Industry Standard Recording Practices that you need to know

This post summarizes the industry standard practices in music production and audio recording. These are commonly referring to the recording labels, recording producers, recording engineers, audio mixing engineers and audio mastering engineers. These recommendations are formulated to bring order and maintain a certain level of quality standard for recording work.

Going down to independent and amateur level, most of the beginners practicing music production in their own bedroom does not know that these standard or recording practices exists. What will happen is that they will search the Internet for information. Sometimes this information may not actually be the accepted standard or the authority. Hence the novice producer and engineer may experience problems in delivering the master recording to the main players in the recording industry.

One of the most important technical specifications for recording delivery is entitled: “Recommendation for delivery of recorded music projects” authored by the Nashville members of the P&E Wing of The Recording Academy in cooperation with the Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Committee on Studio Practices and Production (AESTD1002.1.03-10). This technical document contains one of the most important information as to what the major players in the recording and music industry are practicing when it comes to storage and delivery of music projects. The original document is technical in nature and very long. But this blog post will summarize the learning’s in a friendly manner so that it can be understood even to a beginner in audio recording. This is only the first part and the rest of the recommendations will be discussed in future blog post.

Recording bit-depth and sample rate recommendations

1.) When doing backups of your finished master (“master” means a complete music production work for which derivatives of it can already be used commercially and to be played in most all broadcasting mediums- radio, TV, etc.); the bit depth and resolution should be higher than the master. The document listed the following bit depths, sampling rates and guides for storing your digital audio master:

a.) Minimum of 24-bit depth.
b.) Minimum sampling rates:
88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, 176.4 KHz, 192 KHz, 352.8 KHz, and 384 kHz
c.) Not yet implemented or applied with any dithering and sampling rate conversion techniques.

Note: You should keep a higher resolution or “unaltered” copy of your master (the minimum is 24-bit/96KHz). The primary reason is that in the future; if you are planning to re-distribute a copy of your songs to a recording label, etc. You simply need to base from a high resolution copy of your master to create the best quality copy of your work for distribution.

This copy of master can be taken from the audio mastering process. Refer to the flow chart below:

To have the best quality as possible of your music production project using digital recording techniques, you need to record at least 24-bit/96KHz. Then this bit depth and sample rate is the same throughout the audio mixing and mastering process. After mastering, you will save a backup copy of your digital master. To be distributed to music store outlets, you will base it from the high resolution master which will be applied with dithering and sample rate conversion. It will then be available as 16-bit/44.1KHz used by CD and MP3.

The Master Delivery Media Storage Standard

See table below:

In the primary delivery and storage of master, it mostly recommends MacOS as the operating system for music creation using the following software: Protools, Nuendo, Paris, Cubase, Digital Performer, Logic, Sonic Solutions. The storage media will be hard disk drive using SCSI technology (Small computer system interface). According to the recommendations, it will accept ATA/IDE Hard disk drives provided it has a firewire enclosure. When transporting master from one location to another, the hard disk drive should be placed in shock proof cases. Looking at the table, there is only one DAW supported by Windows which was recommended by the committee and that is Pyramix.

Author opinion: If you have observed there are quite a lot of users which are not using Mac OS as their digital audio workstation operating system. The committee should also include Windows operating system as one of the recommendations. It is because those mentioned software are cross platform (can run either Mac or PC). Also a lot of decent software which are not included for example Reaper and Adobe Audition which have fairly large user base. In addition, common external hard disk drives for backup use are using USB connectivity. Most likely in the near future, these recommendations would be revised to anticipate some changes in the recording technology.

Definition of a “Master” & “Track”

Deep down to the novice home music production level, “master” is commonly understood as the final output of the mastering process while “track” is the name of each song in the CD album. But this is not only the case how the leaders of the recording and music production industry are defining these terms.

If you are hired to become an engineer or a producer in a major label, knowing intimately these two terms are very important. This will avoid miscommunication issues between you and the recording label.

Know the Technical Definition of a “Master” in Recording Industry

The official definition of a “master” according to the document “Recommendation for delivery of recorded music projects” is ANY collection of “official” or “unofficial” work output by the recording producer and engineers in the studio.

This master will be used by the next process or be kept by the label. In music industry, the recording label is the owner of all masters created by the recording producer.

It is because the recording producer is being hired and financed by the recording label to create these recordings. Any work output done by the producer is therefore owned by the label. Let’s elaborate this definition by showing a flow chart below:

In all music production processes (recording – mixing – mastering), the recording producer will be in-charge in managing the recording label project. In the first process, the recording producer will initiate recording sessions with the artist.

For example if the producer will be recording with a 3-piece band (drummer, guitar, bass/vocals), the following will be sample work output of the recording session:

a.) Drum recordings – snare track, bass track, cymbals, etc.
b.) Vocal recordings – lead vocal track, backup vocal track
c.) Bass guitar recordings
d.) Guitar recordings – lead guitar track, rhythm guitar track

Each of these “tracks” (“tracks” will be defined in details in the next section) will have several takes. These takes will be examined by the producer and decide which one will be the best take or version of the recording.

This is usually the best recorded performance of the musician or the artist. Even there are several takes during the recording session; the industry standard is to NEVER DELETE any of these takes. These includes those takes that were not being completed at all (for example an interrupted vocal take because of wrong lyrics) or irrelevant to the music production project (such as artist interviews or artist talking in the studio which was captured in the recording, etc.).

This means that after completing the entire recording session, all these takes are also called “recording masters” based on the above flow chart. However, only the best take is regarded as the official recording of a specific track (vocals, guitars, and bass) that will be forwarded to the audio mixing process.

Those other “unofficial” or “uncompleted” takes will be archived in a digital storage media (hard disk drives) as discussed in Part 1 of this tutorial and will be kept by the label.

In the mixing process, the mixing engineer will be working those official recordings provided by the producer. The work output of the mixing process will be called the “audio mixing master” or commonly known as the “mix down”.

Like the recording session, the audio mixing session also have several versions of work outputs. For example, there will be several mixes for each song in the album such as “radio friendly mix”. Each of these mixes will be kept and should never be deleted which also forwarded to the recording label for review and approval.

Finally the recording label and the producer will decide on the best mix that should be forwarded to the mastering engineer for every song in the album. The mastering engineer will be working on these official mixes.

The output of the mastering process is the final master that would be distributed to music store outlets. All versions of the song final master done by the mastering engineer should also be kept by the label.

The reason why the recording producer is not allowed to delete any of these masters (unofficial takes, mixes or masters) because after the recording artist spends several successful years with the label; they will decide to release some of the artist archived masters in the past. These are commonly called “unreleased recordings”. In some instances these will become very successful such as the release of Beatles bootleg recordings.

Definitions of “Track” and its uses in music production

You will be surprised that the term “Track” can have a lot of definitions in music production. When you are using this term, you should be clear to what applications or implementations are you referring to. This word is either used as noun or a verb. For example:

“Track” as used in analog tape recorders – a noun signifying the number of channels in the analog recorder. For example a 4-track recorder will have 4 channels of recorded audio.

“Track” as used music production – a noun signifying a unique recorded entity. For example a vocal recording of the main singer in the band would be called as a “lead vocal track”. In a guitar, you can have such terms as “lead guitar track” or “rhythm guitar track”.

Each of these tracks can either be mono, stereo or even surround. Then during the mixing process, the engineer will be combining all of these tracks in the project. It is why it is called “multi-track” since there are several tracks recorded and mixed together.

“Track” as used in CD album, LP or EP collection – a noun signifying each of the individual songs in the collection.

“Track” as used in recording session – a verb describing the recording process. So if you hear the producer, “OK let’s track the guitar now” – this means that the producer would want to do a recording session of the guitar.

Content last updated on October 11, 2012