Once a record is mixed it still needs to be mastered.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on that process and it’s necessity, so let me clarify a few points.

For the purpose of this article I am limiting my expertise to CD mastering. Mastering for Vinyl is a whole other ball game and definitely needs some specialized equipment and understanding.

Mastering is the final step in the recording process. The main goal of mastering is to prepare your CD project for replication and to balance your tracks that they will sound great on any system.

This often includes :

• making sure all songs are in the right order
• making fine EQ adjustments, so that each song has a balanced sonic signature
• enhancing the stereo image, if necessary
• carefully adding some compression, to obtain the same perceived volume level
• ensuring that all songs have a similar sonic signature ( balance between bass, miss and highs)
• making sure that the spacing between the songs feels just right
• making sure that the fade outs are clean
• adding ISRC codes (which will let your songs being tracked by SoundExchange and such to collect performance royalties)

Even though there are an abundance of tools and plug-ins for mastering available, such as Izotope’s Ozone and several others, I highly recommend letting somebody else master your project.  In today’s world most projects are recorded and mixed either in a home environment, or at different studios by different engineers.

For one, I would never master a project in the same room and on the same speakers where it is mixed.

Mastering facilities have a finely tuned room with highly accurate speakers and amplifiers. Your home studio and even some professional facilities have their own characteristic sound. Some rooms (especially home studios) will have some shortcomings , so do have cars and living rooms in which you might double check your mixes. So if it sounds good at home is not a necessarily guarantee for it sounding good on other mediums.  A neutral listening environment and a good mastering engineer will ensure, that your CD sounds good wherever it’s played back.

For your CD to sound like a coherent project, the mixes need to have a similar sonic signature. If you get tracks mixed by different engineers in a variety of places, you will definitely have big differences within your mixes. Even though each mix might sound great in itself, you will like likely encounter that one track might be much louder, more bass heavy or has more treble than the other. The lead instrument, or voice might be louder on one track than another and mastering is the art of making all these mixes sound like they belong on the same album.

I am still a believer in albums and I cherish the experience of listening to a whole album in sequence, as opposed to downloading the one or other track. As an artist I want to take the listener on a musical journey. I spend a considerable amount of time figuring out the right order of my songs, not unlike putting a setlist together for a live show. There a subtleties I learned over the years that have quite an impact on the listening experience, such as spacing between tracks and the speed of fades. The generic 2 sec pause does not always sound right.

Finally if you want to make some money from your recording through airplay, you will need to have ISRC codes embedded into the files. These codes ensure that companies like SoundExchange, which collect monies for the artist and the master owner, properly track your song.

Mastering engineers are experts with a specialized skill set and equipment. But they are not magicians. So the old “we fix it in the mix” (to dismiss problems in the recording process) is just as wrong as “we fix it in mastering” to dismiss problems in your mixes. Try to get your mixes to sound as good as you can before you send them to mastering. And don’t over-compress them; leave the mastering engineer some room to work in.

And don’t get cheap on this process. I learned the hard way, when I tried to safe some money on mastering and going to a cheap place, just to find out that the final result was horrible. A bad mastering job can actually destroy your project. I went and borrowed some money to have it done properly and was rewarded with a great sounding album.

There are many great mastering places out there. If I may recommend someone, then it is Ron Boustead at resolution mastering. He mastered my last 5 albums and he is excellent and reasonable. Your music can be uploaded digitally and can be delivered digitally by him directly to the printing facility. So even if you are not local, you should check out his services. Here is a link to his site. RESOLUTIONMASTERING.COM

Until next time this is Nils signing off

PS:  For the last few years I have been helping new and established artists by writing and creating tracks and getting their music presentable for radio and commercial distribution. For those of you you need some great material and want some songs recorded, check out my site nilsmusicproductions.com

What is album sequencing? Simply put, it’s determining in which order the songs on a CD are placed.

To me as an artist, the CD, or album as I like to call it, is still a complete statement and expression of my art form. A great CD is not just a random collection of songs. As not all songs are obvious singles, some might be equally important to set the overall mood and pace of the CD.
I always come back to the example, which most of us, who grew up in the age of vinyl, can remember:
You buy an album, because of that hot single you just can’t live without. Then you wear it out, listen to it over and over. After a while, as you gradually get over the single, you start listening more and more to the rest of the album. You find these little hidden gems, songs you probably wouldn’t have downloaded just by themselves. And all of a sudden one of these songs is becoming your favorite tune on the album.
Not having that experience is what I believe to be the biggest loss in the age of individual downloads. So whenever you can, always download or purchase the whole album. I promise you won’t regret it, as long as the artist is sincere.

Here are a few guidelines I use to find the perfect sequence of songs.

While I work on an album, I make myself car CDs trying different song orders. I am looking to find songs that work well after each other.

1. the first song should be a grabber. It is usually the first song anybody hears. It also sets up the character and sound of the album

2. sometimes you have a song that’s the odd one out. I would try putting it at the end of the album or as a break in the middle.

3. I look at the tempo, or more precisely the tempo feel, of my material and list the songs in 3 categories: up-tempo, mid-tempo and slow. Where is the majority of my songs? To keep the album flowing you don’t want to place too many songs from the same tempo category next to each other.

4. I would shy away from a sequence of songs that get gradually slower. I rather choose an order, so that tracks get gradually faster and then drop to a slow song as a breather.

5. I would not put all the singles (your radio songs) at the very top of the album and I certainly would not put all the best songs at the end of an album. This is where album sequencing differs from a live show set list. I would put my best song at the end of a live set, but not as the last song of an album.

6. If there are two songs that are similar sounding, I would not put them next to each other.

7.  I would not choose to put two slow songs next to each other, unless my album is a collection of ballads.

8. Key considerations: To me that’s secondary to tempo , but if you have 4 songs in the same key next to each other, that could get a bit boring. Also after 3 songs in the same key, a song in another key might sound more different than intended.

Remember these are just general guidelines. Any of these rules can be broken if it feels right. That’s why I call it an art, not a science. The overall effect should be an album that flows well from one song to another and keeps the listener engaged.

But as I discovered in the interview, Brian was staying very busy. He worked as Dave Koz’s music director, kept writing his own material and he is still going strong today. One thing that stuck out in the interview was that Brian said the format needs more original material. I’m paraphrasing: “ It needs to evolve, otherwise it’s going to die, and the only way to do that is by introducing more new original material.” That is a sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with. Brian went on to say that he always works on writing as much new and good material as he can, and when he runs out of ideas he approaches other songwriters to supply him with tunes.

Brian has been doing well in the last years since this interview. He just released a new CD entitled “Out of a Dream”. And I am happy to see him in the charts. True to his believes he approached various songwriters to help him and collaborate on the CD. I was one of them. The opening track “One of a kind” was my contribution. Brian took my idea and put his own spin on it. The result is a nice mix of Nils’ upbeat grooves and Brian’s sensual piano playing.

Brian recognized that the key to an artist’s resilience is flexibility and good original material. This attitude has served him well. Every great artist I can think of is associated, if not defined by an original song.

I have been writing more songs the last two years alone, than in the 5 years before. I expanded my work into producing new and upcoming artists, as well as writing songs for established artists. Of course I try to keep the best stuff for myself. And therefore I feel that my upcoming album, to be released later this year, will be the strongest work I have done in years.

The only advice I can give is to write as much as you can. Realize that not every song is going to be a masterpiece. But if you keep writing eventually you’ll come up with something great. And if you can’t and need more material to make your album stand out, give me a call.

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