Now this right here is the OTHER side of a Christmas record. Full of rockin’ and inventive takes on Christmas classics. Gotee Records have always been the guys that do things a little differently, and here is a classic example. There’s always room for rocking out some holiday cheer. Check it out here on iTunes – Tis The Season To Be Gotee Too
Here it is kids. Francesca’s “Christmas” – what a fun record. It sounds GORGEOUS if I do say so myself, and it actually gets COLDER when you play it! (It doesn’t actually get colder when you play it)
This is a must have for the Christmas time. Go get it!
If you haven’t been hip to Francesca, you can check out her Facebook Page and her Twitter Thing – I don’t know her address or license plate number, so I hope those will do.
I’m going to be looking at a lot of progress bars today – I’m rendering XD Masters (Expanded Dynamics) files for the songs that to be the radio singles for Francesca’s amazing Christmas album. Yes, I’ve mentioned the amazing Christmas album once or twice. It’s good. You’ll know when she’s blowing up the charts this fall.
For the last couple years, I’ve been doing this thing, as I’m sure other mastering dudes have, of sending specially treated versions of mastering for radio play. I call them XD Masters, and they’re cool.
We know that “radio” does stuff to the music we send out. They’ve got a tough spot. Radio audio guys have a particular challenge when it comes to dynamic processing for FM broadcast. They have to try to get songs from 1984 where there was no loudness war, no monster digital limiting, no actual concern for how loud a song was recorded to sound as good as they did then while being parked next to some seriously loudly mixed/mastered current day tunes. We can save the debate on how loud is too loud. That’s client to client – although I don’t crust (whoops. awesome typo. thanks Reid.) the life out of stuff, FYI. ANYwho. The only people who really have a say in that are the people making the music and paying me for quality louderization. (New word. All mine.)
So I’m sending out versions of the songs for radio intent with the louderizering backed off. It sounds better on the radio because their compressors aren’t re-compressing down to broadcast-happy level – essentially undoing what was done in mastering. Radio gets more dynamic, not so hot mixes, their broadcast compression doesn’t have to work so hard, thus, it sounds better.
That’s fun, right?
I just finished the Mastered for iTunes version of Francesca Battistelli’s new (and AMAZING) Christmas album. I can do it for you records too. You’re going to want this one. You’ll play it for years. I’m playing it now, and it’s 90 degrees outside.
I’m in the midst of mastering the new Francesca Battistelli Christmas album, which is pretty fantastic, I’ve gotta say. She sounds just gorgeous, and the mixes are out of hand. I love it. We’re doing a MFiT version, so it will be silky smooth on your iDevices and whatnot.