Mixing and Mastering

A lot of people have their own recording setups at home these days, which I think is great. That's how my studio started after all! However, it also means I know how frustrating home recording can be: you can spend hours tweaking and refining a mix until it sounds perfect in your studio, then burn a disk and play it in the car, or on a friend's system, and find it sounds all wrong... its easy to blame your equipment in such cases, or to think you need some magical 'mastering' treatment,  but actually the main culprit is likely to be your room. Unfortunately, while microphones and audio interfaces are getting cheaper all the time, a properly designed and acoustically treated control room is beyond the reach of most home studios, so that's where I come in.

I don't claim to be a proper mastering studio, and if your project has the budget I would urge you to use a specialist mastering facility. But if that's not an option, mastering your tracks at my place is the next best thing.

A quick note about the term 'Mastering': in my studio this does not mean slapping on a multi-band and a limiter and making it really LOUD. Check out the Turn Me Up campaign, and remember that, according to the statistics, loud CD masters do not correlate to increased CD sales.

Instead, every mastering session will start with your Free Consultation Session: bring your mixes down to the studio, and we will spend an hour or so listening through to them, and checking them for technical or other issues. If there are any problems that would be better solved by you returning to the mix, this is our chance to find out in advance: perhaps you need to leave a bit more headroom when rendering to avoid clipping, or perhaps you have issues in the sub bass region that you missed on your near-field monitors. Or they might be absolutely fine, in which case we can set our minds at rest. This service is offered totally free to anyone that books a full mastering session.

The mastering session proper will start by putting each track under the 'audio microscope'. If there is background noise I will do my best to remove it or minimize it (if you have a section of just background noise I can sample that noise profile and remove it from the exposed sections of your song). I can also clean up digital clicks and pops, and even things like coughs and chair creaks, using powerful spectral editing software.

We will then assemble your play list, and adjust each track as needed to make the whole thing sound like a record. I have powerful processing options available, including multi-band compression and dynamic equalisation if needed, but I also have the experience to know when not to use them. Your final master will be dithered to 16 bits with one of the best algorithms available, and burnt to a red book disc using CD Architect to provide full control over track IDs and pauses etc.

Or, you can go one step further and bring your mixes into my studio for final polishing. Bring in your multitrack projects, or your final mixes as multiple 'stem' files, and we can make sure every detail is just right.