Mixing / Production

Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world?

Last month we discussed how to prepare mixes so that they are ready for the mastering engineer. This month, we look inside the mastering room during the processing of an album, to see what kind of equipment is used, and the sort of processes that are applied to finish the tracks to the required standard.

This issue's Studio SOS comes to you from the other side of the world, as we help an Australian reader sort out his vocal recordings.

Most modern musicians use samples, even if only in Sample & Synthesis-based keyboards or virtual instruments. But sampling itself has become something of a lost art. In the first part of a short series on rediscovering this skill, we look back at how the technique and the technology developed.

East Norfolk Sixth Form College needed help integrating their hardware multitracker with their computer sequencing system, so the SOS team travelled over to Great Yarmouth to lend a hand.

Celebrities from around the world were keen to contribute to a fund-raising single for victims of the Asian tsunami, and converting all of this goodwill into a finished record required innovative use of broadband Internet to collect together their performances.