Online Mastering Studio
Red Mastering Studio is an online mastering studio based in South London UK.
The studio provides professional, budget audio mastering services, producing high quality masters ready for a CD, vinyl or the Internet release.
On this website you will find information about:
* mastering engineer - who I am and what I do to make your music sound better
* mastering online- what is mastering audio, online mastering service
* budget prices - prices for Vinyl, CD mastering; conditions and explanation of the audio mastering online
* mastering portfolio - ‘before and after’ samples
* mastering equipment - analog and digital tools in Red Mastering
And because great masters are born from great mixes, you will also find some tips on how to prepare a good mix ready for audio mastering.
Audio mastering is a mixture of art and science. There are 3 crucial elements to the process: a flat and accurate monitoring system; a customised, made-to-measure acoustic treatment; and – last but not least – a skilled and experienced mastering engineer. Red Mastering Studio has them all. On top of that, I use the best quality high end analog and digital equipment helping me to achieve what my clients desire the most – great sounding audio masters.
When mastering audio for a CD, vinyl or the Internet release, the most important thing is to fully understand and fulfil clients’ expectations. You must remember, there is no accounting for taste; what one may perceive as bass heavy may be bass light for the other. My personal opinion does not matter but to be able to deliver audio masters my clients will be happy with, I need to be on the same page as them as regards loudness of their material, for example.
Providing an online mastering service has a slight disadvantage to a traditional mastering studio offering. There are no attended sessions hence there is no face-to-face contact with clients. It is obviously easier for a musician, band, producer or label’s AR to express their ideas when they can be present in a mastering studio, witness the Mastering Engineer at work and point him there and then in the direction they want to go with their material. They do not have the comfort of such a direct contact when using an online mastering service. I therefore need to gather as much information as possible about their goals before I start to work on their material, and I also need to communicate with them throughout the whole process.
At Red Mastering Studio London, the mastering process is broken down into the following stages:
1. Critical listening / mix review
This is the most important part of the audio mastering process, where I listen to the material in perfect acoustic conditions and judge its sound quality from a strictly technical point of view. The role of a mastering engineer is not to appraise artistic value of the material, such as song arrangement, out of tune vocals or tempo mistakes. These issues should always be addressed at the production stage like recording, or at the very last mixing. Although I am aware that assumption is the mother of all cock-ups, I simply need to assume that material sent to me has been appraised and approved from the artistic point of view. At this stage, my task as a mastering engineer is to act as a fresh pair of ears to the mixing engineer and/or producer. They have spent a lot of time working with the audio material and quite possibly they can no longer be objective in their opinion about it. If I spot any technical issues with the mix, such as one instrument being too loud or too quiet, distortion/clipping, phase issues, tonal imbalance etc. I move to stage 2. If the mix does not have any problems - I can go straight to stage 3.
2. Removing / minimising mix problems
If technical problems identified in stage 1 are serious, my advice always is to revisit the mix and address these issues there. I always give very precise technical instructions, such as ‘please cut Hammond organ in verses below 50 Hz min. 5 dB’, making it easier for the mixing engineer and/or producer by pointing them straight to the problem with the mix. This kind of advice is invaluable because many of my clients - independent artists with small budget, often recording and mixing their material at home, rarely have a flat and accurate monitoring system. And a mix can never be perfect if the mixer cannot hear peaks and dips of audio spectrum in their material. This is where mastering services of Red Mastering Studio become indispensable.
If problems with the mix are minor, or if the client does not have access to single tracks for whatever the reason and it thus unable to revisit the mix, I do my best to get rid of these issues at this stage of audio mastering, making sure to cause as little impact on the rest of the song as possible.
3. Audio processing / adding the 'magic touch'
The penultimate stage of the audio mastering process at Red Mastering Studio, London. For many, the most important one in which a mastering engineer waves their magic wand and makes even the worst audio mix sound great. The common misconception about audio mastering is that it will deal with all the issues of a bad mix. It will not. Mastering means working with (usually) just one stereo track and for example cutting or adding dB on one instrument will have a ripple effect on the whole song. That is why you need to revisit the mix and make changes only to the problematic tracks, without changing the whole mix.
Mastering audio means adding an extra layer to the song, a ‘magic touch’ if you will. By using compression, saturation, equalisation, M/S widening, limiting , parallel compression, expansion, and dithering, I can elevate your mix by one level. If your mix is great, its master will also sound great, just that little bit better. If it is average, the master will sound better but only good, never great.
Mastering should only enhance the mix, so you need to work on your mix until it sounds exactly how you want it. The mastering process will not change the mix dramatically. If you expect it to, you will end up being disappointed. Let me use a car analogy – audio mastering is like spray painting a car. If you take an Fiat to a garage and want to paint it red, you cannot expect to drive out in a red Ferrari.
4. Revision of mastered song
I send the mastered material to the client and wait for their feedback. If they are happy then my job is done. However, due to the nature of online mastering and lack of face-to-face contact some amendments of various nature are bound to be required - hence one free revision is included in the price of my master.
Please note that if at this stage you decide to change your mix for whatever the reason, it will not fall under the master revision and the whole process will need to be repeated from the first stage.
It is really at this stage that the importance of good communication at the start of the process transpires. The more information I had been given and the more detailed it was, the fewer changes will be required. It really is worth putting some effort into thinking everything through at the beginning and conveying it to me. It will save a lot of your and my time at this final stage of audio mastering and will help to avoid any disappointments.
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Mastering audio today:
It is stating the obvious that the music industry today hardly resembles that of the 1970's or even the 1990's. There have been major changes in how music is recorded, who mixes it and the purpose of audio mastering. It used to take very skilled craftsmen to record material, mixing was done by the very best in the industry and the job of a mastering engineer was to compile songs to create a coherent sounding album, not to make each song as loud as possible. The arrival of personal computers, popularisation of home recording and the Internet have changed it all. Expectations towards sound engineers have also changed and they must conform or they are goners.
However some things remain the same, like the process of creating a great song - and I am talking about its technical aspect and sound quality, not the artistic side of things. The formula is:
70% - tracking / recording
20% - mixing
10% - mastering
As you can see, the most important bit is recording; mixing and mastering only add polish. So record your tracks as best as you can, do not leave everything to fix it in the mix, as Bob Katz used to say, and definitely do not count on the master to be the ultimate remedy. And remember that at the end of the day a great song (in artistic sense), no matter how badly recorded will always be a great song; the opposite is never true.
Red Mastering Studio from London, UK offers budget mastering services to anyone looking for great quality and exceptional customer service, at an affordable price. This is why most of my clients are emerging artists who need a CD master or a single master for the Internet release. Sometimes their aim is to be in the top 40 on the US charts; sometimes it is the first song to leave their 'bedroom studio' and be shared with a wider audience. In either case, I advise and support my clients with important technical information to help them achieve their goals and leave my online mastering studio with a great sounding master. The quality of my work, big attention to detail and fantastic communication and feedback my clients receive are what sets Red Mastering apart from other mastering studios.
I have an extensive knowledge of the hip hop genre and I have successfully released an album with Sony BMG as a mixer/producer. Therefore many of my clients are hip hop artists. I also work with a lot of people producing house, soul and jazzy house, electro, pop, r'n'b, reggae and IDM. I have mastered almost every genre of music you can imagine - jazz, ethno, folk, acoustic, country, rock, indie-rock, punk and metal. Red Mastering Studio's London and virtual doors are open to any other genre of music, and recently I did audio masters for techno and hi-energy producers from the UK and continental Europe.
To sum it up, let me tell you what in my opinion a great audio master is. Quite simply, it is when the client is very happy with what I have achieved with their material. There is no such thing as 'one size fits all' as far as audio mastering is concerned. I might have cut the greatest master in the music history, and 99.9% people may agree but if the client is not happy, then I failed them as a mastering engineer. And so I shall always aim to make you happy.
