Editing and mastering the material

Montage roomMostly the people in radio that do the editing are different from those who take the music up. In some cases it can be the same person as it was with our guitar duo cd. The main principles in the radio are to use as little after editing as possible. The sound should be the room’s own sound, the compression is not allowed and so on. But the music was taken up with 4-5 microphones and mixed together at the same time so it would have been  very difficult to change anything and remain natural.

As I said – I regretted a little bit that we have only 2-3 takes of every piece. Sometimes it meant that we had no choice if there was some mistake in one take. In the beginning when the editor received the material she was a little bit surprised that there were so few sound files. She thought that at least half of them are missing because usually the guitarists have much more takes 🙂

But – as with many things: you will forget as time passes by. But my problem is that I am still playing that program live and am technically better than ever so I think I could play it another way now thow I doubt that I would have the fresh feeling that I had. I don’t listen to this CD often but occasionally I hear it from radio and then there is virtually nothing that would still bother me.

The mastering process was longer – I felt that the first versions were too natural as my ultimate goal was to get this disc played in radio stations. So I found a movie sound engineer who did something that they in the radio would not have done – he compressed the material and did some versions for me. I think I chose one of the softer compressions as there was a real tough one, too 🙂

Listen to those tracks and decide for yourself:

The first version of radio – Bourree by Bach mp3
The first version with compression – Bourree by Bach

If I think of myself laying back in my armchair and having one of those perfect headphones on, there is little doubt that I would choose the version without compression. But thinking of what awful equipment for listening to the music people use nowadays! I bet you’re listening those tracks through your laptop’s speakers 🙂

Unfortunately mp3 is a compressed format anyhow and I cannot upload the .wav file which is too big so I hope that one day you hear it from the CD, too. The CD version is somewhere between those two examples.

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