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The question I’m most commonly asked about mastering is, “What does it do, exactly?”
The idea behind mastering is a simple one. The mastering engineer is an objective listener with a trained ear who is able to tweak your mix to bring out the best in what’s already there. It’s the last step in your project, the final "polish" before the CD or vinyl is duplicated, and your files are distributed online for download.
The first two steps are tracking and mixing your project - tracking is recording all the necessary tracks (drums, guitar, vocals, keyboards). Mixing is when you balance those elements to find the right blend. Mastering works with that final mix to bring out the best in what’s there.
What doesn’t mastering do?
It’s important not to confuse “mixing” with “mastering”. When you’re mixing, you’re still working with blending the individual tracks of a song - mastering works with a single, stereo file. So, mastering can’t make wholesale changes to the mix. I will be able to push back, say, an overly obtrusive kick drum, or tame particularly harsh vocal sibilance, even change the apparent width of the stereo signal - but I can’t, say, remove a backing vocal, or change the eq curve for a particular instrument. That sort of track-specific stuff needs to be accomplished in the mixing stage.
What can I expect my mastered music to sound like?
While every project is different, you can generally expect the music to be louder, for one thing. More tightly knit, more coherent sounding - less like a loose conglomeration of separate tracks, and more like a song. Mastered music also often sounds clearer, punchier, and more detailed. Depending on the quality of the material I get, the music often sounds as if a blanket has been lifted off, revealing more sparkle & subtlety than was previously apparent.
If I’m mastering an album for you, expect the individual songs to be as loud as each other, and to hang together better as a collection.
Should I premaster my music?
No. You should mix your music to the best of your ability, getting the right balance between all the elements, and leave it at that. At this stage, it will, most likely, sound too quiet, but that’s fine. Your job is to get the right blend between all the different elements in the song - one of the primary aims in my mastering is to bring the volume up to where it should be.
If you apply a lot of compression and/or limiting to your music, there’s less there for me to work with. You’ll get better results if you leave the final-stage compression to me.
Why master my release at Dan’s House?
I’ve worked with over 500 bands and solo artists over the past 11 years, recording, mixing, and mastering. I’ve logged thousands of hours behind my DAW, and I’ll bring all that experience to bear when it’s time for me to bring your mix to its maximum potential.
In the last few years, recording technology has advanced to the point where great work can be done on smaller budgets in home-based studios. But an “artist-recorded” album needs that professional mastering touch even more urgently than a total “pro” studio recording to bring it up to par with everything else that’s out there.
What format should I send you?
If you’re sending me files online, send 44.1k, 24 bit wave files. If you’re shipping me a CDR, burn the files onto a data disc - don’t send an audio CD. Two reasons why a data CDR is better than an audio CD - a data CDR uses more of the available space on the disc for error correction, and on an audio CD, the bit depth of the file is limited to 16 bit.
That said, if all you’ve got is an audio CD, I can use that! Likewise, if you’re unable to send 24 bit files, 16 will work as well. My preferred format is 24 bit, 44.1k wave files, but I can use pretty much whatever you’ve got.
What format will Dan’s House send back to me?
If you’re looking to get CDs replicated, then I will ship a Red Book compliant master CDR, good to send to any replication service. If you’re selling the music online, I will upload or ship 320 mbps mp3s suitable for digital distribution.
Do you use analog or digital tools for mastering?
I use mostly digital tools when I master, but sweeten the mix by using my D.W. Fearn VT-2 in one stage of the mastering chain. The digital tools I use are a combination of Universal Audio’s amazingly accurate digital recreations of vintage equalizers, compressors, and limiters along with UAD’s modern digital mastering filters.
In my DAW environment, I use a combination of Steinberg’s Nuendo and Wavelab software for mastering and arranging the final master CD.
The studio’s AD/DA converters are Lynx Audio’s TEC award-winning Aurora converters.
How can I sell my release online?
I use Tunecore.com to get my music online - they will distribute your mp3s to Itunes, Rhapsody, Emusic, Amazon, and every other major online retailer you can think of, worldwide. All you have to do is upload the mastered files I give you, along with your album artwork. They give you back 70 cents on every dollar sold - the same cut you’d get if you went directly to Itunes yourself. All you pay is a low yearly maintenance fee.
How do I send you my files?
Many of my clients find it easiest to upload their files to me, either through my YouSendIt account, or via an FTP program. If you choose to send files online, feel free to zip your files together into one or two packages, using a lossless data compression utility like WinZip, Winrar, or Stuffit. if you send via YouSendIt, you’ve got a 2 gig limit per file, so if the whole package is over 2 gigs, you’ll need to break it up into smaller packets.
If you want to ship the files to me, burn them onto a data disc, either CD or DVD, instead of sending me an audio CD. A data disc uses more of the available storage space for error correction - it’s just a slightly more accurate medium than an audio CD. Also, an audio CD is limited to 16 bit audio files - it’s better if you can send 24 bit files
My shipping address is...
Dan McKinney
5121 Camp Meeting Rd.
Center Valley, PA 18034
What sort of payments do you accept?
PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, or a mailed check. Or cash, if you can come in
What does it cost?
single - $50
2-3 - $45/song
4-7 - $40.00/song
8-10 - $30.00/song
11 songs and up - $310.00/album
What are compression, equalization, and limiting?
These are three of the primary tools used in mastering. If you already record and mix your own music, you’re quite familiar with what these three terms mean. But for the uninitiated...
Compression knocks down the peaks in any audio material. Visualize the louder parts of the song as hills, and the quieter material in between as valleys - compression tames those high points, but leaves the valleys as they are. Once these peaks have been attenuated (brought down) you can raise the overall signal, and end up with a net gain in volume without having the peaks go past their upper limit.
That’s the simple explanation, but there are quite a few variables that determine how compression will shape your sound. The speed with which the compressor reacts to the peak (attack), the amount it pushes back on the signal (ratio), the point at which it kicks in and starts compressing (threshold), and the speed at which it releases (release time) are crucial to getting it to work with what you’ve got. A compressor set to a fast attack time, fast release, low threshold and high ratio will sound totally different than a smooth setting with slow attack and decay. Some music benefits from the color introduced by more aggressive settings, while some calls for a smoother, gentler response.
There are also compressors that work with various frequency ranges to either compress, limit, or expand just these specific ranges. Say, for instance, you’ve got a big boomy bass drum that you want to push back into the mix a bit - you could isolate the range where the thing is booming out, and set this compressor to only push back on that particular sonic range.
Limiting work in a very similar fashion to compression, but usually has a very high compression ratio - it tends to not simply compress each peak, but acts to more severely limit the peak at a particular point. A “brick wall” limiter will not allow the signal to go past a certain point.
Equalization refers to tone control - bass, midrange, and treble. EQ can brighten your track, rein in boominess or harsh sibilance, introduce more meaty midrange, or carve off subsonic frequencies. There’s an infinite number of combinations you can choose from when filtering through an equalizer - parameters include the frequency affected, the width of the range being boosted or cut, and the shape of the curve. Also, every EQ, whether digital or analog, has it’s own characteristic sound. Some are quite transparent, while others lend their own unique color to the material.
Can you remove unwanted sounds?
The answer is “yes, sometimes”. One step in mastering is cleaning up the beginning and ends of songs - if there are unwanted sounds here, like stick clicks, guitar noise, etc., that stuff’s easy to trim. But if there are unwanted noises within the piece itself, like a feedback squeal, harsh vocal sibilance, pops or clicks, I can remove these, too, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s only possible to attenuate these unwanted sounds to the point where they’re really not noticeable any more, and sometimes it’s possible to lift them out altogether.
What is phase correction?
A sound consists of peaks and valleys, the simplest of which to visualize is a sine wave. If you’ve got two sine waves where the peaks and valleys coincide exactly with each other, you can say that they’re “in phase”. If the peaks and valleys of one of the channels gets flipped, and the other channel doesn’t, then the two signals will be out of phase. Sometimes I’ll get a mix where the phase has been reversed inadvertently in either the left or right channel, so one of the first checks I do is to make sure the left and right channels are in phase with each other.
When the two channels are out of phase, you can get frequencies canceling each other out, resulting in a loss of sound. It’s simple to check, and simple for me to fix, too.
What is DC bias?
Again, this is a simple problem to detect and fix. If you can visualize a sine wave, half of the signal should rise above the center line, and half of the signal dips below it, in equal proportion. If there’s DC bias, the wave would be biased toward the top or bottom. Correcting the bias centers the wave around zero again.
Do you offer noise reduction?
I do. The easiest type of noise to remove/reduce is good old-fashioned tape hiss. But I can also filter out hums, buzzes, and more complex background noise, again, with varying degrees of success depending on the severity of the problem.
What other filters/enhacers do you use?
While I prefer to generally stick to the basics of eq, compression, and limiting, I do have a variety of tools at my disposal, including mastering quality plugins from UAD that punch up the sound by subtly mixing in harmonics, or mimicking analog tape saturation - these plugins literally add “good” distortion.
Occasionally I will add a tiny amount of ambient reverb to give a piece desired depth, or subtly expand the stereo signal to give it more spread.
An important point to keep in mind is that it’s very easy to use too much of this kind of stuff - at no point in mastering your music do I want “effects” to be heard - the point behind mastering is to reveal what’s there, not glom on another layer that might actually obscure or misrepresent what’s at the core.
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