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
Meta-commentary: FM Mastering Shoot-Out
A few months back, FutureMusic did a shootout between three different mastering houses – Abbey Road’s “online” mastering, a dedicated small studio that also did mastering “in the box”, and another guy that mastered the entire track specifically with Logic’s bundled plugins. The results were…interesting.
Case Study: Symphonic Metal Album
The Challenge: Add an ad-hoc recorded acoustic track to an album of well-produced punchy symphonic metal without either overcompressing the acoustic song or dulling the majestic metal. The Solution: The track itself was a quiet piano-and voice version of one of the main album tracks, with high dynamic range and a startlingly good performance. However, [...]
About All-In-One Mastering Packages
With the rise in the DIY Mastering ethos for independent studios, a number of companies have put out all-in-one mastering solutions, generally a single program or an all-in-one plugin that handles every major step in the mastering chain. I can’t say I’m a huge fan.