The Piano Mastering and Finalising Process (Part 6 of 6)
The Piano Mastering and Finalising Process (Part 6 of 6)
The Piano Mastering and Finalising Process (Part 6 of 6)
In the final part of this series of piano recording articles, I will look at the mastering and finalising process of our piano recording sessions at our WKMT Studio.
Once we have mixed the piano recordings we move on to finishing the project by mastering the recordings and creating the finished files for our clients. We take the mix and run through the mastering process. For our piano recordings, this is often subtle volume levelling that is achieved by some light compression and limiting, this allows us to preserve the integrity of the natural piano sound and dynamics whilst having a louder final recording that can listened to comfortably in a range of different listening environments. If the style of the piano recording requires a more ‘hyped’ and modern sound then we can increase the amount of compression and limiting which will give the recording less dynamic range and be overall louder.
After we have gone through the mastering process, we make sure that each piece starts and finish in the right place, and create fade ins and outs if desired or needed. Each piece is then bounced down into a single stereo wav file one after the other, these files are labelled and serve as the final audio files, these files can then be converted to other file formats such as an mp3. The files can then be put on to a CD, hardrive or e-mailed to the clients depending on their preferences.
This concludes this series of piano recording articles, thank you for reading.
Thomas Rickerby (Sound engineer)