This is truly my favorite part of the song recording cycle.

If mixing is about balancing the raw performance, mastering is making that mixed song hold up in
power and volume against anything else it’s playing after on YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, etc.  Mastering engineers (myself included) will be happy to tell you about the end of the loudness war, LUFS values, etc. – all valid technical elements.  

But the goal of mastering is to make sure the mixed song translates from the fanciest speakers in the world to the earbuds that came with your iPhone – and that your song is just as potent as anything else your audience is listening to.

Mastering has become even more intriguing to me than mixing.  Perhaps one of my favorite
challenges is remastering old albums done with budget gear in the 90’s. This too has taken quite some time to get the hang of – I still take every mix to my car, listen to it, take notes and go back and make changes (there’s a reason the world’s best mastering engineers are renown for their “golden
ears”).

Although clearly important, oddly enough Mastering is largely misunderstood.  In fact, when I recorded my first album back in 1994, no one told me that it should have been mastered.  I only knew that it didn’t hold up against anything else on CD or the radio.

It wasn’t “radio competitive”.

For this reason, one of my big passions is re-mastering the songs bands released years ago for
today’s streaming and digital release.

Of course, in today’s age, broadcast radio is all but obsolete – streaming has taken over. And because of new standards of loudness management, mastering is perhaps more important than ever – and yet easier and cheaper too. 

Once again, it’s quite common to turn to a different mixing engineer than the one who did the
recording (and the one who will master the song).  Why?  Typically for a fresh perspective.  

And as mentioned before, today’s digital era often demands different mixes/masters as well – one for
streaming/broadcast, but also versions for licensing in movies/television/video games.  You may also need an alternative master if you’re going to print vinyl. As your mastering (and/or mixing) engineer, I can provide multiple versions for these alternate uses.

So once again, the big question:

How much does it cost to work with me?

Well if you’ve read the pages on Production, Recording or Mixing, you’ll see that I’m very serious
about trust. So if this is our first project together, then this is a steal – the first song is free (which will include three mastered versions). At the end of the mastering process, you will get three stereo WAV files (suitable for publishing on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc.) as well as high quality MP3’s. 

The only caveat is that I will have your permission to use all or a part of your song on my website for
my sample reel.