Q: Do I have to attend the session?
A: It's always better to attend the session but if that's not possible we will happily master your tracks without you. This is charged per track (see prices) and includes as many sessions needed for you to get the sound you're after.

Q: Why shouldn't I just master on my own?
A: Doing your own mastering is kind of like putting a new engine into you car. Fine if you have the right tools and expertise to do it but if not then best left to a garage. By the time you have finished your track your ears will have become so used to what they are hearing it is impossible to accurately judge and master your material. Using a mastering studio means that your material can be successfully mastered using a pair of fresh ears from an engineer who is doing this day in and day out as well as monitors with a flat frequency response.

Q: What are the most common problems you encounter?
A: Masters brought to us that have been desampled or over compressed.

Occasionally people bring in MP3's or other compressed (desampled) formats for mastering. This is highly undesirable as the algorithms used remove audio information that cannot be restored by mastering. The same applies for pretty much anything that has been through iTunes.

Over compression or limiting of the audio is often due to using a finaliser or similar software plugin. This can leave us with no headroom to work with and in our experience is often misapplied anyway causing distortion which we can't undo.

Q: My original recordings were really bad quality - can mastering fix this?
A: Although mastering should be seen as adding the final touch, rather than
a fixing process, we are able to use our specialized equipment and experience to bring even the worst recordings up to the highest quality possible.


Q: How long will the mastering take?
A: That depends on the length of your material and the quality of your
recording. It generally takes two to three times the length of the audio eg: a cd that
is sixty minutes long should take between two to three hours. If there are
things in your recordings that need special attention like declicking, denoising or problems that occured during the recording process then it may take longer.


Q: Should the whole band come for mastering?
A: Ideally one or two people should come along, anything more than that will
create a very sqaushed and potentially noisy session which is very distracting for the engineer.


Q: Does it matter what genre of music I/we make?
No we have mastered every type of music though it's always a good idea to bring a reference cd along so that we can hear what kind of sound you would like to achieve.

Q: The studio where we recorded the tracks have offered to master them for us, is this better than coming to you for mastering?
A: It depends on whether the studio has a dedicated mastering suite which is separate from the control room where the tracks were mixed down in. If not then it's better to go to a dedicated mastering studio as it gives you a chance to check whether you missed any potential problems that wasn't apparent during mixdown. 

Q: The studio where we mixed the tracks have a finaliser (or similar) that they can apply to the mixes. Is this a good idea? 
A: No as this give us no headroom to work with and in our experience is often misapplied anyway causing distortion which we can't undo.

Q: Can I bring a copy of my cd that the studio gave me rather than the original?
A: Yes but only as long as it's a clone of the original. Be very wary of copying a cd using iTunes or Windows Media Player or similar multimedia applications as this very often converts the sound to an MP3 or windows media file first and then back to a CD Audio file. This causes desampling which sometimes is only apparent on really good speakers but is exaggerated by any mastering processes.