Music Mastering Studio, London, UK Online Mastering and Mixing Audio

It involves human perception, as music is not just rhythm, and harmony, but most important – Emotions. A Real Mastering Engineer working in the studio in the listening room can add to the mastering music or his perception of the sound, and focus on emotions in the music, something which is not possible to measure in any scientific way.

The computer/automatic software plugin doing Instant Mastering, cannot discern jazz music from reggae. As per a simple example, humans will do it in a few seconds and will apply processing audio that relates to the specific genre.
Reggae will focus on the bass, whereas jazz songs – focus on fidelity clarity and smoothness. The machine will apply processing according to the 0s and 1s inside the file. This is a crucial point when the machines simply cannot compete with the skilled engineer.

In this service, the entire process is done automatically by the computer. Your music is analysed by the algorithm and AI applies a certain type of processing to the audio file. The focus of the above service is to make the mix/audio file extremely loud. This is very incorrect to call that process AUDIO MASTERING (Audio Mastering is a more complicated chain of processes). There is no doubt that that type of service is very convenient (as done entirely via the Internet and automatically – therefore your “Master” is done in the next 10 min or so. Easy to order, very fast and very cheap. For audio engineering amateurs – it could be a great thing to try their first time, but for anyone considering their work seriously – definitively not.

If you spend weeks and months recording and mixing your album, it’s your baby, would you give it away to some automatic plugin or rather use the experience, skills and knowledge of a professional sound engineer?

• The first and most important part of Audio Mastering is to carefully listen to the music.
• After initial listening, the mastering engineer takes notes and decides what processing needs to be applied.
• Editing: The very important part where all small issues, like crackles, clicks, and other digital gizmos should be spotted and removed.
• Feedback to Mixing Engineer: Improving the mix.
• Processing Audio: Analog and Digital. The crucial thing is not to aim for LOUDNESS only like INSTANT/AUTOMATIC SERVICES do but for fidelity, quality, musicality, and good balance.
• Authorization and final delivery in specified format (DDP, vinyl premaster, MFiT, high resolution, etc).

When you use Instant/Automatic Mastering services, nobody listens to your music in a specially treated room with a high end, full-range monitoring system. There are no 20-30 years of experience of listening to tens of thousands of records in any music genre, an experience which has a great impact on the outcome. With automatic service, there is also a lack of communication between the mastering engineer and client – something which is crucial, discussing the project, explaining, and listening to the client’s requirements. This process alone can bring massive positive outcomes to the final project.

When you send your mix to four different Mastering Engineers you will get four different masters, and none of them is “better” or “worse”, as there is no definition for an ideal master. Communicating with a Mastering Engineer has a massive impact on the outcome, a client is a person who decides about it, not the Mastering Engineer. Upon personal request, the mastering engineer creates an audio master per client, per his/her requirements. It does make a certain difference when you deal with a mastering engineer, a human being, adding something additional from himself to the project, an extra that a machine is not able to provide. Every mastering engineer will deliver different sounding masters, every person adds some of his/her own “personality” to the music. It is a value that cannot be overestimated.