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How records are actually finished
Written for people making them rather than for people writing standards. No settings to copy, because the settings that transformed someone else’s record were a fix for their room, their microphone and their voice.
Ten guides, grouped by what you are trying to do. Each one links the capability it relates to, so you can stop reading and go and try it.
Finishing a record
What the last stages actually do, and which one your problem belongs to.
- How to master a songThe whole process in six steps, in the order they have to happen, with the four mistakes that undo the rest.
- Mixing vs mastering: what each one actually doesTwo different jobs with different tools and different questions — and a simple test for which one your problem belongs to.
- How to EQ vocalsMost vocal EQ is subtraction, and most of it happens on other tracks. Why boosting the vocal usually fails.
- Mastering hip-hop: the 808, the knock and the levelThe genre's risk is concentrated at the bottom of the spectrum and the front of every drum hit — and loudness is where both get spent.
Loudness
The part of the craft that changed completely when streaming started turning everyone down.
- What LUFS actually measuresWhy platforms normalise by loudness rather than peak, what gating does, and why your DAW's peak meter disagrees with the encoder.
- Streaming loudness targets, and what they actually doMastering louder than the target does not make you louder. It makes the platform turn you down by exactly that much, with less dynamic range than you started with.
- LUFS for Spotify, and what the normaliser doesThe published target, the quiet, normal and loud listener settings, the one case where Spotify limits your audio, and where true peak bites.
- LUFS for Apple Music: Sound Check and the targetSound Check on tracks and albums, what Apple Digital Masters actually is, and why the lossy encode makes true peak the strict number here.
Repairing and rescuing
What can be fixed after the fact, what cannot, and how to tell before you start.
- How to remove noise from a recordingHiss, hum, clicks and room are four different problems. Treating them as one is why noise reduction makes voices sound underwater.
- Six home recording mistakes that are hard to fix laterMost home-recording problems are fixable in a mix. These six are decisions made at the microphone that no amount of processing undoes.
How the tools work
The mechanisms behind the things that sound like magic, explained without the magic.
- What stem separation actually doesIt estimates the sources inside a finished mix. Understanding that it estimates — rather than recovers — explains where it succeeds and fails.
- How pitch correction actually worksThree steps, and the hard one is the middle. Why retune speed rather than strength is what makes a tuned vocal sound tuned.
- What Auto-Tune actually isOne company's product, not the technique — and the famous robotic sound is a speed setting, not the sound of tuning something hard.
- What Dolby Atmos music actually isObject-based rather than channel-based, which is why almost everyone hears it as a binaural headphone render — and why it plays back quieter.