Showing posts with label music mastering. Show all posts

Historias de España

Raül Fernández Miró and Sílvia Pérez Cruz, two of Alex's long time clients from Spain released a great new album a little while ago, called Granada. Raül is undoubtedly one of Spain's most interesting and most sought after producers right now. He's constantly coming out with one mind blowing release after another.

Sílvia is on the other hand one of the stronger female voices of the country. She started off her musical career as the co-founder and lead singer of flamenco pop band Las Migas but is now going solo and often seen collaborating with Raül. It seems nothing can go wrong when these two multi-talented Catalan artists work together. The song in the video above has a very special effect, I think not only on myself. But there's no way I can listen to it without crying. It's like an internal button that hits each time it's played. In particular in the studio Alex works where sound is impeccable and it feels like Sílvia is whispering delicate words right into your ear.

Here's another fantastic piece of art, (Sílvia sings in six different languages on that particular album):
Check out Raül's Facebook here and Sílvias here. Their latest album Granada can be found on many places online but only on iTunes is also the first song I showed you, included.

Here you can find some info about Alex's music mastering affairs if you missed it last time.


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right here right now

Why have you decided to stay longer in the US? - a question we've encountered many times as of late and I'm sorry if I haven't been as informative and personal here in the blog this past year, but real life has gotten some well deserved attention. I owed my life that attention after too many years of flaunting my life in the open nothing. To keep things straight and simple, I can go ahead and tell you that the main reason to why we have decided to stay in the US for at least another year is …… (drumroll please) : 

$$$

Not so surprised are you. 

After four-five years of living and traveling in our floating home aka a sailboat, we felt it was time to get back into some sort of stability mode. Financial stability I'm talking, the sort of stability that comes when you generate enough money to support the life you love living. There has been many ways we've made our living during this journey so far (after we ran out of savings some 1,5-2 years in), but the temporary ways were often only good for a short while. Even though they were fulfilling in their own regards, neither the blog incomes (made approx. $15k annually when blog was most active), or Alex's carbon fiber design and construction ($40-100/hour) were jobs that we truthfully loved doing (blogging full time and having sponsors and daily traffic to promote adds stress to life, and working under scorching hot sun with toxic chemicals has its toll on your health), and so we knew that the only way for us to be able to happily continue sailing around the world or whatever we later decided to do, we definitely needed to find a way to get back to earning dineros in ways that sat good with our souls. Cause we didn't only have us to feed, we had a new/old boat to renovate. 

Alex missed the mastering, and I started to get fed up with having to blog when sometimes I had nothing to blog about and all I wanted was to be free from sponsors and ads and live a more discreet life. If you've followed, you know how I slowly began removing one sponsor and collab after another.

Money is not everything in life, but it is needed, period. So when we found ourselves in the neighborhoods (Panama isn't thaaat far from America after all), we figured the US would be the best place in which we could make a decent living, finally fix the boat up completely, and also be able to save up for the future. Because if it's one thing we've learnt during these years on the go, it is that it is not very comfortable nor pleasant to be broke. Especially not when you also live on a boat that is in need of a major renovation. It was the right time to reintroduce financial stability into our lives. And working with the things you love rather than slaving for something you do not quite believe in as much, is a human right and need imo.

Even if New England doesn't offer the best of climates (actually one of the worst places if it's weather we're talking), it just so happened that it introduced us to the perfect set of opportunities. Alex got a splendid deal with the mastering studio from which he freelances today, a studio owned by Jonathan Wyner who's an associate professor at Berklee College of Music and one of the most renowned mastering engineers in the world. 
And for myself that always have had a dream of one day opening my very own personable restaurant, I have got the greatest opportunity to explore that field and begin practicing and testing my way to my unique style. You might know it already, but our dear friend who actually was the first one to lure us into coming to visit in New England a couple years ago, is the owner of a larger incubator kitchen space of 4000 sq ft. A place that rents to caterers, chefs and start up food companies, and in which we have built a section for my very first food business. This is how it looks, don't you just love the old fashion maple tree baker's table that we just installed?
I will tell you more later on, but my first intention is to offer simple but healthy, homemade, vegan, organic and non-gmo meals and sweets for take out and delivery in the Southern Boston area. Menu testing, website building and marketing is what I'm up to day and night at the moment, and I can't even begin to explain how wonderful it is to be working on such a meaningful personal project, in such a beautiful, inspiring environment to that. It does (most of the times) make me forget the fact that the vicious cold winter is knocking on the door.

Having seen and felt what life feels and taste like in approx. 50 countries in total (Alex's, mine and our mutual travels combined), America would not be at the top of our dream-locations-for-living list. But again, do we have the same set of opportunities any elsewhere at this moment? Answer to that is a big fat no. Even if our ideal place to live still is somewhere in the Mediterranean, we must also consider the national economy and direct abilities for us to do what we wish to be doing. And from that current viewpoint, this area of the US is really the best for us, for right now. America has many flaws, but it is still the land of opportunities.

If you're a human being of flesh and blood you know that anything is always possible, so we're taking it easy on the planning side of life. For now we're just hoping to keep doing what we love doing, and we're working towards having equal amount of entrepreneurial success, as peace, fluidness and comfort in our everyday life. We still live on the boat and will do so until November I believe. If we lived in a perfect world, we'd live on the boat year round cause that is what home is to us, but there's something called miserable New England winter that comes in between. One winter was definitely enough for the boat and us to be bedded under the snow. Duende should then be back in the water again in April next year.

Isn't life amazing the way it moves and spins you around. I think it's healthy to sometimes step out of your fixed ideas and stop yearning for something else all the time, and just surrender to what's thrown at you. Take a moment and look around, and you might well find yourself right where you are supposed to be.

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mastering and music

I have so much music to share with you, albums and artists I want to talk to you about. Many of them are Alex's mastering clients and he's been pretty fortunate to work on some real good productions this past year since we got back on land and he started working out of a studio again. 

A quick crash course in what exactly "mastering engineering" is for the ones of you who doesn't know what his profession actually means: It is the final step in a musical production. When the artist, producer and mixing engineer has done their part in recording and mixing, and the music is about to go out on the market, that is when the files are sent to a mastering engineer. 

Mastering pretty much means fine tuning music, it can mean removing distortion, adding dynamic and adding the particular sound that the artist or producer is looking for. It's about removing what's not meant to be there, about enhancing what's good. It's also about making the music translate its best in the same way regardless of the sound system it will be played on. Some projects are obviously more challenging than other, all depending on the production and how well done the mix is.

While certain producers reach their accepted level of sound by producing and mastering on their laptops, the truth is it is very hard to compare with the depth and 3D sound of a custom built mastering studio environment with top notch analog equipment in combination with the digital tools to perfect each step of a production.

It is mind-blowing what a difference a good master can do to music. Most people don't realize this step even exists as it is a very low key profession. But it is interesting to know that many artists and producers would have never sounded the way they do wouldn't it have been with the aid of their chosen ME.
Given the importance of this step in production, it's been not only rewarding for Alex to be back in the studio after a few years of sailing, but also for his old clients to have him back as they've had hard finding the specific sound they've been used to anywhere else since he sold his studio in Barcelona four years ago. It's a pretty personal thing after all, how your music sounds and how you wish for it to be received. What it is you are going to offer your audience. If you take your work seriously, you obviously want it to be as perfect as possible.

Alex's mastering trademark is his dynamic and loud sound (without being too aggressive which is a balancing act) and therefore does he have a lot of electronic (minimal, techno, tech house) clients that demand a massive bombastic club sound, as well as artists and music with a lot of heavy bass, such as reggae, dub and hip hop. I am also going to show you some absurdly good flamenco pop/ experimental that he's worked on.

But first these great reggae tunes by Rampalion, one being a dub version. Incredibly talented band all the way through and with the mastering work by Alex the sound is just impeccable. Seriously speaking. Make sure to listen with very good headphones or sound system please. Transports you back to a hot Caribbean beach...


Check out Alex's website here, and although not fully updated > here < you can find some of the music and artists he's worked with in the past few months. Feel free to like his new Facebook page too if you like.

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analog mastering

Just a short video I made in the studio the other day. Alex has been mad busy working on some real good music in many interesting genres lately. American pop and rock, cumbia all stars from Peru, Flamenco and ambient tunes from Spain, Dutch EDM, Malengue from Guinea and some fresh tech house like this… Will show you more of what new he's done as soon as they're all released.
This is one of his more recent EDM masters, currently #4 on Beatport's progressive house chart.. This last one is maybe not my cup of tea but millions of people around the world goes crazy about that stuff.

If you want to see what other artists and labels he's worked with now and in the past, check out his website here: 

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