Submitting Songs to a Music Mastering Studio

By Richard Dolmat

Mastering is the last stage of production, right after the recording studio session mixdowns and before the master CD is sent to get duplicated and distributed. It is extremely important to your product and can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your recordings.

Since many musicians have a home recording studio, it is more important than ever to get your final CD mastered properly. For indies trying to stand out in a world of big recording budgets, this level of mastering art can make a huge impact on the quality of your home music studio recordings.

Some of the processing done at the mastering stage may include:

* Equalization and harmonic balancing for consistent sound throughout your entire album.
* Adjusting micro/macro-dynamics (volume changes) of your songs for consistency and loudness.
* Checking inter-channel phase and polarity for mono compatibility.
* Final CD layout with proper song spaces, segues, fades and crossfades snapped to CD frame boundaries.
* Sample and bit rate conversion with dither to Red Book Audio CD Standard.
* and a few tricks up our sleeve ;)

What you get at the end:

* Proper final master CD burning with relevant paperwork (PQ Lists, BLER print-out etc.)
* Full QC (quality control) on all final masters (C1/C2/CU/BLER error checks).
* Individually printed master CD with your name and contact info.
* A studio that takes it's time (may take 1, 2 or more days; until you're happy)
* A kickin' album!

It's amazing how a good mastering job can bring out the width, depth and dimension of a song. You'll hear sounds that used to be buried in the mix, the vocals will shine through, the reverb and effects will be heard, and the whole CD will be more enjoyable over a varying range of playback systems. But of course, this all depends on the mix of your songs. The mastering engineer isn't a Jedi and can not create or change something that isn't there. I like to use the analogy that it's like trying to take the eggs out of a finished cake. Not possible!

Most professional mastering studios can accept audio CD, data CD (wav, aiff), DAT, ADAT, DA-88, Mini-Disc, cassette tape, vinyl, and USB/Firewire hard-drives.

Here is what you should do when sending your music to a mastering studio:

* Use their available Mastering Order Form to send all your information.
* Include all ISRC codes along with your songs, if you have them. We need these before burning the final master disc.
* DO NOT add any processing to your main mix bus (ie: compression etc). We can't undo what you've done. Keep it natural and clean.
* Do not clip your files, keep your peaks somewhere around -3dB and you'll be safe. It's nearly impossible to remove distortion.
* Leave space before and after your music (ie: 2-3 sec at head and tail of each song)
* If you have, include the UPC number of the disc.
* Make sure ALL your song names are in full. No abbreviations please! The engineer needs full names to add as CD-TEXT (which some CD players use to show your band name and song name)
* Give a track list of the order you would like your songs to appear on the final CD.
* Include your CD album title
* Include your FULL contact information (Band Name, Album Name, Contact Person, address, tel, fax, web, email etc). The engineer will use this information to print onto your duplication master disc.
* Send along a few of your favorite songs as reference. Rip a couple of songs from your favorite CD and add these in with your original files. This can do wonders in helping the mastering engineer understand the 'sound' you are striving for. It's always easier to 'hear' an example than it is for you to explain it.

If possible, we at Digital Sound Magic Studios, prefer to receive 44.1 kHz (24bit) data files on CD-ROM (24bit wav or aiff). This gives us the best source material to work with.

Errors

Each and every audio CD in the world has errors on it. That's just the nature of the game. But each and every audio CD player has built-in error correction. The CD player fixes these errors on the disc before you can hear them, giving you perfectly clean audio playback. According to the Red Book Audio CD Standard, an audio CD is allowed up to 220 errors per second!

Well, at www.digitalsoundmagic.com we like to think we have better quality control than that. We like to keep our error rate to no more than 30 per second. But we quite often average around only 5 per second. Which just goes to
show, you DO get what you pay for!

And last but not least, always always ask questions. If you are confused, the mastering engineer will be more than willing to help. If not, take your money and run.

Oh yeah, NEVER EVER EVER use a mastering studio that asks for your songs in MP3 format. EVER!