THE STUDIO

Sid's Garden - Andrew Garbutt

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EQUIPMENT

RECORDING

Recording is the most criical step in your music production. Room accoustics, instrument isolation, microphones, cables, connectors, pre-amps, and analog to digital converters must all work together so that mixing and mastering can end up with the intended outcome.

MIXING

Mixing entails understanding exactly what the end product should be. It is important to work closely with musicians and producers to get the right mix. Here the sound engineer applies his tools and skill to create the sound the customer wants.

MASTERING

This is where song master files are place side by side. Song titles, artist, composer, copyright., etc are added to individual songs. Here the individual songs are arranged in the order they will be heard on the 'album'. A master file for is created for a CD and/or individual files are created for Web sales.

Our recorder is an audio interface and a computer. Analog audio input signal is adjusted with professional quality pre-amps to match the sweet spot of the analog to digital converters thus allowing the cleanest, fullest, multi-timber digital spectrum to populate the recorder memory (disk drive). Instrument volume mixes can be setup for each musician's headset.

Matching an instrument with the right microphone and/or direct box is crucial.

There is no outboard gear in our setup. All outboard gear duties are tightly integrated into the audio interface, computer, and Presonus Studio One Pro software.

Mixing is accomplished utilizing a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. The 'mixer' is displayed on multiple large computer monitors. As many tracks as needed can be adjusted for volume, gated, normalized, EQ'd, limited, compressed, etc along with as many effects as necessary. A master file is rendered for every song before going to CD mastering.

Individual songs are strung together, spaced out evenly, adjusted for individual volume and EQ. The order of songs and how they fit together on the CD becomes appearant in this step. With multiple songs easily played right next to one another it is easy to notice subtle phasing problems and otherwise unnoticeable harsh artifacts or unwanted sounds. Listening over and over to whole 'albums' and going back to further edit individual songs is not uncommon.