Mastering

We provide a full mastering service for your CDs, through our special partnership with a local mastering studio.

Mastering is the final step in the production of your music before it is duplicated. It involves processing your tracks and adjusting the tone and dynamics to make them consistent with great-sounding commercial records. It also involves tidying up fades and any glitches and creating a proper ‘Red Book’ CD master ready for duplication, with necessary track information and encoding (PQ, ISRC etc). Your tracks will be ready for the shops, clubs or radio and will stand up against other commercial material.

This doesn’t cost as much as you think! We cut costs by not offering attended sessions and dealing with customers exclusively via the internet.

However, we still have experienced engineers (technically and musically trained) using high-end analogue and digital equipment in acoustically treated rooms, able to take your music to the next level.

We also offer a mastering-only service (no duplication) . We can also provide you with high-quality encoded MP3 files and a mastering-grade Red Book CD-R or DDP image (at extra cost, see below).

Dance music specialists

Although we love working with any genre of music (including live recordings and spoken word), we specialise in dance music. With extensive experience producing and engineering for the underground dance scene, we know what it takes to make a master sound loud but also punchy and dynamic (something you often cannot achieve simply by using a cheap plugin limiter) and how important it is for your music to not only stand out in a DJ set but also to sound punchy and ‘phat’ on a club system.

DJ Mix CD service

We also offer a service for DJs wanting their mix CDs to sound consistent and loud, with necessary track markers (with no gaps!). Simply give us the timings of where you want the tracks to start (to the nearest second) and we’ll do the rest, including making sure the track start point is on the first beat of the bar.

First demo track for free!

Send us one of your tracks and we’ll master it for free! We offer you the chance to hear what we can do for free, before you commit to your first payment. Simply send us your track and we’ll send you back a high-quality 320kbps MP3 for you to check out (one per customer, maximum track length 8 minutes).  Please include a Track Sheet with basic information such as what your expectations are of your mastered track.

What we offer

  • Fast turnaround, friendly service
  • High-end mastering for CD production
  • Free archival of your mixes and masters

Pricing

  • £25 set-up cost (per CD)
  • then £10 per track
  • DJ Mix : £40 (includes set-up cost)
  • Prices are for a single CD and include:
    • Consultation via email
    • Analog and digital processing
    • Noise reduction, click removal etc. if required
    • Fade ins/outs
    • PQ encoding (track markers)
    • ISRC insertion
    • Low error-rate Red Book master CD-R
    • Downloadable 320kbps MP3, if required
  • Extras:
    • Additional master CD: £10
    • DDP image: £20
  • We accept audio files in the following formats, up to 32bit / 192kHz:
    • WAV
    • AIFF
    • SD2

Customer satisfaction

We want to make sure that you’re completely happy with the end result. If you’re not, let us know and we can work with you to make changes to the master until you’re happy. First revision is free, other revisions are charged at a negotiable rate. Please bare in mind that if you want to make changes to your mix after mastering, this will be charged as a new master.

Tips

  • Although we accept your music on CD-R via post, we prefer if you upload your music as digital audio files via a free file transfer service. We don’t accept MP3s for quality reasons.
  • Provide us with as much information as possible in the Track Sheet word document. This includes your full contact details, timing information, any information regarding changes you’d like to see in tone, glitches or noise problems fixed etc. and any reference recordings you’d like to sound like.
  • Please provide us with files that are as high-resolution as possible. We accept Wave, AIFF and SD2 files up to 32bit 192kHz. 24 bit is the minimum, although we accept 16bit if this is all you have.
  • Please do not add any processing to your final mix, including any limiting, compression, EQ, normalisation or dithering. This is very important! If the mixdown is very compressed we cannot do much with it and it will (most often) not end up sounding as good as it could do. As a guide, your mixdown/recording should be peaking no higher than -6dB FS. Do not try and make the mixdown ‘loud’ – that’s our job! If someone else is engineering for you, please provide them with this information. If your tracks are too compressed for us to work with, we may return them and request less compressed versions.
  • If the CD is for commercial release, you’ll probably have ISRC codes. We can insert these into the CD – please provide them in the accompanying Track Sheet word document, if required.
  • Please remember to leave time for mastering. We aim to complete the mastering as quickly as possible, usually in 5-7 working days, but won’t rush if it requires extra work, so please leave plenty of time before any deadlines you may have.


Click here to send your tracks to us!