Mastering (officially called ‘Pre-Mastering’) is the ultimate stage in music production, traditionally the last adjustments were made here before pressing Vinyl or a CD. Our mastering services are aimed at providing adequate loudness and clarity for online release, with other adjustments only done where necessary (don’t fix what doesn’t need fixing) – this may include fixing pops and noises, distortion or harshness, and controlling problem frequencies. 

LOUDNESS…

Please note that we *can* produce very loud masters, but since most music ends up online on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and such, there is little point in trying to squeeze more loudness out of a mix since each of these platforms normalises the tracks to an average (integrated) LUFS value of about -14dB. The best practise in our opinion is to master for a decent average loudness, suitable to the genre of the track, and then turning it down to the required average level for the streaming services. So getting enough loudness is never an issue. Should you want to press a CD or Vinyl, things are slightly different, contact us to discuss the possibilities. If you are in the market for superclone

External mastering

For higher budget projects we work with specialised full time mastering houses throughout Europe, for the simple reason that these people provide a second pair of highly trained ears to go over our work, and they generally have a different perspective from music producers. While due to budget constraints it is common these days for mixing engineers to do mastering work as well, and they may be very well capable of doing so, the ‘second pair of ears’ argument has held up for decades and is why in high profile productions there is ALWAYS a separate mastering engineer taking care of that step, even if he or she will make minimal changes to the final mix.