means the cheapest on the market. Alternatively, you can buy portastudios that let you record eight tracks simultaneously at better than CD quality for less than $500 and use their USB interface to transfer the tracks directly into your DAW. I use this method for location recordings, record the drums on the first eight tracks, bounce them into another session so you still have all the individual tracks for mixing and then individually track the bass, vox, guitar et cetera using the bounce. When you don't have Abbey Road at your disposal, one of the main skills a sound engineer has to develop is coming up with effective workarounds to push the limits of the technology. I think you're making that sound a lot more daunting than it actually is. As long as you configure your LAME converter to "Slowest but Highest Quality" you should get a decent result and it's the computer that does all the work. Same with dithering. The process of dithering consists of three or four mouse clicks in adobe audition or whatever mastering suite of your choice. There's a good reason why recording and mixing an album takes weeks and then it's mastered in a few hours. It's because mastering is the easiest part of the process. The problem is that there's this ludicrous mystique around mastering that was built up in the days when mastering was done with very expensive cutting needles that could be damaged by phasing issues laid down at the recording stage. Obviously, in this case, no one would let a rookie engineer near their cutting equipment. The skill set that a sound engineer requires to record and mix music is transferable to mastering and like anything else, if you practice mastering you'll become good at it. Of course, it suits mastering engineers to carry on the imposture that you need to have fallen from the sky to master a recording. As I no longer rely on sound engineering as my only source of income, I can now break the code and assure everyone that this is absolute bollocks. Anyone with a musical ear who can operate the equipment in a recording studio can learn the mastering process. It's even quite possible to master songs that you've written yourself, despite huge amounts of uninformed anecdotal opinion to the contrary.

I've had some experience of editing work for broadcast on an online radio station. It was rather humdrum work really, taking out stuff like coughing, pauses, spluttering and stammering. I've worked on corporate presentations for online streaming as well and edited in jingles to broadcasts. Like Tom, I'm still owed royalty money and not holding my breath waiting on it's being paid. That said, the corporate work does pay pretty well to be fair.

This. Even the slightest noise in your recording environment is going to be a problem when you turn the gain on your pre-amp up to mic level. The noise floor can become an insidious racket. Prevention is definitely better than cure with this. Over used Noise Reduction algorithms leave noticeable side effects in the form of horrible metallic chirping sounds that are actually more distracting than hiss. You have to think very carefully about whether you've actually improved the sound when you use them.

To be fair, the only way to learn to produce good work is by producing shit work. I must say though, compared to the equipment around when I started out twenty years ago, DAW's really are a joy to work with... The first tape loops I made in the days when the digital domain was in it's infancy were produced on a little yamaha four track, by a painful process of recording the loop onto a tape and then recording the tape onto other tapes again and again and again and then getting out scissors and glue. A loop that could be produced in sixty seconds in this day and age took the guts of a day's work back then, unless you were lucky and could afford a fancy reel to reel recorder, which would allow you to join a piece of tape with your loop on it end to end and then play it round the flanges and out and back round a couple of microphone stands. Even that was far more of a pain in the arse than using a DAW to do it. Add to that the utterly puny dynamic range that tape has compared with the Digital Domain. The maximum dynamic range ever achieved on tape without noise reduction was 75dB. Even bog standard 16 bit digital gives you a theoretical 96dB and an observed 90dB of dynamic range without noise reduction. As decibels are logarithmic (base 10) this gives you better than a ten fold increase over the dynamic range of tape. On a 16bit system, the quantization errors are too tiny to be perceptible, and with the 144dB range of 24 bit audio, the quanization errors are tiny on the atomic level. In terms of alaising errors, as long as you can sample above 40,000 Khz, which even the kids toy soundcards that ship onboard with PC's can, you're never going to hear one. Hooray for Harry Nyquist!!! Digital is definitely where it's at...

I haven't sat and practiced as such in years, if ever. When I'm laying down studio tracks I do so by comping and if I later want to play them live, I learn the arrangement from what I've comped.

And now, I see, I've already posted on this thread and have now just reiterated the points I already made... Must either be premature dementia or wet brain setting in...

I wonder if the alaising errors on primitive or incompetenly operated digital systems will one day be treated with the same nostaligic indulgence... lololol Transistors for me... They don't blow up when you switch the amp on to set up for a performance.

I wouldn't feel comfortable signing away my songs, even if anyone did want to buy them. Frankly, I've never had an offer I thought was worthy of me...

I was swaying over professional or semi professional as how I envisage my future. In the end I opted for semi-pro since I can't imagine myself every relying solely on the music inudstry to pay my rent ever again. Not unless there is a radical and substantial improvement in how the industry operates.

DAW's are like any other tool. You can do wonderful things with them as long as you bother to learn how to use them. To be a Jedi Knight in sound engineering parlance, you need to learn how all the equipment works and then do a thousand studio sessions, which will give you around ten thousand hours of experience. DAW's do not and cannot make things sound awful, big red buttons or no. A DAW can't make a single decision for itself. The person operating the DAW manipulates the controls and the DAW responds accordingly. In short, it's people that make things sound awful. Trent Reznor, for example, has composed some wonderful pieces using a multitrack recorder as a composition tool.

It would depend on how heavily compressed the tracks are... A signal that is heavily compressed and has peaks at -3 dB could sound considerably louder than a signal that is uncompressed or lightly compressed and peaks at 0 dB

Three years learning to play guitar another six years getting to grips with arranging music and doing occasional bass guitar sessions, then another three at college studying musicology, sound engineering and psychoacoustics, followed by five years on the road and running a recording, mixing and mastering studio as a freelance sound engineer. And the culmination of it all is that I'm totally disillusioned with the music industry and now work in aerospace... Still, no regrets. I still love writing and producing music for myself and others as a labour of love.

And keep asking questions whenever you come up against an issue you aren't sure about. I had a listen to your track. It has a nice feel to it and it's prefectly good for a beginner. The beats need compressed and they're a little dry, but come on! Rome wasn't built in a day... Keep at it, keep reading up on it. You'll get there. The reason it's recording the metronome is because the device settings are set to the wrong input so it's recording whatever is played through the soundcard.

You've got a cool voice Pascal...

If you're using Cool Edit, go into device settings and make sure it's actually using your sound card and not the wavemapper. This might help to some extent with the latency problem you're having.

It worked for Les Paul, the first and greatest Multitrack engineer.

All the major labels are good for these days is producing very poor reality television shows and releasing badly produced, anti-artistic and anti-intellectual rubbish. To paraphrase a quote by Richard Dawkins, and hopefully my use of the vernacular will be excused. Music as a creative artform is important, and anyone who doesn't agree can f*ck off.