LOCAL MUSIC PRODUCER Bob Pro is positive that Rwandan music has been faring well in the region ever since local artistes realised the importance of mastering their music production. Rwandan music had for years been struggling to spread to an international stage due to the low quality of production of songs and failure by the artistes to master their songs. Mastering, a final step of audio post-production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced. The purpose of mastering is to balance sonic elements of a stereo mix and optimize playback across all systems and media formats. It’s a glue, varnish and polish that optimizes playback quality on all devices. Bob Pro has established himself as the pioneer of mastering engineering having handled the majority of audio music projects recorded by Producer Element at Country Records and songs of artistes signed under Kina Music record label management. The producer has been doing mastering for years but a number of local artistes opted to take their projects to Uganda or Kenya, until they came to the realisation that a local producer can do it. “It was a matter of mindset about the importance of mastering. Only a few used to bring their songs for mastering because they knew its importance and, as time went by, more artists got to understand the essence and secret behind mastering,” he said. “But if I can do it from here in Rwanda, it is an indication our music is growing,” he added According to the producer, Rwanda’s music distribution on the international stage would never be the same if local artistes didn’t know the importance of mastering. “The more you release songs with poor quality the more people will question your music. Luckily, our artistes have been closely following how international musicians successfully produce quality music because they are committed to learn new things for the interest of their music,” he said. Bob Pro emphasized that local artistes’ will to learn is, in return, bearing fruits because their music has for the past few years been winning the vote of confidence from the international audience while their power play on popular international TV stations like Trace Mziki and Trace Urban among others has been regularly growing. “International TV stations like these, not forgetting radio stations, would refuse to play the songs of our local artistes because they were missing something important. Mastering is one of the major things that their songs lacked and cost them a chance to get power play because they didn’t meet the production standards of these stations. But you can see where we are, things are getting better and the power play is growing because our production is doing better,” he said. A big number of popular producers have no skills in mastering and that pushed artistes to queue towards Bob Pro to serve them. However, the producer defends them insisting that everyone can focus on what he does best. “Everyone has what he does best in music production. Being good at mastering doesn’t make me the best producer because there are things that other producers can do better than I do. It’s all about working together,” he said. The producer added that he is ready to share the skills to whoever wants to learn mastering like he did for the likes of producer Flyest Music.
