Why?

Mastering is the final step in the recording process. It is an important and crucial part of the process of making a professional record. If you wan to compete with the market today you have to have it mastered.

Mastering helps you put together a set of songs so that they sound like they belong together sonically. The help shape the songs so they make sense playing from track to track in loudness and balanced frequency.

Preparation

When prepping your files for mastering, don’t apply any limiters or an sort of mastering chain on the stereo bus. Always leave some headroom for the mastering engineer to work with; the standard is to leave -6 dB. That will leave plenty of space for any EQ boosts or processing that will help improve your song or album. When mastering the engineer will want to work from bounced down stereo mixes.

Formats

File formats that we accept are Wav, AIFF. We also accept, ¼ inch 2 track analog tape, a CD, a DAT Tape, or a Cassette. If you are going to give us digital files we would suggest that you give me the files in the same bit depth and Sample rate you recorded at. If you can we suggest that you record at a 24 bit depth and up to 88.2khz sample rate for the best A/D, D/A conversion, also leave the mixes without any dither on them we can apply that for you. If you are going to give us an MP3 file be aware that these are compressed files and that we can still master these but they may not sound as good as using a higher quality Wav file. Again we want to stress that please use the same sample rate and bit depth that you recorded at.