Online Mastering Services
Organic, analogue mastering to make your music feel alive
Mastering is about more than making music louder. It’s about teasing out the details in your mix. Gluing tracks and albums into cohesive worlds. And defining the record’s sound.
With a hand-picked selection of gorgeous analogue equipment, I craft deep textures, rich tones, and a vibrant sonic character to make your music somewhere listeners want to live.
Mastering Portfolio
Online Mastering Services
The personal touch
Online mastering can feel… anonymous. I do everything I can to bring the personal touch to both your music and your experience.
If I haven’t mixed the record myself, I’ll happily provide detailed, practical feedback to get your mixes into the best possible shape before touching a single knob.
And once you’re happy with your masters, I make a point of telling you what I’ve done. So you know exactly how much care and attention has gone into making your music sound its best.
Real Analogue equipment
Plugins have come a long way, but they still can’t give your recordings the same richness, depth, and sense of life that high-end analogue can.
Over the years, I’ve built an analogue chain that gives me the perfect balance between transparency and character: from near-invisible elegance to gooey warmth and biting fizz.
99% of my mastering is done in analogue. Because I know my chain inside and out. It gives me tactile control. And nothing beats the electricity of sending your tracks through real circuits.
Mastering for CD, download & streaming
I provide a single, 44.1kHz/16-bit master suitable for CD, download, and streaming as standard. Additional file formats, sample rates and bit depths are available on request.
Mastering for vinyl
Digital loudness techniques, excessive sibilance, and stereo bass can all play havoc with vinyl. I can provide high-resolution vinyl pre-masters ready to cut to wax.
Online Mastering Rates
Mastering for digital distribution
Single (1 track): £65
EP (2-5 tracks): £55 per track
Album (6+ tracks): £50 per track
DDP file for CD pressing: £50
Additional versions & instrumentals: £10 per track
Vinyl pre-masters
£10 per track additional to standard rate
All prices include up to two revisions, and one minor mix re-submission. Major mix changes are charged as new tracks. No VAT to pay.
Upload your tracks for mastering
When you’re ready for mastering, simply send your stereo mixdowns to [email protected] using FromSmash.com or your favourite large file sharing service.
Please ensure files are:
- Stereo interleaved, 24-bit WAV or AIFF
- At the sample rate of your mixing project
- With 3dB headroom, or at least no clipping
- With master limiters switched off
Mastering a song means treating the recording so it stands up against other releases within the same genre, translates across different playback systems and speakers, and hangs cohesively with the other songs on an EP or album.
It also means ensuring the master file complies with the technical specifications of the destination format.
Yes, mastering a song is necessary. Even the best mixes tend to be much quieter and have translation or balance issues that could be remedied in mastering.
Analogue mastering offers an additional sonic advantage, too. Sending tracks through high-end analogue equipment tends to imbue a liveliness that can’t be achieved with digital processing.
The most important thing is to make sure it sounds exactly the way you want it to. After that, please ensure you deliver the mix as:
- 24-bit WAV or AIFF
- At the same sample rate as your DAW project
- Without any limiters or clippers on the master bus (unless mixed into)
- With no clipping on the file
You may have heard that mixes should be delivered at -6dB. In truth it doesn’t really matter, as mastering engineers can always turn files up or down.
The most important thing is that the file doesn’t go over 0dB, as that can’t be undone.
In a nutshell, mastering means doing whatever needs to be done to finalise the record. In most cases, that means a layer of broad-stroke, balancing EQ, some subtle compression, and a mixture of clipping and limiting to raise the level to commercial standards.
Some mixes need more work than that – like surgical dynamic EQ, or an extra compressor. Some mixes don’t need anything beyond a limiter to raise the level.
The real value of a mastering engineer is having an experienced pair of ears that knows what needs doing – and what doesn’t.
No. Loudness normalisation is widely misunderstood. Most streaming services, like Spotify, have loudness normalisation built in, commonly to -14LUFS. But that doesn’t mean you need to deliver -14LUFS masters.
In fact, it’s riskier to hit the target. Services like Spotify have flip-flopped over the years as to whether normalisation is enabled by default, and some platforms, like Qobuz, don’t even include the feature anymore.
If you deliver at -14LUFS your track will be considerably quieter than tracks that have been mastered louder. If you deliver at the CD standard (generally between -11 and -8 LUFS) you’ll be in line with louder masters – and if you are normalised, you’ll just be turned down with everything else.
Try turning normalisation off on your Spotify account and you’ll notice most big releases are mastered considerably louder than -14LUFS.
Vinyl doesn’t like the brickwall clipping and limiting used for level when mastering for streaming and CD. Instead, it’s up to the cutting engineer to set a level that plays well with their lathe and that hits the sweet spot on the record.
Stereo bass and excessive sibilance can also cause issues with vinyl, but it very much depends on the cutting engineer’s equipment, so these judgements are best left to them.
As an analogue medium, vinyl also doesn’t need a particular sample rate – it’s best to deliver at the highest rate possible for maximum fidelity.
So, vinyl pre-masters are generally the same as the digital masters, but without any clipping or limiting – kept safely below 0dB – and delivered at the highest sample rate available.
The short answer is: as loud as is appropriate for the material.
The long answer is that it’s context dependent – both in terms of genre and how the track sits with the other songs on a record. I tend to favour a middle ground between loudness and dynamics, but am happy to nudge it one way or the other if that’s what you want.
Although I keep an eye on LUFS (and generally tend to hit somewhere between -11 and -8 LUFS) it’s a mistake to shoot for a particular target. The LUFS scale was originally developed for post-production – mixing TV and film – with a view to freeing engineers from looking at meters and just use their ears.
I try to deliver first masters within one week of receiving mixes, and revisions within two days of feedback. It does, of course, depend on what projects I already have booked in.
I will keep you informed of timings at every step of the way. If you have a deadline you need to meet, let me know so we can plan accordingly.