The process of audio recording, mastering and manufacturing

The process of transforming your music ideas into a finished product that you can share with others involves a series of steps leading from the original recording session through the delivery of you finished CD, Cassettes or vinyl records.

The choice you make at each step affect the quality of the final product. In this article I will try to make you familiar with all these process so that it will help ensure the possible best quality of the final products.

There are many possible variation of process, but in general the process runs as follows:

• Recording involves capturing instruments and vocal sounds (using microphones and direct inputs through digital audio workstations or Rewire) and storing them into the Tape or Computer hard drive. Some recordings are made direct to stereo. But the majority of professional recording engineer records in multitrack. Mostly vocals and solo instruments should be recorded in multiple mono tracks and should be stored individually until final mix.
  
  Mixing: is an art of blending individually recorded sounds through a console or a DAW (Digital Audio Engine). On a multitrack mixer controlling the level and pan each track to it designated meter to create a final mix of the musical instruments and voices.
  
  Editing a collection of individual songs mixed into a complete master that follows from start to finish in the desired order and with the desired amount of space between each music tracks called “master assembly”. A master may be assembled by transferring between two digital recorders such as DAT machines or by physically editing mixes on an analog tape. The ease of control allowed by digital wave form editing, however, means that digital recordings are frequently assembled on a digital audio workstations with the material than transferred in assembled form to a digital master tape or to a recordable CD.
  
  Premastering/mastering is the link between the production process and the manufacturing facility where copies will be made. Overall program level is set, as well as song-to-song or relative levels should be set equally. EQ and Compression may also be used to make the material sound as good as possible when played in the listening environments (such as home stereo player or in the car) by the consumers who buy the final products. Once optimized the resulting program is transferred to an appropriate production master for the plant that will be make the actual copies ( CD or Audio Tape or DVD).
  
  Manufacturing is when the actual copies are made and packaged for distribution and sale.
  -For CD’s the master tape is transferred to a glass master from which molds are made for replication, a multi step process involving injection molding.
  -For cassettes, the produc master is tranfered into a digital bin a storage device that converts the program from digital to analog at high speed and sends to slave machines that records on cassette tape, which is than bulk loaded into cassette shells.
  -For Vinyl records the master lacquer is used to make molds which are used to press the records.
  
  In the next blog I will cover some of the factors that influence quality during these various steps, and help you to learn how to get the most out of the audio recording and manufacturing process. for more information you can allways visit at http://www.loopsking.com/