We know who you are - a struggling band on a budget with a no-advance indie-label deal that pays out roughly $27 every year. Or maybe you're a self-releasing artist who's trying to cut a demo or make a CD to sell at gigs. Whatever the case, you're likely the kind of musician that doesn't have thousands of bucks to spend on the mastering stage, and even if you did, you probably couldn't justify spending that kind of cash on a release that is unlikely to recoup those kinds of losses. We feel your pain, because that's who we are too, and that's why we do this.
After going through this a few times and learning just what it takes to put out an album, we took it upon ourselves to dive into this, so we could help out other artists in my position, and maybe make a few bucks at the same time. Oh, and justify outlandish gear purchases, of course.
We're not hugely fond of some of the trends in pop-music mastering - the extremely-compressed, overloud tracks that dominate the airwaves. Of course we recognize the reality that some compression, saturation and/or limiting will be needed to balance a track, "glue" it up, or just give it more punch. Our preference is to do these things in such a way that it polishes the tracks wihtout draining the vitality right out of them.
No, we're not Bob Katz or Bernie Grundmann or Abbey Road. We don't have a storied legacy and a platinum-album client list. But we do what we do well enough, and we're far more cost-effective for the indie artist than any of the big names. If you're reading this, then likely you're not their target audience.
Want more convincing? Wander over to see some testimonials from our clients, or contact us for a quote and we'll do a quick test-master of some of your material so you can hear what we can do.
Recent News, Opinions, and Articles
Evaluating Your Mastering Job
Most mastering engineers I know give a client at the very least the opportunity to preview the kind of work they do – whether that’s a single track as an example of what they intend to do or the first pass of the whole job depends on the engineer, but nonetheless, it’s a pretty standard [...]
Plugin Review: Cytomic TheGlue
In my recent binge of plugin purchases, I broke down and bought TheGlue, based almost entirely on the recommendation of Dan Clark (of The Dark Clan and ListlessWorks studio). Like offerings from Waves, UAD and SSL, TheGlue is a compressor that models the famous (infamous?) bus compressor from an SSL G-Series console. Never actually owning [...]
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