Mastering Music Online
Why Music Mastering is provided online?
There is only one key difference between a traditional mastering studio and one that offers its services solely online – the clients are never present during the mastering process. They cannot instantly react to the effect the processing has on their mix and they are not able to correct instantly the engineer’s approach if needed.
There is no denying that lack of face-to-face contact makes it a little bit harder for a mastering engineer to hit the spot, as everything is subjective and depends on personal taste and preferences. That is why good communication throughout the whole online mastering process, from start to finish, is crucial to producing a master that meets the client’s expectations.
Some studios prefer not to engage too much with their customers. You simply send them your mix and a few days later a ready master is sent back to you, with no other interaction. Our approach is different. Not only do we ask about your goals at the ordering stage so that we can tailor the processing to your needs, but we also get in touch at some point in the mastering process to keep you in the loop.
The Red Mastering team is always available by phone or e-mail so you can contact us if you have any urgent queries.
Please bear in mind the time difference between London and LA or Sydney though!
If you are new to Online Mastering Services, please read about What is Music Mastering?
Audio Mastering process at Red Mastering Studio is broken down into the following three stages:
1. Critical Listening / (optional) Mix Review
Critical listening is the most important part of the audio mastering process and takes place regardless of whether you opted for a mixed review or not.
Our Mastering Engineer will listen to your material in perfect acoustic conditions, judge it from a strictly technical point of view and decide what kind of processing should be used to achieve the results you expect.
We do not appraise the artistic value such as song arrangement, production and musical ideas. Our job is strictly technical.
If you can imagine for example a car shop, where you bring your car for repair, we serve owners of Fiat and Mercedes in the very same way, without commenting on the choice of your car, but only on technical problems.
If you ordered a mix review and your mix has problems such as tonal imbalances or dynamic issues, We will email you as soon as possible with quite specific instructions on how to remove them. We will also let you know how your mix could be improved; you can then decide whether to follow these recommendations or not.
If you did not order a mix review, Our Engineer assumes that you are happy with the mix and will ignore problems like an instrument being (in his opinion) too loud or too quiet as it is assumed to be intentional.
Although, we will contact you if any serious technical issues are discovered such as distortion or clipping. Please consider that mixes submitted for audio mastering (including stem mastering) without the mix review option are anticipated to be fault-free and as such they are scheduled for only one mastering session, as opposed to two sessions for orders that include mix review.
If we have to unexpectedly stop mid-work and wait for the mix to be amended or just to hear back from you, we could fail to deliver on the other orders that had been scheduled following your session. There is an additional fee for an interrupted session so to avoid extra charges, please always double-check your mix before sending it for mastering, or choose the Mix Review service to avoid situations like this.
Why we don’t provide Mix Review as a standard to anyone ordering audio mastering?
Well, the answer is very simple – many Clients are happy with their final mixdown, and they do not want to get back to the audio mixing stage to amend the mixes. Other people have no access to the original mix with tracks (for many reasons like the mix was done years ago, and they lost the original tapes).
To be perfectly honest, at the beginning of Red Mastering Studio, we did offer Mix Review as a free and standard option for audio mastering, but after years of doing this, we realised this should be an additional option.
2. Mastering Music - Audio Processing
We use various audio processing techniques to enhance your mix. Depending on the material and the final medium Our Engineer may use saturation, equalisation, M/S widening, limiting, compression, parallel compression, expansion, peak limiting, balance correction, noise reduction, and A/D or D/A clipping.
Although it is always advisable to fix the issues detected at the previous stage by going back to the mix, it may not be feasible.
To a certain degree, some of these problems can be dealt with during audio mastering.
You must however bear in mind that working with one stereo file has its limitations and for example, compressing the drums will affect the rest of the mix. To lessen the impact, stem mastering can sometimes be an option, though it should only be used in exceptional cases.
Instead of processing one file, two or more stems (groups of instruments) are being manipulated independently from each other, allowing for much better sound control.
If for example, a less experienced online mixer struggles to properly remove ‘pops’ on the vocals, We can fix the problem by working with two stems, the vocals and the instrumentals.
Can you make my song very loud?
Some clients insist on making their songs extremely loud even if the genre of their material does not call for it despite my strong advice against it.
This is the result of the loudness war we have been witnessing for the past few decades; making masters painfully loud just for loudness sake. The clients are so worried about their single or album not being competitive volume-wise in their genre that they are willing to sacrifice the dynamic range of their material.
We do appreciate that sometimes it is difficult to go against the tide, therefore we offer an extra loud master as an additional option.
You will receive two versions – one with full dynamic range and the other one, much more compressed, less dynamic and louder.
Please note that in our opinion, a standard master of the loudest music genres such as rock, hip hop or house should be no louder than around -10 up to -8dB RMS. An extra loud version can be up to 4 dB louder, though it depends on the source material.
Also please be sure, that our job is to advise and follow your requests, it’s your music at the end of the day and we are here to serve you.
We will inform you though about the consequences of following your requests – simply if you request to squash your mix, to unhealthy levels, we will deliver and also warn you ahead of doing so about the negative outcome.
3. Master Revision
It is at this stage that the importance of good communication at the start of the process transpires. The more information was given and the more detailed it was, the fewer changes to the master were required.Since introducing the Job Order form, more than 95% of Red Mastering Studio clients were satisfied with the first draft and no amendments were required.
I always advise you to listen to the master carefully on various sound systems before deciding whether you like it or not. If you are not entirely happy with how the master sounds, you should email us your feedback and we will make the necessary adjustments.
Thanks to a very convenient online application Job Order, all you need to do to hire us for audio mastering online is to submit the relevant Job Order. If you have never used our services before, check here to find more details about the process…
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