Immersive multichannel audio solutions have been developing since the 1960s, with the first spatial audio technology being developed by Bell Labs. This technology used an array of microphones to create a 3D sound field, and was initially used in film and television. Over the years, surround sound, ambisonic audio, and object-based audio have been developed.…

The mastering process is crucial in today’s music market. It is quite like mixing, but doing it on the master track rather than on each instrument. The goal of mastering is to further polish the mix of the song, fix some imperfections, and sometimes optimise or change the whole listening of the song. Other than…

I did the image of the chorus of the song Champion by Fall Out Boy. This song has a mid frequency focused mix and the chorus is tight and balanced. The panning of the song is symmetrical, and it dosen’t have creative panning with instruments placing at an interesting position. The high end is very…

Over forty thousand songs are added to Spotify per day. The modern music market is just like an arms race back in the 20th century, but rather than stocking weapons musicians and copyright companies are stocking music copyrights. They upload tons of music on the internet and most of them are basically listened to by no…

Twelve-tone Equal Temperament abbreviated as 12-TET is the dominant phonetic system of nowadays music. It divides an octave into 12 parts. That is 12 semitones. The persons who did the exact calculations of 12-TET were Zhu Zaiyu from the Ming dynasty and Simon Stevin from Belgium. They finished the work independently in 1584 and 1585. …

Mick Guzauski was one of the behind-the-scenes engineers for the famous Daft Punk album Random Access Memories. He also won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album with this work. From the album, we can clearly tell how good he is at blending acoustic instruments and electronic dance music elements. The entire work is almost…

Many people cannot distinguish surround sound from stereo sound. Basically speaking, a surround system is just having more audio channels than only two a stereo system has, and playing this audio through multiple speakers placed in certain different directions, creates an immersive listening experience. There was a surround system on the market back in the…

Equalisation, or just eq technique allows you to gain or diminish certain frequencies in the way you want. It is a crucial process in the modern music industry whether you are doing acoustic or non-electronic music pieces. The great use of eq helps people cut off the undesirable sound from instruments and audio and bring out…

A mixing reference is a music piece that you know its details and characteristics very well and can compare with your own mix to help you spot the flaws of the track. Therefore, in this case, you should always choose a reference track that you are familiar with and has similar aspects to the music…

The Loudness War, or Loudness Race is a phenomenon in the music industry that people try to make their music as loud to be more attractive to the listeners and so to surpass other competitors. This all started when the TV advertising companies found out that the louder the sound of the ad is, the…