Services

Mastering is the last chance to correct any mistakes and make sure a record functions well when it gets out into the world. The biggest responsibility of a mastering engineer, whether we’re talking about a single or an album, is to create a unified sense of a whole. The mastering engineer may also enhance the sonic character of a record, creating a more open or deeper, fuller sound, whatever is decided that the record could benefit from and more importantly if it is required.

We have different aesthetic approaches to processing a mix during the mastering stage, this depends on what suits the material and, ultimately, what the artistic direction requires. In order to preserve the purity and unique character of a recording, mastering is done in the most discreet manner, dealing mostly with slight corrections and making sure there is a good balance going on. We call this transparent mastering.

In other cases we have tracks that lack body or character, things sound sterile or lack clarity. This is where analog warmth comes in. It helps add a sense of weight to a song, fills a thin or harsh sound mix, emphasising rich low-end frequencies and softening the highs, making them more intimate. This is we call warm or colored mastering.

The mixing process can tighten up a vocal performance, make it sound more present, intimate or airy.
It can make a beat sound more or less aggressive, a piano feel more emotional, a whole track sound more indie or more pop. When thinking of a production timeline, mixing comes after recording and before mastering.

A professional mixing service can have a huge effect on the sound of your song, more so than the use of a particular microphone or whether you added an extra vocal layer or not, and much more so than mastering. A good mix should make your song pop out of the speakers, sound clear and polished and complement the recorded elements of your song.

During this process, the mixing engineer balances the levels of different recorded tracks to bring out the important elements in each section and make the song feel cohesive, manipulates and enhances the sonics of each individual track within the mix with the help of processors such as equalisers & compressors,  adds creative effects such as delays, reverbs, radio filters, heavy vocal pitching, panning, distortion and others to make the record sonically interesting.

An analog electronic signal can vary according to many factors, it describes something that can be represented using a continuously variable characteristic. In contrast, something that is digital can only be represented in discrete or finite increments, meaning there is a limited set of values they can be, like 1’s an 0’s. It cannot be anything in between or outside that range.

There are many factors that combine to create character in recordings, ranging from instruments, musicians and performances,
through the rooms and microphones used, to the preamps, processors and effects, but when we talk about analogue warmth, we’re usually referring to the character that the analogue processing or recording equipment and the recording medium add to the sound.

Digital recording systems can now deliver a near‑perfect recording medium that gives back exactly what was recorded. That’s great in some circumstances, but it’s not always what we want. In many cases, the technical limitations and imperfections of analogue systems have become an integral part of the quality of the recorded sounds that we all grew up with – and the end result is perceived by many people as being more pleasing than we can easily achieve today with all‑digital recording and processing chains. Further than that, some of the sounds resulting from the ‘abuse’ of analogue gear have become recognised effects in their own right.