Greatest Design Tip

If you’re feeling like you want to do your own design or even if you just want to have meaningful input into a design that someone else is doing for you, I have some simple, but great advice.

Go over to your favorite place for perusing CDs and look at a fifty designs. Take a notebook with you and make three columns: “artist/band;” “album title;” “rating” (from 1 to 5). The idea is to get enough of a list designs that you can give ratings of 4 or 5 that you can look them up later on your computer. You could bypass the step of going to the store and just look at designs online, but if you do, you’ll miss a lot of creative ways to use the reverse part of the traycard to compliment the insert — this occurs when a design uses a clear tray and the left side of the tray shows through on the left side of the jewel case. You will also miss out on seeing how certain choices can get lost once they’re covered up with shrink wrapping.

Once you get back home to your computer, go to your favorite music site and track down the artwork online. You can generally copy the thumbnail by right-clicking on the artwork. If you don’t have a graphics application, paste it into Microsoft’s standard Paint program or some other application that will allow you to see the images quickly and refer back to them.

Then start working your way through the design. What is the central photograph or object on the cover? Where is it positioned? How is it framed? What is the background? Is it a texture? Is it simple or complex? How is the designer using text? How many fonts are being used? How are fonts used differently? What do you like about the color combinations? Which is the boldest color? What is the most subtle color?

As you work through three or four designs this way, try to begin asking yourself if any of the elements that you’ve listed could represent you and your music well. Also ask yourself why you feel like certain design elements would not represent you and your music well. Being able to tell which elements you shouldn’t use is just as important as discovering which you should.

If you invest the time to work through defining the elements you like and dislike, you will have a much stronger vocabulary when it’s time to either start your own design or sit down with your designer.

Keep in mind that, especially for new artists, generally when a person goes to a store to buy a CD, the main representation that they get is not the music itself, but the graphic on the cover. It’s important that you take some time to find a design that represents you and your music well.

If you have other helpful ideas for artists who are headed toward the creation of their CD artwork, please add a comment.

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The Most Common Graphic Mistake

I thought I’d try to throw out an ounce of prevention with the hope of saving a lot of people a lot of time. There is a mistake that is pretty common that ends up creating a lot of headaches for people and a lot of sentiment of…”wow, I wish I had known.”

Here it is… create your graphics in 300ppi.

(I’ll pause to let it soak in.)

O.K., here is what you need to know first. Graphics are made up of little specs of light called, “pixels.” The resolution of an image is measured in inches. So the measurement is defined as “pixels per inch” — i.e. ppi.

Here’s the problem. Most consumer applications default to 72ppi, but printing for a retail product requires a minimum quality of 300ppi. So when we receive a customer’s graphic that is 72ppi and print it out it has a look that is usually referred to as “pixelated.” It’s possible to see the little squares that are making up the image with the naked eye. (Of course, this is where we share the bad news with the customer that they need to re-create their graphics).

Re-creating a graphic can take hours or days. And it only takes a few seconds to change the setting. In Photoshop, it’s under the “Image” tab. Go to “Image” and scroll down to “Image Size.” When the dialog box opens set “resolution” to 300.

Adobe Photoshop is a professional graphic design program. Often we will come across customers who don’t know about this function in Photoshop or are using a program like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint to create the graphic. Both of the latter can only create images in 72ppi. These applications are fine for creating web pages or presentations, but they’re not created for graphic design.

If you’re wanting to create your own graphic design, but you don’t want to lay out the cash for Photoshop, check out Paint.net

Once you have a graphics application, you can go to our templates section and download a template for the piece your designing. The template shows where the safe areas are for text and photos and also shows where to add the extra graphic that’s called the “bleed.”

So give yourself a bunch of your life back in advance. Be sure to create your graphics in 300 pixels per inch.

Brent Tallent
Green Room Productions
www.greenroomprod.com

Mp3 Masters are Not the Best Choice for CD Duplication

More and more I’m seeing masters coming in that are made from mp3s. Sometimes customers will bring a data disc of mp3s and ask us to compile a master for them. Sometimes customers think that it’s a time saver to email the mp3s so they don’t have to bring a master over.

It’s understandable. The average listener cannot tell the difference between an mp3 file and an uncompressed file such as a .wav. Mp3s have made music listening easier than ever because files can be moved and stored in so many great ways.

I think it’s interesting that it’s a far different situation with video. I think 99 out of 100 people would be able to tell the difference between a high definition image on a television compared to a standard definition image, but you would be incredibly lucky if you could get one person out of a hundred who could discern the difference between an mp3 and an uncompressed audio file.

So why isn’t it a good choice for masters that are going to be used for CD duplication? The most significant problem is what may happen downstream. Most artists hope that their music will be played on the radio or, even better, television. When an an audio file is played on the radio or beamed out for television it goes through a special compression process. To beam all the information so far and so fast, the size of the information has to be reduced.

So if your CD is only playing at the level of an mp3, now we have a problem because we’re compressing something that’s already been compressed. Depending on how hard they are compressed, mp3s are 1/3 to 1/4 the file size of an uncompressed .wav file. This means that as much as 75% of the information has been discarded. So when the radio station gets it, they’re going to take the mp3 that is only a fraction of your original data and compress it even more. And suddenly the number of people who can discern the difference will skyrocket. Often the problems that appear won’t just be a lack of fidelity — digital noises can enter that will sound like a percussionist who had one too many.

Even though mp3s are small and easy to transport, in today’s world of cheap storage there is really no reason to use the mp3s. When you’re mixing, it takes the same amount of time to export an mp3 as it does an uncompressed .wav.

So when your preparing for your CD duplication, do yourself a favor and output your mixes at 44.1khz, 16 bit .wav files. You’ll be glad you did.

Brent Tallent
Green Room Productions
www.greenroomprod.com

What to reach for when mastering your CD

Mastering is the last step an artist takes in the crafting of a project before getting the CDs duplicated or replicated. It’s always amazing to me the amount of time that can go into a project and then in the last seconds the whole project can be improved or ruined.

Often people ask me what mastering is and why a project needs to be mastered. Some times the term “master” gets applied loosely to all sorts of different ideas and places in the process. The recording process in a nutshell is: record the basic track; add peripheral instruments; add vocals; mix the levels of all the different pieces and then master.

When a song is being mixed, generally the engineer is trying get as much level as possible without risking distortion. This was much more of an issue in the days of analog because we were always fighting tape hiss and the best way to defeat hiss was to get your mix as loud as possible without distorting it. This isn’t as much of an issue in the digital era.

But it helps to understand that during the mixing process, the goal is to get a good mix with a good level — not an exact level. Mastering is about getting everything exact.

You might have experienced a CD where you found yourself turning the volume up and down from track to track because there was no consistency in the album overall. This happens when an album has not been mastered or when it’s been poorly mastered.

The common solution to this variance in the track levels is called, “normalization.” Normalization goes and looks at the levels in a given track and finds the highest point. It then raises the entire song proportionally to it’s maximum potential.

So if a person goes through each song and normalizes it, then the loudest point of each song will have the exact same amplitude or loudness.

It turns out that this is not enough of a solution to create the consistency that is desired. The reason for this is that a song might have one spike that is not really the norm for the rest of the song. The normalization goes and finds the spike and makes its calculations based on this spike and not on the song in general. This can be overcome with some sort of gentle compression.

Compression can ruin a mix faster than anything so it’s really important to be careful at this stage. The goal is to catch the spikes and just barely graze the levels of the rest of the mix. You do this by watching the meters as you adjust the ratios. I like to choose a fairly bold ratio like 10 to 1 and then begin moving the amplitude fader. I watch the meters and take note of where they stop moving. Then I start moving it back until the lights are barely moving most of the time and I can see it jump on big spikes.

Once a mix has been compressed, then there is a lot of leftover headroom — that is, we don’t have the normalized peaking. I have this crazy system where I normalize all the tracks to 85% and then I do a light compression to catch the spikes. Then I normalize again, but this time to 90% — not 100%. I do this because my last step is to use a finalizer and I want the finalizer to have room to push the mix up the last 10%. If a track is normalized to 100% and then finalized, too often there is a lot of subtle white noise added and the overtones loose their normal characteristics.

Compression is going through the track and finding spikes and telling them they have to play a little softer. One thing that finalizing does is nearly the opposite. It goes and finds the parts of the track that don’t have as much amplitude and it pulls them up so they are closer to the more dominant sounds. It then gives the opportunity to pull everything up so that the song peaks at its maximum level. I like to find a the song in an album that has the fullest mix and use it as my standard to finalize all the others by.

A lot of mastering engineers will jump off into EQ either here or earlier in the process and try to balance the overall frequency spectrum. I’m going to leave that for another discussion.

I’m not much of an audio file, but when I was learning about all this there seemed to be an ongoing argument about what the maximum level should be. Some people would say “100%” and others would advise to keep it a couple points below 100. For whatever reason, my instincts always lean toward keeping it a two notches below 100%. This doesn’t mean 98%. It’s something like “99.96%” The reason that it has been debated has to do with digital errors and error rates and things that artists generally don’t want to be concerned with. But it’s my opinion that the difference in amplitude cannot be perceived by one’s ear, but the potential risk of the errors could tip over into something that could be audible.

The last step I take is to look at the beginning and end of each song. Most of the time there is extra space that needs to be taken out. Some times I’ll write a very short fade at the beginning so the track doesn’t slam in from digital black. A good part of the time, if not all of the time, tracks need to be faded out. Some times the track will have a long fade as part of arrangement of the song and some times it will be less than a second. It’s important to be careful to keep the track as one audio file at this stage. Pro tools can end up interpreting the fade in and out as different tracks. Once I write the files, I use a command called, “duplicate” to make sure all the parts of the song are summed down into one file.

If you’re preparing for replication, it’s nice to have a PQ list although it’s far from the norm anymore. As a substitute, you can type out a list of the songs with the exact track lengths.

Once the tracks have been mastered, it’s time to export them. CDs can only use files at 44.1 khz and 16 bit. With all the variables that recording workstations offer these days, I’m sure this causes a lot of confusion. Export the files in .wav format. Don’t export as mp3. I’ll save that explanation for another post.

Once you’ve exported the .wav files, drop them into an application like ‘Toast” that will allow you to put them in order and put space in between each track — the standard space is 2 seconds, but it’s up to your preference.

To summarize, my process for mastering goes something like this. Import the tracks; normalize to 85%; compress lightly to graze the spikes; normalize to 90%; use a finalizer; check the beginnings and ends of songs; add fades; export as .wav at 44.1khz and 16 bit; drop the mastered tracks into an application like “Toast” and burn the CD.

If you have some favorite mastering tips and tricks, please add it to the conversation.

How to get CD titles to show up on your CD master

You can’t. You can’t get the CD titles to show up on your CD master. Well, you can, but not the way you think.

First of all, there’s this old technology called CD-Text that confuses the issue. CD text is a technology that never really got all the way off the ground. My truck can recognize CD-text and so can one of my players at home. However, there are far more players that don’t recognize it. And, probably more important, computers don’t recognize it.

More and more of our clients are asking us why the song titles aren’t showing up on their discs when they put them in a computer. Did we duplicate it wrong? Did the customer master it wrong?

A lot of people are surprised to find out that the song titles aren’t included on the master or the duplicates. There is a special technology, sort of a fingerprinting technology, that can take the unique characteristics of a CD and give it a unique identifier.

This identifier is a stored in an online database that is queried either without the user knowing or because the user initiates it. If a computer is connected to the internet, the software will usually start the search automatically as soon as a CD is inserted in the computer.

Here’s the million dollar information… If the song titles have been entered into the database, i.e. the online database, then it will return the titles to the user’s computer where they will be stored and will appear every time the disc is inserted into the computer.

So where is this database? The main database is called “Gracenote” and it can be easily found by using a search engine. Most people use this service without knowing it when they use the “submit names” function in iTunes.

So the way to get song titles to appear is to go through the process of entering them in the database. It’s really best to do this right when you go to duplication, (which is one reason we offer this as a service). If you do it before duplication, there’s too much of a chance that you might still make a change to your master. If you wait until after duplication then you will be losing time on having the names available — it can take up to six weeks for the names to begin appearing.

It also allows for adding information about the album title and artist. This is important for the cataloging of the album, but also for the potential benefit of search engine help.

One more thing to keep in mind… spelling. Six weeks is a long time to wait to get something corrected. It’s important to double and triple check the spelling of all the text for the song titles, album title and artist information.

I’ve been told that the uniqueness of this identifier is similar to that of a fingerprint. However, fairly regularly I’ll put in a CD and I’ll be asked by the computer application to narrow it down from three or four choices. Once I narrow it down, it can add all the appropriate information. If anyone has insight into why this happens, please add it to the blog.

Thanks for reading and have fun typing those titles in.

Green Room CD Duplication

Thanks for stopping by our site.  While you’re checking out prices and information on CD duplication, please check out some of the articles about what some of our customers have been up to. You can find prices for CD & DVD duplication as well as CD & DVD replication and print prices for flyers and posters by following the links on the top row.  Also, check out our Street Buzz about recent releases and our Muse section with articles relevant to the music industry. If you’re not familiar with the difference between “duplication” and “replication,” here it goes… duplication utilizes CD-R technology and has a standard turn time of two days. That means you can have 50, 100, 300 or 1,000 retail ready CDs in just two days. Replication is the process where CDs are pressed from a glass master. Thie process has a standard turn time of eight days and a minimum of 1,000 CDs. The printing of the paper and the cases that hold the discs are identical. You can have retail-ready CDs in as little as two days. Actually, we can have them for you tomorrow, but a small rush fee would apply.So why choose one over the other? The main reasons are going to be cost, the quantity of CDs you know you’ll sell in a short time and cash flow. I always ask customers how long they want to have how much money in their closet and for what period of time. Or, how many CDs will you sell over the next week?  Four weeks?  What I’m trying to get to is that cash flow and a delivery timeline are huge factors when determining which process to use. Usually, CD-Rs are a good choice up until 300 or 400 units (withstanding a rush situation like you could hit a home run if you had a thousand CDs tomorrow). If you have the time to wait, it generally becomes more cost effective to use the replication process and get a pressed CD if you’re wanting more than 300 to 400 discs. Another factor is color. Pressed discs come standard with three colors and CD-Rs are most cost effective with a black imprint — adding color to a CD-R is .85/disc. When doing color CD-Rs, it usually starts making sense to convert to a pressed CD after 250 to 300 units. Again, turn time is always an important factor.

Singles Break Artists

I came across a great article by Eric Bealle, called “The Limits of Marketing.” In the article he makes some interesting points about writing certain songs with the specific purpose of creating a radio single that will break an artist. He alludes to the tempation that artists have to use songs for radio release that aren’t really written with this clear purpose in mind. He says, “singles break artists.” And suggests that if you aren’t crafting good singles, you’re likely spinning your wheels. He has a book, (I’ve not read it yet), that breaks down the ingredients for a good single and even gives exercises for working through these ideas. If you check it out, let me know what you think.

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