Hi, I’m Matthias and I’m in the electronic music scene since the late 1990s. In 2010 I started building my own mastering service with focus on electronic music. To see some selected references, just click on the logo below.
Technically, digital masters allow you to do pretty much anything you want to your music, as long as it sounds good to your ears. The industry standard for streaming services currently bring down the level of all tracks to about -14/-13 LUFS. In general it doesn’t make sense to provide different masters for every different service. It showed up for me to target a level around -10 LUFS, that works best on all platforms and digital stores, even for a physical releases. Of course it is also possible to reach -8/-7 LUFS if you want to, and if it still sounds good, depending on the original marterial.
Vinyl, on the other hand, has some physical limitations - during the cutting process and during normal playback, that’s why I decided to preserve most oft he dynamics in a vinyl master. The master will be mono under 150-200 Hz, low cut around 30Hz and hi cut around 15 kHz on all tracks. Depending on the music, a vinyl master could be used for a digital release without any problems too, just to save some money if needed.
Since the last years software solutions for digital mastering developed into high-end tools and provide a lot of advantages to analog gear, such as total recall or using an unlimited number of instances of any plugin in your session. In general a well done „in the box“ mastering will not differ from an analog one in an objectively measured listening and most people, especially your fans, will not hear any difference, even if they like to tell you 😉 … but anyway, that called „mojo“ or „warmth“ gained with analog gear can be an important subjective point for being pleased with the final master.
Finally I prefer the hybrid solution as setup to combine both worlds, analog and digital. If you want to have the
analog colouring circuit included, just let me know.
Just a few words about STEM-Mastering, and I’m not a fan
of it. A good mixdown should already hit the final state for 90%, so if there
are any issues that could better be fixed in the mixdown, then do it. Working
with STEMs is still more into mixing than mastering, and you’ll always affect
frequencies that better should be untouched… just get a better mixdown first, believe
me 😉
How much does it cost? That is the most common question,
and you may have already recognized that there is no information about on my
website and I can tell you the reason for that. My experience during the last
years in running my own labels, support friendly labels and artists, doing
promotion campaigns and distribute music, is that everything costs money, and
everyone has a different budget for external services, depending on a lot of
different aspects. A new indie-label has a lower budget than a bigger one with
releases of already nameable artists. For me I decided to offer an individual
pricing, depending on the given budget, and that works very well already.
Just
ask me and we will find a solution that works for both sides, and hopefully
results in a longtime coop.
I can also support you in questions like cutting vinyl or CD
dublication (DDP Masters).
Do not hesitate to contact me, just push the contact button,
and may the groove be with you.
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.