Category: Uncategorised

Dummy by Portishead is one of my favourite albums of all time, and while a large portion of that will always be down to the incredible creative capabilities of Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley and of course Beth Gibbons – the unusual mixing techniques have always stuck out to me and created a lot more interest…

The ‘loudness wars’ is the term for a practice dedicated to mixing your song to the loudest volume possible without clipping, it is competitive in nature due to an observation in the 1950s where people tended to play louder cut records in jukeboxes more often. [1] This competition for the loudest song has causes the…

The engineer I chose to study is Mandy Parnell – best known for her work with Brian Eno and Aphex Twin, as long as her long term collaborations with Bjork. She has a very inspiring approach to mastering, in an interview with SoS mag she speaks about how important it is for the mastering engineer…

The main idea behind immersive audio formats is the transition from channel-based to object-based audio. What this means is that in immersive audio, each sound is treated as an individual ‘object’ that can be places and moved anywhere within a three-dimensional sound field as apposed to the specific set of channels previously seen in standard…

Despite the current state of surround systems feeling overwhelmingly futuristic the very first surround sound experiments date back the 1930s. None of these were used in a commercial sense until 1940, with Walt Disney releasing the film Fantasia. Disney wanted to find new methods to create a higher level of immersion for the audience, and…

Mastering is the final creative step in the audio production process, it is the bridge between mixing and distribution and the final chance for an engineer to enhance sound or repair problems. A key part of this process is making sure that a record sounds finished and that it is playable on a wide variety…

The first seen applications of EQ as we know it today was throughout the 1920s for radio and television. These EQ’s used large electro-mechanical equalisers to boost or cut specific frequencies in order to balance out the audio signal – they were much larger machines than we use today, with large rows of dials to…

When describing stereophonic (more commonly known as stereo) sound, I think the best place to start is by defining and comparing it to monophonic sound. When a speaker is described as having monophonic (mono) sound it means that you only have one channel of audio playback. As a result of this, when you listen to…

No matter how hard I tried to force myself, I found it impossible to draw something that I felt accurately represented my interpretation of the music I was listening to. I tried originally with music I was very familiar with, which I could see very clearly in my head however after being unable to do…

A reference track is a completed, professionally produced song that aligns with your vision for your own songs outcome[1]. Not all reference material are songs, with some producers also utilising different types of noise (pink noise for example, to aid the process of balancing your tracks at the start of the mixing process) in order…