Course Details for in-person classes

Now in our 11th year!

Dates - please see the calendar here

About the course

We've had the privilige of welcoming audio novices, studio engineers, educators (including a Professor of Music Production), professional musicians, charting artists, and even mastering engineers attend our weekends. The reason why anyone is welcome is due to the format of the weekend - whilst covering the art of mastering, the weekend is also an opportunity for 'like minded' people to come together and talk music, production, mastering and socialise on the Saturday evening (we've been known to go for a meal as a whole group). The weekend permits for discussion that extends knowledge and experience around audio mastering. Many participants remain in contact with each other after the course.

Music

Yes - bring your own music and we'll look to master some of it with you. This is a great way to see how to review your mixing and your mastering when you go home. If we, for whatever, don't get time. Russ and Paul, after the course, will happily master one track using Ozone later to share with you to analyse what we've done and why.

We have a catalogue of pre-mastered music you can use. Our clients and previous students have been kind and permitted us to use this material.

Equipment

The main studio is designed by Recording Architecture, but all the other rooms still use industry standard ATC monitoring for this course.

Whilst we'd love to have the time to play with analogue mastering tools (we like them too), we keep to the digital so you can work in smaller groups around the facility at the same time, getting more hands on mastering your own music. Plus, given the generous longer-timed trial software provided by Wavelab (Steinberg) and Ozone (iZotope), you can take your work home and keep working.

Yes - we encourage to bring your laptops with your Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) on. Whilst we'll not want you to necessarily master using these on the course, we can show the way in which you might consider transferring your skills from our industry standards offerings (mainly Ozone, Wavelab and occasionally Pyramix) to your own choice of DAW (we demonstrate this transferability to Reaper, a inexpensive DAW). Additionally if you have your mixes, we can also help show the best way to translate that to the mastering stage, time permitting.

The Running Order

The following is a rough outline of what we'll cover. More details will be given when we meet.

• Welcome

• History & context of mastering

• Listening frameworks for analysis (with set examples)

• Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) discussion: WaveLab, Pyramix, ProTools, Reaper and any other DAW

• Ozone introduction

• Tools of the trade (compression/limiting/EQ/other tools!)

• Mastering approaches and destination discussion

• Pyramix demonstration & let's begin mastering together

  • transferring those approaches to other DAWs

• Discussion about results

• Mastering task and workshop

• Plenary discussion to close

Goodies

We try to give you some goodies when you come to us:

• Paul's exquisitely purchased biscuits for nibbles during the course (do let us know if you have dietary requirements)

• Lunch - a sandwich and crisps etc. Again, do let us know if you want or need anything else

• A course mug!

• Practical Mastering book

• A copy of Wavelab v10- LE to take home and practice (tbc from Steinberg)

• A timed trial copy of Ozone 9 Advanced (tbc from iZotope)

• A Reaper DAW Template (with standard shipped Cockos plugins)

Cost

• We try to keep the costs as low as possible given many of you will travel. For prices please contact us as it depends on how many students attend. The days are a decent length and we cram a lot of content and practical in, so we hope represent good value for money.

Mentoring

After the weekend, students like to continue with their learning. Paul and Russ are both available on an hourly basis. If you wish to continue by Mentoring, please mention this to us and we can outline the costs. We tend to do these over fortnightly meetings with tasks in-between. Contact us for more details.