Master Music Techniques

Video Transcript

"FREDERICK BURCHELL: Hello. My name is Frederick "Ricky B." Burchell with B4 Entertainment on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to talk about producing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your independent CD. Now, let's talk about mastering the record. Now, mastering the record is just like--almost recording the record. It's almost the same process what you do when you're looking for somebody to master your record. What you want to do is get a copy of somebody's work that you're interested in mastering the record. Network with other artists, see who mastered their records. If the sound quality sounds good then I will call them--call the company to master. Now, what is mastering? Mastering is actually taking all your songs that you recorded and make them even, Making them all one level, one sound, one universal sound, and you want to master your record if you're doing an independent CD. You want to master your record. All the big-time labels do it and that's what you need to do. You need to get your record mastered. Well, like I said, take a copy of somebody's work, listen to it, listen to what they've done in mastering other people's stuff. You take it back and you play it on your CD player. Make sure it sounds good; if it sounds good then compare it to a major label CD. If it sounds as good as a major label CD, then that's the place that you want to go to get your record mastered. And also another thing that you really need to take into consideration, mastering will not fix certain things. If the mix is bad then the mastering can only do so much, so when you're in your studio and you're recording, make sure that mixes are right so when you take it to the master, the master will just enhance it. The master doesn't fix the mixing problems. There's always a room for that."