February 3, 2010

Handing the CD over to be ‘mastered’.(gulp)

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 9:53 am

It’s hard letting go of a project, especially one that’s close to your heart,
one that represents hours and hours of your time, one you’ve spent months
obsessing over, one you’ve examined and tweaked and made
the tiniest, barely perceptible adjustments to.
But this is the next step. Turning in the mixes of our new album to be
mastered at a local studio.

For those not steeped in the recording process, this is the stage where you hand over already mixed recordings to a mastering engineer who will polish it up for final release.
He’ll make sure all the songs are the same volume, clean up any unwanted noise, perhaps make small EQ adjustments here and there, add a little (hopefully not too much) compression to even out the sound, and then he/she will present you with a Master CD (in exchange for a not-small bag o’ sheckels) which you will then hand over to some company who will now manufacture your album from this master.
It’s part of the process.
It’s smart to have another set of ears do a final check on your work.
But still….it’s hard.
To let it go.

Luckily, I feel that it’s in pretty good hands. Bill Sayre from FastTraxx studio over on Broadway, south of Belmont in Fresno, is taking care of it. We talked a while, shared philosophies on everything from microphones to the rock n’ roll bands of the 70’s, and I think he’s the man for the job.

The job should be done in less than two weeks, and then it’s time to mail it in and wait for the mailman to bring me boxes and boxes of the new CD. Even more fun than waiting for that submarine that really motors through the bathtub that you ordered from the back of Cap’n Crunch….I never got that thing to work. Baking soda?

FastTraxx studio

1 Comment »

  1. Can’t wait for the new album!

    Comment by soddruntlestuntle — February 12, 2010 @ 1:44 pm

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