Mastering

I have always had an interest in mastering music since I have started at this school.  I thought I would share with you some well known master engineers and some of what it entails.

Audio mastering involves and extensive knowledge of audio engineering.  You have to know about all of your time based effects, equalization, how the mix sits and the overall direction of the album and or song.  While mastering you have to make sure the song or album is able to playback on a variety of different playback systems.  When you are a mastering engineer you take the mixed product which is usually a song or commercial and you add the final tweaks to it that make it sound perfect, take away whats overpowering the mix and putting it on what media forms it deserves.

Here are some famous mastering engineers that I would suggest researching: Bob Ludwig, Stephen Marcussen, Steve Hall, Adam Ayan and our very own Dave Gardner!

Look more into this and see if this is of interest to you.  You can never stop learning!

Click on the picture below to link to an interview with three brilliant “masters”!

Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Vimeo

Twitter Pros:  You can be notified if someone is, “following” you.  They will give you email updates, and you can decide if you want people to know where you are in the world or not, put up pictures and create your own layout, as if anybody cared though.

Twitter cons:  Anybody can try to follow you, you can’t do much else besides update on what you are doing, there is not much else to do besides tweet.

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Flickr Pros:  You can choose to share, restrict or make all of your photos private, you can choose whether your photos can be searchable or not, your very own web address, choose who can print your photos, choose if your photos can be added to a gallery and your own license.

Flickr cons:  You do not have to be registered to view photos, advertisements, you are subject to yahoo’s terms of service not an individual set.  So if you have a problem with yahoo, that sucks.  There is an upload capacity.

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YouTube pros: You can choose if you want people to find your videos through web searches and if you want advertisements or not. almost anything you say can be collected by others, do not send media advertisements to your personal email, only your account name is displayed to others,  you can choose if anybody knows your gender, email address and location, etc.

Youtube cons: You have to give your information out for certain videos, they may “tag” you, it will be known what you view and the frequency of said views.

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Vimeo Pros: Does not collect personal information from children under the age of 13, no personal information is provided to third-party companies, the site will watch out for fraudulent transactions for you, you can limit what promotional newsletter are being sent to you and contact them for anything else you feel is needed for privacy purposes.

Vimeo Cons: You have to pay for the better version which includes more upload space, faster uploading, etc. It will be known if you log into the other sites they are connected with such as Ask, Zwinky, and Match.com, third parties can add advertisements on website, use caution with personal posts for anybody can use it or read it.

You’re never really asleep, your never really awake.

There is an author who I have followed extensively for the past couple of years.  His name is Chuck Palahniuk, you may recognize the name.  He is the person responsible for writing the book Fight Club which has turned into a major motion picture.  I bought the book and loved it.  Not only did I read that book but I have also read five other books by this man.  He is an incredible writer and I encourage reading most if not all of his work.  It is brilliant in all aspects as fight club is if you like that kind of stuff.  Some great books I would recommend are Survivor, Haunted and Lullaby.

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/

Independent Artist!!!

I am an independent artist and I engineer as well.  I am currently working on songs myself that influence from “industrial” bands, various black metal bands and sound in general.  This is a growing interest of mine and I am open to any references to bands or people I should check out.  As well as writing my own songs I also engineer a great deal and want to get as much experience as possible.  If you have any songs you wish to get out and want a professional sound contact me and we will set up studio time.  I will have to say I am still in the learning stages but it means free mixes and studio time!

Soon I will upload my material onto this page for you to listen to at your leisure.

Mosaic

Mosaic was one of the first major web browsers to be used for pictures, videos, etc.  The programming team for Mosaic then created Netscape Navigator, then Communicator, then to just Netscape, the browser we all fondly remember.  Eventually a free open-source software version of Netscape came out entitled Mozilla.  In 2004 it was released as the ever popular Firefox.  Mosaic was invented by Marc Andreessen and his colleagues from NCSA(National Center for Supercomputer Applications) in 1993 which was meant for Unix computers.  Soon after Mosaic was released for Macintosh and became widely known for supporting sound, pictures, videos, history files, etc.  In 1994 Mosaic released its rights to Spyglass, Inc., they licensed it to many other companies such as Microsoft.  Developement of Mosaic discontinued in 1997 to focus on other promising projects at NCSA.

There are not too many interesting videos on the topic of Mosaic and the Internet except for the video below, unless you want to see Shavo from System Of A Down rant about how Marc Andreessen is the greatest.

Marc Andreessen

The Verve-Sweet Deals

The Verve has a special deal with their new album, “Forth”.  As far as this album goes you can buy the CD directly from them for $7.99 or download it from iTunes for $9.99.  If you pre-order the album from iTunes you will even get a bonus track not included on the original CD.  The next step up from that is the CD and DVD package, which includes a documentary and packaged in a special case.  After that you can get the deluxe box set.   The box set includes a vinyl with two bonus tracks not on the CD and limited edition of the CD and DVD with a special tour book.