Mastering

Archive for the ‘Mastering Dance Music’ Category

You may have heard the phrase “practice makes perfect”. Yes it is true because constant practice can really lead you to perfection and this is applicable to salsa dancing. By practicing salsa dance steps, you can master dances like cuban salsa.

Practicing away from the class is an essential part of the learning process and you should be dancing salsa as frequent as you can. It is of great importance to practice the right moves correctly.

When you start, you have take it in slow step moves and count out loud. As you learn each of the steps and the timing you will be able to speed up what you are performing.

Choose some slow tempo or you start your salsa dancing without music. Just by counting, you can later move to faster tracks as you become more efficient at the timing and foot work.

If your class provides free dancing after the class use it to practice the moves you have just learned to get them clear and fixed in your mind; remember to right them down.

If you cannot practice right after the lesson spend some time at home with your notes performing for at least half an hour within in the next 2 days after the lesson.

Below are some steps that can help you when you practice:

1. Look a dance partner to practice with. Usually, people come to classes on their own; this presents them with a problem as they have no one to practice with. Find yourself a practice partner from your class who desires to put the work in with you to elevate their Salsa dancing skills.

2. If you have no practice partner, do not worry, you may think that this is a slightly silly suggestion but bare with us. We have all sang into an imaginary microphone or played air guitar at home; oh come on of course you have; no practice partner does not mean you cannot practice!

It is time to dance with an imaginary dance partner step out the move and steps as if you have a partner, remember count out loud to the music.

3. Repeat the same sequence again and again until you are already familiar with the steps. Learning is an art form and its effectiveness depends on your learning skills. Doing the sequence all over again can effectively make you to master the salsa dance

4. Dance with every body you can. We have said before that Salsa is a social dance and you can make a sociable experience with it; its part of what makes it so enjoyable. This will help you progress your salsa dancing skills.

These are some useful tips which you can apply when you want to learn salsa dance steps effectively. See you on the dance floor

A beginner’s dance class can have a funny feel to it. There are the dancers who’ve been there for months and seem like pros. And then there are always the first-timers and you can feel their nervousness in the air.

When walking into a beginners dance class for the first time it can take the warm-up to really settle and start to feel more comfortable inside the class. Sometimes you won’t even be able to do the warm-up and wonder how you’re gonna cope once the dancing actually starts!

The good thing is that most dance teachers are quite sympathetic especially in their beginners dance classes. They’ll spend a lot of time breaking down the moves and going through things with enough time and repetition to make sure you get it.

Many times there’ll be parts of the dance routine that you won’t be able to do perfectly. At these points a beginner can become a bit discouraged and think they’re useless when they’re really not.

If a beginner takes a class and struggles to get most of the moves they’ll walk away either thinking they’re completely useless or that the class wasn’t for beginners. This is a misconception. Very few dancers can just go into a dance class and get it perfectly if they’ve danced for months let alone in their first class.

Also a beginner’s class is not meant for dancers in the class to be able to get it perfectly at first attempt. It is meant to cover quite a lot of material so that a beginner can become a better dancer. Also if you ever watch an elementary or intermediate dance class you’ll notice that it can be quite complicated and fast.

The beginners class needs to provide some sort of preparation for that next level so that a dancer who wants to progress to higher levels will have the opportunity. A beginners class should cover the basics, the foundations upon which everything else can be built.

It can help to think of piano grades or belts in martial arts. You can’t expect to be able to play a grade 1 exam piece on a musical instrument at your first practise session. Grade 1 may be the lowest grade but once you’ve achieved that grade you can already play a bit.

With dance classes, once you can successfully pull off the moves and routines in a beginners dance class you can dance a bit. So go start your dance classes and when you come to bits you can’t do, realise what a good dancer you will be when you can and practise till perfect!

Get a Record Deal – You do not have to have read the preceding five articles in this series, what is a Working Band to Do? In order to benefit from read this. It may be that you had your demo recorded already and did not need the other independent artist; it may simply be that you are interested in the process.

Somehow or another – in a process that combines love, luck, and a lot of hard work – you got some of independent artist songs recorded for your band demo. Now, it will matter somewhat in the marketing of it, but not at all in these production steps, whether it was a recording of a live show or a set of tracks recorded in a studio.

At this point, the question to be answered, the decision to be made, is: Is the mix tape ready to master? Mastering is the last step before production, and it needs to be done professionally, at a cost (for three songs) of somewhere between $100-500. It is not a good idea for the recording/mixing engineer to master the CD, nor is it wise for any other amateur to do it. Since it may cost as much as all your studio time did, it is an important decision that you cannot afford to make incorrectly – or, for that matter, make correctly more than once.

The mixing phase, where the producer and the engineer balance all the recorded tracks in each song played, adjust EQ, apply reverb and other effects, choose the best guitar solo overdub or cut-and-paste one together from several different takes – in other words, get all the parts working together to make one, organic whole. Whole books are written about this one subject, mixing, so it is far, far beyond the scope of this kind of article. If the Muses are smiling on your project, you will have hooked up with a competent pro or a gifted amateur who excels at mixing.

Okay, so you have your finished mix. Actually, there is a great two-dollar word meaning next to the last that should be used in this situation, since no one else but the producer and engineer have heard the mix tape at this point and someone may point out something that needs to be fixed or tweaked. So, call it the penultimate mix. Really: Call it that when you get the group and a neutral observer or two together for a listen. Okay, guys, this is the penultimate mix here…

This is where the producer, whoever he or she is, really does need to get some feedback about the demo. If it is you, be prepared to hear my solos too short or your solos too long, or I can not hear my drum fills, lots of that sort of thing. You may even hear a compliment or two for all the blood, sweat, and tears that you and the engineer poured into the work – but mostly you will hear whining and complaints. You need to keep this feedback session short and focused, with everyone thinking of the greater, common good, the overall sound, the clarity and punch of the tunes, the integrity of the sound, and how well it represents what you do musically.

Another series of books, of course, could be written on all the things that could possibly be wrong with the tunes or the recording of them, but just aim for the sound quality and presence that you get from your favorite CDs, and if you attain 85-90% of those levels, you have done well. Do not let this mix review session drag on; get it done in one evening. You can tweak and micromanage and fiddle forever, especially with software and hardware tools that let you tweak and micromanage and fiddle in a million ways with you get a record deal. Resist the temptation to finesse the demo into a state of perfection. Yes, there is such a thing as perfection; no, it is not on Earth.

Mastering is the final signal processing step before an audio CD is manufactured. This process is applied to the whole demo, all the tunes, and is not the time for fixing things that are performance-, recording-, or mix-related. Mastering will generally affect the gain level, apply limiting and compression, and perhaps add a bit of other signal seasoning to make the product radio ready – or, in the case of dance music, club ready.

There has been a tendency in the last couple of decades to compress the life and dynamics out of rock and pop music, so that your CD is as loud as the other guys or gals. This is not as prevalent in jazz and classical music as it is in, say, hip-hop and heavy metal, and should not be done just because. If your music has dynamic range – in other words, if it has some softer passages, some less orchestrated ones, some space, and some subtlety – ask the mastering engineer to take it easy on the slamming.

What you should have after handing the mastering engineer his check is a high-end CD-R with your tracks written to the 16-bit, 44.1 kHz Redbook audio standard. This disc is sometimes called a PMCD (Pre-Master CD), and it is what a CD manufacturer will use to make the glass master used in replication. If you want to back it up, or keep the original safe and deliver a copy for manufacturing, remember that you must copy the disc, not the tracks; the whole disc needs to be cloned because the all-important Redbook table of contents file needs to be at a specific location on the disc for it to work.

Okay, then. You have your PMCD. You have a little money left. It is time to shop for a CD replicator.