And then there was four.

Part 83

  Our first concert of 2012 is nearly here. Upstairs in Sweeney's bar on Dame street on Tuesday the 3rd of April. This will also be our first concert with our new member Patryk Graczyk on guitar, so come along and give him a warm welcome to the band:-). Two weeks a go we did a photo shoot with www.music-shoots.com. Above you can see an example of the results. As I have mentioned before, your bands image is an important part, even though some of us like to think that it is lame to think that way... But it is important, and a good quality photos are important part of your press kit. I have been lost in the world of no internet thanks once again to UPC, who is really making it hard for me to stick with them at the moment... But that's another story;-). But we are working on our new website at the moment, which has temporarily slowed down due to lack of broadband, but when I get everything back working, we will have some of the photos from the photo shoot available for a download as screen savers on the site. But more on that later. We actually have quite few concerts coming up at the moment:-) You can check the detail on our website www.jpkallio.com and of course all the info will be on our Facebook page as well. So we really hope to see many of you in the next month or so at one of the shows.

  And now on to something completely different. Quite long while back we did briefly talk about mastering. A project I have been recording in the paste few months brought this subject to my mind again. It still surprises me a bit how many musicians don't really understand all the aspects of recording process. I think if you are thinking of making a career out of music, you should really spend some time learning about recording. I don't mean you need to become sound engineer or anything like that, but you should understand how the process works. We all know about going to studio and recording songs, and most of us know about mixing. This really is something to keep in mind while many of us end up using some of those studio days you might have won on a battle of the bands, or payed for with your hard earned cash. A very good sound engineer once told me you should spend as much time mixing as you do recording. I know things are much faster now with computers as you can save mixes. But still, serious album will take long time to mix. So if you do have one day in studio, and you want to finish tracks, you need to allow time for mixing. This is where you set the levels of all instruments, clean up tracks, compress what need to be compressed, EQ, add effects, etc. This is part of the recording process that requires quite lot of knowledge and experience from the engineer, but also becomes part of the creative process in the hands of a good studio engineer. When this is done, you will have nice sounding tracks, but to bring them up to the broadcast level you need to master the tracks. This is an art form of its own. Here you have just a stereo track of your mixes, that you worked very hard on, and you run them through multi-band compressors and sometimes an EQ as well. Here is where you get rid of any peaks in the signal and level everything in to a nice tight sound file, that you can then boost to maximum level without it distorting. This sounds simple, but it is very skillful art and requires very detailed high end studio speakers and an engineer with very good and experienced ears. There are studios, like the Trackmix studio that have the facilities to do mastering in-house. And there are studios that specialize in mastering. But lets just say this, don't just expect your tracks to come out of your Pro Tools, or Cubase at the level you hear most commercial tracks. You need to spend some money in good quality mastering to get to that level. And you will be amazed what a great mastering engineer does to your tracks. You will find much more detail and clarity, but still containing the warmth.

  So next time you are planning to spend money on studio, I would consider the mastering as well. Give your tracks a chance to stand up to their full potential.

   J.P.