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Whether your sounds need subtle polishing or major salvation,
we can put the finishing touches on your album.
A key benefit to enlisting the help of a mastering engineer is that he or she can make good
mixes sound great and ordinary mixes sound better. Usually, the improvement made to an average
mix is substantial. By making use of high quality equalizers, compressors, peak limiters and
other assorted tools, the mastering engineer is able to contribute to a mix in ways that are
often difficult or impossible to do during the mixing process. A correctly mastered song will
sound good on most sound systems.
Our philosophy in mastering is to let your music dictate how the mastering progresses. We enable
each song to sonically compliment the album as a whole, while preserving each song's own,
personal identity. Your collection of songs will then become a cohesive, professional album.
We get a feel for where your album is going, then we help you get it there.
AUDIO PREPARATION
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PROJECT DELIVERY
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We need clean stereo mixes of your songs. It's very important not to put any EQ, compression or
limiting on the master bus when you mix. The reason is that once a track has been limited to any
significant extent, it's very difficult for the mastering engineer to do his or her job. Even
something seemingly minor, like applying additional EQ, can be problematic for the engineer.
Another key reason you'll want to avoid EQ, compression and limiting during the mix is because
you may want to re-master your mixes later, possibly for a different medium. Therefore, you'll
want to start with your clean, archived mixes. Think like it's the old days when an artist would
do his mixing in the studio and finish with all the mixes un-mastered on tape. Those clean,
un-mastered tapes would then be used for mastering later.
Remember, when in doubt, leave it for the mastering engineer.
Delivering 24-bit mixes for mastering rather than 16-bit is preferred.
Doing so will preserve more of the detail and quality of your mixes.
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SUBMIX MASTERING
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SUBMIX MASTERING EXAMPLES
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There are times when serious issues arise that are impossible to correct when working with just
a stereo mix. Most problematic at the mastering stage are kick, bass and lead vocals. If one of
those elements is too loud, too soft, has big peaks or needs more than moderate EQ, it's
difficult to bring them completely into line when working from a stereo master.
For submix mastering you deliver your mixes in pieces that, when assembled, will comprise the
mix that you created. Here is a typical group of tracks for a song made up of: drums, bass,
guitars and keyboards, and lead vocals.
When the elements are split out to separate stereo stem mixes, we will have greater ability to
improve it and yield results that are far better than what can be accomplished mastering from a
simple stereo mix.
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ISRC CODES
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The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) is a unique international identifier for tracks
on sound and music-video recordings. Comprised of a 12 character alpha-numeric code, the ISRC
functions as a digital “fingerprint” for each track. Unlike a Universal Product Code (UPC) the
ISRC is tied to the track and not the CD as a UPC code is. One of the uses of the ISRC is for
royalty collection and tracking from digital download services such as iTunes.
When we master your CD for replication, we will generate unique ISRC codes for each of your
songs. This information will be burned as part of your CD.
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DDP FILES
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There are two ways to deliver your master to a replication facility, audio CD or DDP file.
While audio CDs work for this purpose they are far from ideal because no matter how good the
media and the burner are, you're going to have some number of errors in the data.
On the other hand, Disc Description Protocol (DDP) files are delivered as data on
a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. The error correction employed on data discs is designed to be more
robust than that of audio CDs. This ensures that the audio master that the plant gets
will not have any errors in the data. All the jobs that we take to replication are delivered
as DDP files.
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MIX PREVIEW SERVICE
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While mastering can cure many problems in a mix, it's always better if those things can be
addressed in the mix itself. Send us an audio CD or upload mp3 files and we'll listen to it and
let you know if there are any areas that need to be addressed prior to mastering.
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COSTS
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Our mastering rate is $90 per hour. A typical mastering of stereo mixes for a 9-12 song album will take approximately 5 hours.
Services must be paid for when rendered.
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