Good Question!
Sometimes in life you get a good question that makes you think and re-calibrates you. I’ve received a lot of these in yoga classes…or reading yoga books.
One I came across the other day was “what would you do if you knew you could not fail?”
Something worth pondering. My answer was pretty quick, which is that [...]
Enough Tech Talk
To counter-balance all the quasi-tech-opinionated blather I’ve been posting recently, let’s get back to non-scientific sound. Gut instincts record making.
When you go out for pizza, you don’t really care the exact temperature of the oven, how much salt and water are in the dough that make the perfect crust, or how much sugar is in [...]
Things You Just Want One of
On the heels of Things You Want a Lot of, there’s something a mastering engineer should just have one set of. Namely, one pair of mastering speakers.
A lot of amateur (and some professional and/or semi-professional) mastering facilities incorporate several speaker setups into their playback system. The theory is that the lo-fi speakers (or “alternate” speakers) [...]
Things You Want a Lot of
Being a mastering engineer is like being a makeup artist. You want a lot of different brushes and various hues in your pallete because different pieces of music, like people’s faces and complexions, need different treatments.
Things you want a lot of are equalizers, compressors, limiters, and dithers. They all need to have high resolution and [...]
Interfacing with South Africa
“Hello Paul,
We are starting a small recording studio with basic equipment to start off with. Unfortunately equipment is pretty limited in choice we can get in stores and at our budget range. Anyhow, we looking into a recording interface to buy and got to two interfaces to choose from. I am not sure which to [...]
iTunes: Not for Cutting Hi-Res. Discs
The other day a musician came down from Orange County (“The OC!”) to deliver a disc for me with his finished mixes on it. He was skipping FTP because he said that he’d recorded at 24/192, and uploading files of that size just took too long.
When he arrived, he handed me a single CD. I [...]
European Beer Through a Leaky Straw
I wrote a post a few days back about cables, and the concept hit me again recently when I saw an online ad for a mastering facility. It shows a mondo compressor with more knobs than you can count, and in the corner of the picture you see it’s run through a patchbay with a [...]
People’s Perception
I was e-mailing with a potential client today. They’d been recommended from a previous client who was a friend. The said, “we’re a pretty heavy band, and it looks like most of your work has been with acoustic music. Will this be a problem?”
Interesting, I thought. I’ve worked with extreme death metal, electronic, DJs, punk, [...]
Convenience, Above All?
The other day I was meeting another local studio owner/musician friend to lend him a microphone. After trying to meet up for weeks, he told me he would be at a studio close to my house, so I said I’d meet him there. After I handed off the mic he said, “hey, there’s a ProTools [...]
SDMA Nominees
We’re proud to say that several ZenMastering clients have been nominated for the 2008 San Diego Music Awards!!!!
They are:
• Veronica May (Best Acoustic)
• The Grams (Best Americana or Country)
• Ryan Ferguson (Best Pop)
• Buddy Akai (Best Alternative)
• Tribal Seeds (Best World Music)
Luckily, none of our clients are competing against each other in the same [...]
About This Blog
From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
We welcome comments from readers...pro or con!
