We’re back with another FAQ Friday for you! As always we have some great questions and I am going to answer them all for you!
Before we get to that though, I am going to be involved in something very exciting this weekend: Music Expo 2019 at Expression College in San Francisco!
I will be doing three things there. First, I will be on a panel with Matt Boudreau of Working Class Audio. I will also be moderating a panel between the incredible Piper Payne and Pete Lyman. This panel is called “Mastering and Analog Formats”, so they’ll be talking about mastering for vinyl, and mastering for any other medium and format as well! I will also be doing my own talk where I will be talking all about The Fray’s You Found Me. I’ll talk about the recording process for this record, I will play the multitracks and tell you all about the different experiences I had working with the band, all the different studios we were in, and everything else that went into making that record!
It’s going to be an amazing weekend, so if you are going to be in San Francisco this weekend, I highly recommend coming! Click here to buy tickets and to learn more about the event!
The featured question from today’s video is this: “Am I overthinking that going to a higher sample rate will be better? Should I go back to 48kHz as maybe it’s all you really need?”
In the Academy, we do a lot of stuff in 48kHz because we want to make sure that everyone can download the multitracks whether they have a high-end interface or the cheapest one, or if they do not have an interface at all, but just have their laptop. We want to make sure everyone can download and use the multitracks we offer!
But I have recommended in the past that people record at higher sample rates to future-proof their recordings. After saying this, I had a lot of people saying that everything is going to end up at 44.1kHz and 16-bit, and other people saying that you can’t hear the extra difference anyways.
The reason why I said to do this in order to future-proof recordings is because film and TV often require that recordings be at a much higher sample rate, and before you know it, everything will be 192Khz. So when I say “future-proof”, I mean record in the highest rate that you can, so if somebody likes your song and they want to use it in a film or TV show, you have recorded it at the sample rate and bitrate that they want it to be at. This is a really smart business reason to record at a higher sample rate, because you will be making sure that you can always be competitive and your music can be used in every different format!
Many people make amazing careers out of getting their music used in film and TV, so don’t exclude yourself from that possibility by recording at a rate that does not work for that format!