![]() ![]() After all, the sound of powerful bass and soaring highs from a great stereo is incredibly satisfying. No matter how detailed and warm a vintage recording was, listeners and engineers wanted more extension in the highs and lows. If vintage is soft, round, and midrange focussed, then what exactly is modern? But today’s engineers go to great lengths to get the same warm mids and special saturation of vintage recording gear. To them, coloration was a negative side-effect of the recording process that they were always struggling to minimize. At the time engineers were looking for the highest fidelity they could possibly achieve. Those qualities are generally associated with older equipment that imparted its own characteristics to the program material. “Vintage means a somewhat band-limited frequency response (more midrange focussed with not a lot of extreme bass or treble) and a bit of saturation and possibly even a bit of a ‘lo-fi’ quality.” Here’s senior LANDR audio engineer Al Isler on the subject: Vintage and modern are some of the first descriptors people throw out to make a distinction between sonic styles. I’ll go through some of the differences between mastering styles from different periods in music history. From the questionable first fully digital masters to the peak of the loudness war, there’s certainly been some misses.īut there’s also been lots of great sounding masters from all eras. That’s because our idea of what a great track sounds like has evolved considerably over time.ĭo you ever listen to production from a different era and wonder what they were thinking? Well the best engineers of the time signed off on all those decisions that sound crazy to our ears today. What does it sound like? Do you think of booming, extended low end or, shiny, crisp highs? Punchy drums or larger than life vocals?Ī music listener from fifty years ago almost certainly wouldn’t come up with the same answer. Think of your idea of a well-produced track. The decisions mastering engineers make have a big effect. Mastering adds its own elements of compression and EQ to shape the overall sound of the track. The mastering process relies on the same types of tools you use in your mix. ![]() ![]() I’m talking about things like overall EQ contour, overall dynamics, or the level and frequencies range of each element.īut mastering plays a big role too. When you think of a song being airy, punchy, vintage, warm, modern or balanced what does it really mean?įrom a technical standpoint, those qualities all relate to features of your track. But for the most part, those terms relate to real sonic phenomena that you can hear in your mix. That’s where all the weird mixing terms to describe sound come from. Mastering StylesĮngineers can get pretty fired up when it comes to talking about mixing and mastering. In this article, I’ll show you how mastering affects the sonic style of music, and what it means for your sound. As trends and styles have come and gone in music, mastering has kept pace and made its own contributions. It’s still a highly technical procedure, but it’s also become an important part of the creative process. Early masters were often done without a second thought by the vinyl lathe operators themselves! Back then the only goal was to move a piece of music from the recording medium (analog tape) to the production medium (vinyl records). In the first days of recorded music, mastering was a purely technical process. Guest post by Michael Hahn of Soundfly’s Flypaper ![]()
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