How Audio Engineers Specialize And Some Come To Audio Mastering.

Audio engineers often specialize in a certain area of production, one of these areas is online audio mastering.There are quite a few areas where a sound engineer can end up. Here we will explain the skills that an audio engineer will need to heighten in order to specialize in a specific area. Firstly there are engineers who specialize in working in recording voice overs, this could be simply for radio, to picture or for advertisements. This engineer would be listening for pops and vocal clicks and capable of makening the spoken word sound very clear and intelligable. In addition the engineer would have good people skills and be able to work on long sessions purely recording speech. A music recording enigneer would be a specialist in placing microphones in a studio around the musical instruments that were going to be played, this engineer would need to be able to deal with potentially stressful situations and think fairly fast on his feet, and keep track of many microphones and line level signals coming into the recording console. This engineer would also need to be able to communicate clearly, calmly and effectively with all the musicians and possibly a producer to ensure a recording session runs smoothly. The engineer would require knowledge of the "sound" of all the equipment in the studio in the event that the producer wishes to achieve a certain "character of sound" for any given voice or instrument. The engineer would have to be able to deal with people and technical arrangements on the mixing console and ensure that the digital audio workstation was set up to record all the tracks without distortion. Mix engineers have to develop their console skills to quickly make eq adjustments and add the right compression to vocals and instrumentation if required. The mix engineer needs to be able to get balances of the instrumentation set up quickly and refine the sound as he goes through the track often under guidance of the producer . The mix engineer needs to make the most of what the recording engineer has done. Mastering engineers are engineers that take a collection of mixes and prepare them for the release medium. Much of mastering is done online these days and the mixes are sent to the mastering engineer online and tweaks are made using very high resolution monitors and sent back to the client. The mastering engineer will be listening to overall tone of tracks, level consistency and for sonic defects before the music is committed to a pre master disk, DDP file format or audio files. The cost of online mastering has come down over recent years but care should be taken to ensure you check the engineers background and that they have a long recent clients list.