His Master’s Voice

My last update on the topic of the new music shortly to appear from Anam Danu (my now two year collaboration with The Chanteuse) hit the streets (ie – appeared on this blog) about a month ago now. We had – at the time – just sent out copies of all of the tracks in our burgeoning collection to a small number of trusted individuals with the request that they give us their unvarnished opinions thereof.

This they duly did – and lessons were learned!

As a result – and after a certain amount of horse-trading – we ended up with a mutually acceptable running order. Final mixes followed rapidly, exported as 24 bit WAV files (that is in decently high quality versions) and the package completed with a guide MP3 file of the whole album with timed inter-track gaps, fades and suchlike. Accompanied by the necessary documentation – band name, album title, track names and numbers, track times and ISRC numbers for each track – everything was transferred to our chosen mastering company (CPS Mastering of Vancouver) and left in the care of the estimable Brock McFarlane.

Now – for those who have no idea what audio mastering entails, Wikipedia has this helpful explanation:

“Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication).

One of the key reasons for getting your mastering done professionally is that – being effected in a suitable acoustically-neutral mastering environment –  the end result can be guaranteed to play successfully on pretty much all systems and in all spaces.

Yesterday we received from CPS the first mastered draft of the whole collection. We must now spend much time listening to it on different devices and in different environments to figure out if anything needs tweaking or whether we are good to go.

Then we just need to wait for album artwork (that’s another story!) and the whole can be dispatched to our chosen digital distributor to be sent to the various streaming/digital music providers – and CDs burned as required.

I will – of course – keep you informed of (inevitably slow) progress…