I know that much of the elusive mastering process can be confusing to self-releasing artists and musicians. If you’re preparing to send your mix to Blueleaf Studio (or any other studio for that matter!) for mastering then this guide explains exactly what you need to do so that everything goes smoothly and you get the best possible master.
1. The Mix
- Listen to your mix very carefully – if you don’t want it on the final master, it shouldn’t be in the mix – we need exactly what you want, and nothing you don’t.
- Tops and Tails – Render your track so that you have about a second or two of silence both before the music starts and after the last note has faded out, that way you’ll be sure nothing gets lost.
- Double check all tracks before sending them off, we get a wrong version or faulty renders more often than you would think.
- “We’ll fix it in the…” Don’t count on fixing things during mastering. Mastering engineers work in increments of 10ths of decibels, and rarely push anything over 3dB up or down. If a mastering engineer has to push your song up or down further than that, something is wrong in the mix and should be fixed in the mix, not by the Mastering Engineer. If, for whatever reason, something can’t be fixed in the mix, we’ll do our best but we can’t promise miracles.
- We need all the mixes – this means instrumental versions, radio/TV edits. clean(no swearing) version etc…
- All the notes.. – Send us any and all notes you feel are relevant to the mastering process –
“we’ve been struggling with dynamics and hope you can help tame them”
“please cut out the count-in”
“we want the first song to fade in from silence for about 30 seconds”
“we want track 4 to bump directly into track 5 with no gap”.
Don’t expect us to be able to figure these things out, tell us exactly what you want. - Reference mixes you’ve been listening to – send any songs you’ve been referencing, or at least a list so that we can look them up on our own – “we want our song to sound like the Red Hot Chili Peppers” and “we want our song to sound like Bruno Mars” will result in two drastically different masters.
2. Level and Processing
- Mix your track with lots of headroom, leave at least 3dB of headroom but we won’t complain if we get 6-8dB of unused bits. If your mix is already pushing 0dB, do not just lower your master volume. Instead, decrease the gain of each track to create headroom.
- Remove all Limiters, compressors, EQ or other processes from your master bus. If you think a master bus process is necessary, send two versions and explain why you think the process is necessary, name the files accordingly so we know which has the master bus processing.
- Ensure that there are no digital overs or peaks in your mix.
3. File Format
- Render your material with the same sample-rate used while recording. Ideally this will be 48kHz or higher.
- Deliver 24bit files or higher.
- File format must be WAV, or AIFF. If you send us an mp3 we might have to have a little chat…
- What formats do you need? Check with your distributor/label what they prefer, format, sample frequency, and bit depth. Usually the formats are 44.1khz/16bit for CD and 48khz/24bit for digital download or streaming although this can vary depending on your distributor.
4. Metadata
Commonly this data is included in BWF (broadcast Wav format) and MP3 files. You don’t need to add it if you’re files are only going to an online distributor, but if you’re sharing MP3’s with friends, adding them to your own website or are sending tracks to a radio station then you probably want to consider adding metadata to the files.
Here are some of the common things that can be added, unless the engineer has said otherwise, send them in a text document or spreadsheet along with your files.
- Track names (as you want them to appear)
- Artist name(s) and featured artist names
- Release/album name
- Copyright
- Track order
- Production, mix and musician credits for each track as applicable
- Record label and publisher information
- Track artwork (can be embedded in MP3 files)
- IRSC codes
- EAN/UPC for CD
- Any other metadata you want to include.