Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to All!

I wanted to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Happy Hanukah, Kwanza or whatever you might take part in. I am having a very nice Christmas with my family and friends. this year has been an absolutely crazy year. Lots of good stuff, lots of bad stuff, and all in all a pretty good year. I am really looking forward to 2008! It will be a VERY BIG year for me, mark my words now. And I'll be blogging a whole lot more, starting now.

So, i hope Santa brings you all the things you hope for. I've donated to a couple charities this year, and encourage you all to do the same. Every little bit helps, even if its a few cans of soup for the soup kitchen. I am very fortunately to not be on the receiving end of stuff like that, and I try to never forget how lucky i am to have all of the good fortunes that i do.

Merry Christmas!!!

-Ken Lewis

Fun Mastering Session

I go to mastering sessions from time to time. It gives me a good perspective on how my room sounds, how well my mixes translate, and also it gives me better insight into how mastering engineers want mixes delivered and what types of things they do to make my mixes better. All things are a good continuing education for me.

So, today i was at Scott Hull Mastering in NYC, midtown Manhattan. Very nice place and Scott is a great guy with great ears. He was mastering the Travis Matte album i just mixed, due out early next year. Scott has some great gear including a Sontec Mastering EQ and a Manley Vari-Mu compressor/limiter (both of which i have in my mixing studio as well, both of which almost always get used on my mixes :-)

Anyway, Scott's work sounded great. He definitely improved the mixes and i was flattered to see that he used no additional compression at all on any of my mixes. He did use some fast attack/ fast release limiting on each mix just to keep the peaks in check, and just to be clear, the mixes came out plenty loud. Nicest for me was that almost never was an EQ knob turned more than 1 dB in any direction on any of the songs. Occasionally he would pull out a 2 dB notch here and there but for the most part all of his changes were subtle and his work was excellent. It was a fun day, but i have to catch up now and get some production done.

-Ken Lewis