We do our best to work wonders but at the end of the day we are always at the mercy of the material we receive, therefore the more elements you can get right at the source when preparing pre-masters, the more we can ultimately do for you.

These days there are a whole host of so called ‘mastering grade’ plugins available and a lot of DAW applications offer their own built in processors intended for the purpose. All of these fall short of the processing quality required to achieve a truly great sounding master without any undesired artefacts. So don’t use them on your mix as a prelude to mastering! It will ruin any chance of a great master.

Therefore the most important thing is to try and adopt a less is more approach and only apply mix bus processing you feel is absolutely essential to the sound. In short, try and leave the mastering until the mastering session.

Check your mix carefully for clicks, pops & vocal sibilance, one off loud events such as extra loud crash cymbals; vocals, bass notes or any other dynamically related one -offs. Make sure that you are as satisfied as possible before you submit your work.

Technical considerations such as phase correlation, filtration of unwanted sub frequencies or high frequencies, noise reduction, de-essing and volume automation are all things that should be carried out on individual mix elements and not the whole mix during mastering, whenever possible. We do however have excellent tools for making these adjustments at the mastering stage if there are no other alternatives or the technical fix won’t hurt the final sound.

In reality the best mix you can have is one that sounds right with no processing at all and all we need to do is correct any minor equalisation and set the level in the right spot!

Follow these tips and you should give us the best start possible to optimising your music.

Try and keep peaks on the main mix bus between -10 to -4dBfs (Digital Full Scale) but no higher than -3 dBfs. If they are higher we would recommend lowering the individual mix element faders and group faders to reduce the level on the master output bus. You need to leave the master fader at 0 and work the faders and groups within the session (if Mixing in the box)

If mixing on a console please keep the digital capture recording levels conservative (-4dbfs peak) suggested.

The reason to do the above (both in the box and recording the console output) is not to do with headroom for mastering, (mastering is carried out in the analog domain so headroom is irrelevant). It’s because of intersample peak distortion which starts to happen as low as 4 db below dfs in some computer workstations. When digital mixes have intersample distortion it becomes very hard to get a good clean result from analog hardware as it responds badly to these peaks that your software meters cannot even detect as they happen between sample cycles. Working natively at higher sample rates does a lot to alleviate this issue but only if the parts in the session were recorded at that sample rate. Do not upsample files under any circumstances. You are better off at 44.1K if that is what your session was originally.

No processing on the master bus, e.g. any loudness maximizing processor of any kind. Maybe a little compression from a decent outboard device if mixed on a console for specific effect, but no limiter plug-ins please. EQ on the master bus at our end would often be unnecessary if it were not for needing to undo over compensation by the mix engineer (often due to room deficiencies in the mix environment).

If you wish to give us a processed version that you are reasonably happy with as a reference then that is fine and often a useful tool.

Do not apply any dither or noise shaping to the final mix. Again if this is needed we will apply it in the final stages.