On May 9th, IAR presented a Master Class for its faculty on “state-of-the-art” developments in Mastering. The presentation was conducted by mastering engineer and studio owner Alan Silverman of ARF Digital Productions.

After starting with a brief history of mastering, Alan presented some incredibly powerful DAW plug-in tools that have changed the way engineers can manipulate mixed tracks. He demonstrated a new approach to editing called spectral editing. Using a plug-in called ReNOVAtor by Algorithmix, he demonstrated how an engineer can seamlessly remove unwanted sounds such as coughs, studio noises, ambient distractions, etc. from a recording that was already mixed, leaving the desired sounds unaffected. The plug-in has other musical uses as well, such as rebalancing mixed harmonies.

Alan then demonstrated the latest mastering-grade EQs that outperform traditional (and expensive) high-end dedicated hardware; he showed both linear phase and minimal phase EQ plug-ins.

He went on to discuss how object-oriented editing is a recent operating paradigm that has greatly increased DAW power and flexibility, and has made traditional time-line based automation obsolete. In support of that fact, he demonstrated some powerful object-oriented editing techniques using Magix’s Sequoia native digital audio workstation.