Record Store Day 2016 – Our Picks

Another year, another unfeasibly long list of records being released especially for the nostalgic, vinyl loving elite (which is now everybody), Record Store Day is almost here.

For a mastering engineer, anyone mentioning the word ‘vinyl’ will more than likely get a hug when they want an album mastering. Contrary to popular belief, vinyl records aren’t preferred because we are all super-hipsters, it’s because music just sounds that bit better on a record. How does it sound better? Essentially, in short, it’s just not as loud, which means that the dynamics and other bits of niceness shine through more.

If you want to find out more about mastering specifically for vinyl, and want to know what the difference is, check out this post on mastering for vinyl. If you’re not interested on the other hand, carry on reading to see what the guys at Mastering World have picked as their best buys for Record Store Day 2016.

For Record Store Day, we like to get a good mixture of possible releases to whet your appetite. After all, the Record Store Day list is quite extensive, this one’s a little easier to digest. Check out our top 20.

Here’s some of the staff picks for Record Store Day 2016.

  1. Chase & Status – London Bars – heavyweight 12” vinyl
  2. Doctor Who – Genesis Of The Daleks – Pressed on Blue Vinyl

  3. Ian Brown – Solarized – Limited edition single heavyweight vinyl

  4. Mungo’s Hi Fi – Jump in line – Black dinked vinyl

  5. AIR –  Casanova 70

  6. Funkadelic – One Nation Under a Groove

  7. Johnny Cash – All Aboard the Blue Train

  8. Manics -A Design For Life

  9. The Orb – Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

  10. Clutch – elephant riders

  11. Deftones – B sides & raritiez

  12. Glen Hansard – a season on the line

  13. James Bay – Chaos and the Calm

  14. Run The Jewels – VRTJ
  15. Nirvana – Live on Kaos-FM Seattle 1987
  16. Circa Waves – Something Like You
  17. Foals – Rain/Daffodils
  18. Motorhead – Bad Magic
  19. NOFX – Sid & Nancy
  20. The Weeknd – The Remixes

 

Check out the full list for Record Store Day 2016. 

 

 

Hafod Mastering team up with Golden Boy Records

Wales’s leading dedicated mastering studio have begun a partnership with Cardiff based record label Golden Boy Records.

Golden Boy Records consists of vocalists, songwriters, DJ’s and producers, Cardiff’s new hub for musical talent. Earlier in 2015 we spoke with record label MD Tej about mixing and mastering, and drafted in the mixing wisdom of Hafod’s good friend and client Adam Whittaker. 

Adam lives in central Europe and does all his mixing projects from his mix room ‘Bald English’. Adam works with clients from all over the world on a wealth of different projects, one of these being Golden Boy Records.

Hafod’s mastering engineer, Gethin John is the engineer behind the projects through the partnership. Gethin has worked on some great projects and albums, he also works as a mix engineer, so this comes in handy when you’re working in a collaborative environment like this.

Check out some of the great tracks from Golden Boy Records when they are released later this year – twitter.com/gbr | twitter.com/hafodmastering

GoldenBoyRecords_logoHafodMastering_logo

How should my record sound?

How Should My Masters Sound?

How Should My Masters sound? Mastering World Blog

 

This is completely up to you, but the mastering engineer will be able to gauge what kind of thing you want. It’s important to remember when mastering that this process is the refining process, it’s the tidying up and clarity element of your mixes.

So, usually just by listening to your tracks, the mastering engineer will have a good idea of how he or she should go about mastering the tracks.

With mastering, there is no one-size fits all preset, so every single job is different, the key thing you need to have post-mastering is a brilliant sounding track, that you are super happy with.

If you are particular and have some great reference ideas of what you want the end result to be, that’s great. With online mastering it’s important that there is great communication between you and your mastering engineer, this way you get your tracks back sounding exactly how you wanted them too.

So how should they sound when you get your tracks back?

They should sound crisp, detailed, cleaner and the overall level of the track will also be louder. The whole point of mastering is to refine the mixes of a track, to tidy up the loose ends and tighten up the overall sound. Does your track tick all of the boxes I just mentioned? Great, your track will sound perfect.

 

What if I’m not sure on how the mastered track sounds? 

That’s fine, you can get back in touch with your engineer through the Mastering World email tool and let them know what you would like to hear different. We also suggest that you give the mastered tracks a few plays on different sets of speakers, and over a couple of days to a week or so. This way you know exactly what you like and don’t like, it also lets you hear the tracks as your listeners would.

 

 

Don’t Sacrifice the Dynamics

Mastering Dynamics

Everyday we have chats with clients, and between ourselves about dynamics and about loudness, and you’d think by now that loudness doesn’t matter, but it still does to a lot of people.

But, with loudness comes problems, the louder you make a track the closer you come to peaking and distortion, and then there is the lack of dynamics that comes with pushing a track to over its limit.

What are dynamics? They are the loud and quiet parts in a track. Dynamics are a great thing in music, otherwise it would all just be a wall of noise, or very quiet, but having a mixture of these two things is great.

Mastering is key to bringing tracks up to a respectable volume, but when the limits of loudness are pushed, you begin to lose these dynamics.

What do I mean? Well, basically compressing audio makes the quieter parts of tracks louder, and the louder parts quieter. Done well, and done delicately with finesse, this can make your tracks louder and sound better. But, over-compression can really kill a song, and make it sound pretty bad.

So, why shouldn’t you sacrifice your dynamics? Because without dynamics your tracks will be squashed and sound over compressed, and there will be no room for loud and quiet parts in your tracks. Dynamics are what make music interesting, and they are a good thing!

What is hi-res audio?

HIRESAUDIO

High-resolution audio is exactly as it sounds, audio that is of a particularly high resolution, higher than C.D. quality and most definitely higher than .mp3 files.

Hi-res audio files are usually 24bit, and at a sampling frequency of 96kHz, or 192kHz.

When getting your tracks mastered it is recommended that you give the mastering engineer the highest resolution file possible. For this our mastering engineers usually recommend a sampling frequency of 96kHz and a bit depth of 24. Having files at this resolution gives our mastering engineers the highest resolution files to work with.

What is loudness normalisation?

What is loudness normalisation?

What is loudness normalisation?

Firstly, what is loudness normalization? Well, it’s quite simple, really. The volume of each track played on an app such as Spotify, or iTunes (and now even YouTube) is the same, it’s at an equal loudness to every other track on the app. Quite simply, Loud songs become quieter and quiet songs become louder.

Um, why?

Well it’s actually quite a useful tool. You have the ability to listen to all your favourite music at the same perceived volume. You can listen to the tracks without thinking “that’s quieter than the last track” and heading for the volume knob. It basically makes everything a consistent volume.

Benefits?

It’s kinda good for mastering, it will hopefully mean that soon mastering can de done dynamically once again. These apps that we use everyday like Spotify, YouTube and Deezer all have loudness normalisation set as default, so everything is consistent for the user. Hopefully in the long term this will almost make mastering for pure loudness irrelevant, which mastering engineers would love!

Should I limit my mixes before sending them to get mastered?

Should I limit my Music?

Should I limit my mixes before sending them to get mastered?

This is a simple one, no. The best thing to do with your mixes is listen to them and mix them as mixes, without any master processing on the main buss. The issue you have with limiting and compressing a whole mix is that the mix you hear will sound massively different when you take those processors off the master fader.

The best thing to do when sending your tracks out to a mastering engineer is send them the straight mix files, without any processing. If you’ve used a limiter just to bring up the overall perceived volume of the mixes, take that off too.

Your mixes should not be too close to 0db, and definitely shouldn’t be exceeding 0db at any point.

When you get your tracks mastered, there needs to be space so that the mastering can actually happen. If your mix is pushed right up to 0 on the VU’s then there isn’t much the mastering engineer can do. Remember that quieter mixes allow for more movement in the mastering process.

Taylor Swift Beats Tech Giant Apple

Taylor Swift and Apple Music

 

After Apple Music‘s cheek, it is nice to see that someone out there (good ol’ Swifty) has put their foot down.

In 2014, Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify based on the fact that she eflt the streaming service didn’t pay artists fairly. Fast forward to now. Apple Music is announced, another streaming service is announced to join the long list. Apple say they are going to pay artists more fairly, and especially indie artists, great. But of course, it’s not quite that simple.

Apple is offering a free 3 month trial of their new music service, which is great, but they were intending on not paying license holders for the music streamed during this 3 month trial period. Considering Apple want a better streaming world and a world where artists are paid what they deserve, this seemed really bizarre.

All hail the Swift, or at least respect her, ’cause she’s done it again.

In an open letter, Taylor spoke out about her dislike for the 3 month trial period offered to new subscribers.

Swifty argued that the plan was ‘unfair’, which it kinda is, and that Apple  had the money to cover the cost.

Now Apple say that it will pay artists during this trial period.

“I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,” the 25-year-old said, describing Apple as one of her “best partners in selling music”.

“Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.

“We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”

Swift had some great points, and it points out all the problems with the music industry in general. Music isn’t free, and it shouldn’t be, thank goodness for Swifty, right?

“When I woke up this morning and I saw Taylor’s note that she had written, it really solidified that we needed to make a change,” exec Eddie Cue told Associated Press.

Cue had been speaking to Billboard magazine and mentioned he had already heard ” a lot of concern from indie artist about not getting paid during the three month free trial period”, this was prior to Swift’s outbreak.

Apple were hoping to reimburse artists with a higher rate per stream after the free 3 month trial period, if they had been able to go ahead with the non payment of licenses for that period.

Apple have now confirmed that they WILL pay for the rights during the three month trial period, and they will pay the higher rate of streaming royalties during this period and in the paid subscription model.

Spotify: 75 million active users

Spotify users increase to 75 million

 

In response to Apple’s new service going live, Spotify have announced their user base has reached a massive 75 million monthly active users, 20 million of these are paying premium subscribers.

This is a nice rise from the last figures released by the streaming giant, previous figures indicated 60 million active monthly users with 15 million paying subscribers. Not a bad increase at all for Spotify.

This is no coincidence that this new data release comes just after the release of Apple’s new venture ‘Apple Music’.

According to the Spotify blog, this is a massive increase on previous numbers:

“What a difference a year makes! At the end of May 2014, we reached 10 million paying subscribers and 40 million active users. Today, we have reached more than 20 million subscribers and more than 75 million active users. 10 million subscribers in our first five and a half years – and another 10 million subscribers in just a single year!”

The blog posts mentions how Spotify have paid out more than $3 billion US dollars in royalties, with $300 million being paid out in the first three months of 2015.

The Spotify blog has some interesting stats and figures, check out the blog for more on their projected growth over the next few months.