The Hideout provides the necessary tools and experience to tweak and polish your mixed tracks into a commercially-viable CD.

 Mastering Rates

1 – 10 songs $50 per song

$500 for 10+ songs

 

Mastering is listening without prejudice. The mastering process is the polishing and tweaking of a mix guided by what is learned from “objective” listening.  Mastering is best done by someone who has fresh ears and has no preconceptions or prejudices regarding each track. It should also be done by someone who knows what they are doing and who can “make your mix sound just like your mix….only better.” Mastering is vital to the recording process.

95 percent of mastering is not in the tools — it's in the ears. Unless you have the ears of a mastering engineer, you can't expect any plug-in to provide them for you. Besides, much of the point of using a mastering engineer is to bring in an objective set of ears to make any needed changes prior to printing CDs.

Does this mean only experts should attempt to do mastering? No. Firstly, not all mastering situations require a professional's touch. Maybe you have a live recording that you want to give to friends or sell at gigs. Sure, you can just duplicate the mixes, but a mastered 'veneer' will give your listeners a better experience.

Most mastering is done with specialized digital audio editing programs such as Sonic Foundry Sound Forge or iZotope’s Ozone 4, or hardware that processes the mix, such as t.c. electronic’s Finalizer Express or an Alesis Masterlink (all available at the Hideout).

The mastering process should actually begin with mixing, as there are several steps you can take while mixing to make for easier mastering. You should do these before you hand your project to a mastering engineer. If you recorded your music in high-resolution audio, then mix as high-resolution files. The mastering engineer will maintain the higher resolution throughout the mastering process, and only dither down to 16-bit at the very end. Do not dither individual mixes, and don't add any fades while mixing — fades and crossfades should be done while mastering, when there is a better sense of the ideal fade time.

As for trimming the starts and ends of tracks, with some music you may decide it's better to have a little room noise between cuts rather than dead silence, or to leave a few milliseconds of anticipatory space before the first note to avoid too abrupt a transition from silence to music. Do not add any processing to the overall mix; process the individual channels. Processing completed mixes is best left for mastering. As you mix, you should also watch closely for distortion — it’s better to concede a few decibels of headroom rather than risk distortion. It's not necessarily a good idea to add normalization, as that means another stage of DSP (which may degrade the sound, however slightly) — and you may need to change the overall level anyway when assembling all the mixes into a finished album.

Finally, always back up your original mixed files prior to delivering them to a mastering engineer. If the song is later re-mastered for any reason — for a high-resolution re-release, a compilation, or for use in any other context — you'll want a mix that's as easy to re-master as possible.

Remember that a huge part of conventional mastering is about involving someone who can be more objective about what needs to be done with your music. Unless that person can sit in on the mix and adjust the mastering processors, you're better off giving them your files and some space.

Do not be tempted to present the mastering engineer with a 'pre-mastered' mix where you've tried to take the sound part of the way towards where you want it. Always provide the raw, two-track (or surround) mix with no mastering effects. However, it may be worth creating a separate version of the tune that uses mastering effects to give the engineer an idea of the type of sound you like. The engineer can then translate your ideas into something perhaps even better, while taking your desires into account.