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What is
Mastering?
Mastering is the art/science of assembling individual songs into cohesive musical excellence and should be considered the final step in a recording project before going into manufacture.
Mastering gives your music the means to compete in the world of commercially released material. We level the playing field by bringing your recordings to their fullest potential, whether you recorded it at home, or spent thousands of pounds at a studio.
At Ideal Mastering the tracks are looked at in dedicated mastering studio which has been acoustically treated to give an even natural sound.
The tracks are first loaded onto our hard disk system either at high speed (if a cd master is supplied) or in real time (if any other format is supplied like DAT or
minidisc). The eq of the tracks are first checked and adjusted if necessary and then various effects
can be added like stereo expansion, reverb etc. If there are mistakes in the recording like glitches, pops or things that shouldn't be there we will do our best to get rid of them. The last stage is to apply limiting to the tracks to bring them up to the level of commercial releases.
When the tracks sound as good as they can get, then they are compiled in the correct running order with fades, gaps and pq timing.
Assuming that you have left enough time before duplication, you will be given a test copy to take away to make sure that what you hear in the mastering studio sounds good on your hi-fi, club system,car etc. If you are happy with the test copy then we will run off a production master which is used for duplicating
your copies. If you think that the tracks need a bit more work then we can go back a few
stages and re-do the processing with different approaches.
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Is Mastering Important?
Yes, good mastering is just as important as good recording and mixing. The only reason that commercial cd's are as loud as they are is because they have been processed in the mastering studio attaining high levels. It is important to understand that Mastering is not something to be taken lightly, its not a case of push that button here and this button there to make things sound good, it is a subjective process that can make a
recording either really good or really bad.
What we need from you:
Your masters supplied on either:
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CD
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Uncompressed wave files or standard cd audio, the tracks should be 16 bit or 24 bit, 44.1 khz or 48
khz |
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DAT
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Either at 44.1KHz, 48KHz though we can also go from long play DATs at
32KHz |
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Minidisc
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1/4"
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15, 7.5, 3.75 ips and either 1/4 track or 1/2
track
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Vinyl
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33. 45 or
78 rpm |
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Cassette
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We can take other formats though you may have to bring along the machine they were mastered on.
Provide as much information as possible: do you want them to be loud, do you need overlapping tracks, what your sound could be comparable to.
(You can bring a reference cd that we can understand what kind of sound and level you are hoping to
achieve.)
Patience and honesty: We would like our clients to be as satisfied with the mastering as possible so if it takes just one session or three, its worth the time and effort to get your sound as you would like it to be!
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