Richard's Blog » Music

Mastering the Art

Dickie — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:26:50 +0000

Well it’s done… A bit late in blogging about it, but I was so tired yesterday.

The mastering took the grand total of 10 hours (or there abouts). Amazing when you consider that the CD we were mastering was only 45 minutes long.

We are very pleased with the result. I was very nervous before we went along, that the quality of our mix, and the general EQ was not workable, but I was pleasantly surprised and in fact I am very pleased with the result. It is far better than I could have possibly imagined. This makes it sound like we were working with rubbish, but I think that I am being hard on myself really. Listening to the CD objectively it really does sound rather good.
Loads of thanks goes to Graham Semark of Cyclone Music Productions again, for a stirling job, including carrying on till 20:00 so that we could finish off. Hat’s off to you mate. I also have to thank Sarah because without her the mix would not have been as good as it is !!

For some more pictures see Sarah’s post on her beadlog

Well I suppose it’s on with the rest of my jobs now… must get the GBUK web site up…!!!

Mixing it up

Dickie — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 20:28:10 +0000

Well… it’s almost done. The mixing of the CD we are working on has been completed. The whole thing was mixed in Sonar in fact it was also recorded entirely in Sonar… I must admit that I had a very nice experience with Sonar recording it… the PC was booted up in the morning, Sonar was opened and was used to record 17 tracks over about 10 hours with no crashes.. no resets or restarts needed !! It just did it’s stuff.
The mixing was equally non-problematic. It’s been a dream. Hard work (about 16 hours worth) but a dream none the less. (in fact if you add in all the tweeking I have been doing over the last year to the recording, then that time would probably go up to more like 50 hours !!)
As far as the quality of the mix is concerned, we will see when we turn up at Grahams to do the mastering, I’m sure there will be plenty of things that we notice on the day.

Because of that I am concidering bringing a laptop with Sonar installed, so that if there are any that are obviously wrong we can remix quickly then export again while he works on another song.

Well I think I need a rest now… the last two days have been manic… our daughter has been a star.. just happily playing on her own while we got on with the task in hand. (extra pocket money and Daddy time due !!)

New Glass Beadmakers UK Website

Dickie — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:22:19 +0000

Phew… We are in the final throws of the new website for Glass beadmakers UK www.GBUK.org

Depending on when you look at it it will be either the old or the new site, If it doesn’t look like this picture, then it is the old one.

I will make sure the old pages link to the new ones with some dodgy mod-rewrite rules, so all the old links and google cache should be fine and updated.

The whole site will be run from WordPress with my own custom theme. Therefore because its WordPress its all XHTML compliant with as much semantic markup as I can manage and all styling is CSS… I’m sure that there are some incompatibilities with some very old browsers, but it works fine in IE5.5, 6 Firefox and Opera.

One advantage of using WordPress is that I can let some of the committee members post news items themselves, and update any pages that they own (ie tuition pages)

But on that… that’s one thing that I find a bit anyoying about WordPress “as it comes”, is that I cannot set up a page to be editable by another user… posts yes but not pages (If you are allowed to edit pages then you can also create new ones… and I don’t want that). Therefore I will need to write a plugin to do it, which is something that I really like about WordPress…!!!

To be honest though, the site will probably not be up for another week, as I also have a very hectic schedule this week mixing and producing a CD with my wife which is booked in for mastering at Cyclone Music Productions next Wednesday. It has to be mastered by then because we need the CD run to be available for sale by the middle of March. (More on that when I have finished mixing it)
Too much to do… and not enough time.

Sonar 5 Producer

Dickie — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:48:00 +0000

Well I have just received possession of Sonar version 5… !!! Woo hoo… Thanks to my family for a nice Birthday present. I am looking forward to having a play, although I can see when as we are on a tight schedule here at work (imminent release in less than 2 weeks), but I’m sure I will fit in some time somewhere.
I am reliably informed on the Sonar forum and from Edirol Europe that although the minimum spec is Windows XP running on a P4 1.3Gig that my paltry 1Gig PIII with Win2K will run it just fine… So here’s hoping.

At last Sonar 4 Producer edition…

Dickie — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:02:51 +0000

At last I finaly received my upgrade to Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition for my birthday… So now just need to find the time to put it to use. Time… ah yes I remember, that’s that stuff between cooking, eating, doing the web site, working and sleeping… So not much time left then. Oh well I’ll just have to fit it in somewhere. Ho Hum.

Cakewalk SONAR 4

Dickie — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:27:56 +0000

Some of the best Music software out there… always underestimated…
Cakewalk SONAR 4