A guide to home "Mastering" of your own tunes

[Mattias]

It depends but you can count on at-least 25-30 € per track easily in the underground world.

[Lost to the Void]

10 € sounds like a close friend price, not a relevant business price

I know him from nights out and through friends but we've barely said more than 2 words to each other in person haha,
I haven't a clue what he does to be charging €10 but it's handy if I wanted to play a track out. Id usually have the mastered version off him within 2-3 days.
How much would you pay for a 1-3 track(s) to be mastered? Business price

10 euro for a master......

I can hear the waves L2 already.

[Mattias]

People still use that I was thinking more like Ozone hehe

[Barfunkel]

I'd be very suspicious of mastering that costs under 50€ per track. Not that I know much about mastering, but I have checked the prices from the big boys like Dubplates + Mastering, they are more like 100€ a track, or even more.

If it's 10€, it's probably like a 15 minute job with some Ozone presets, using substandard monitoring.

[Planar]

Steve does it for under 50 euros. Unless prices have changed?

[Barfunkel]

No idea about his prices, but it's difficult for me to see how a professional could charge so low. There's all kinds of expences involved (such as buying a really accurate pair speakers, studio rent, professional-made acoustic treatment, the time it takes to practice mastering before you can start to charge etc), even if the actual mastering is done with cheap software and a pair of good ears.

[Mattias]

It really depends, when checking the prices that goes 100€ per track etc then it also usually accounted for a lacquer master & ISRC and a digital mastered copy to use for promos / streaming etc. 30-50 per track is definitely not uncommon in most mastering business.

edit; saw this http://www.dubplates-mastering.com/prices.html

[Lost to the Void]

Steve does it for under 50 euros. Unless prices have changed?

I do, I try to keep my prices competitive and affordable, as having run labels and been a poor artist I know what it is like.
I`m actually putting my prices up soon, I have to pay for some JBL M2`s somehow, but it should still be relatively affordable for my service.

[Lost to the Void]

As prices go, Matt Colton is arguably one of the best in the business (he won engineer of the year 2 years in a row or something), and his vinyl mastering is less than dubplates and mastering, I learned a lot from him. You pay for their name with those guys.
I wouldn`t pay the money DP&M are charging, I could go to abbey road and do a sit in with Geoff Pesch for less than that.

[AlexSting]

Thank you! Just tried it out step by step - works perfectly for me!!

[Barfunkel]

As prices go, Matt Colton is arguably one of the best in the business (he won engineer of the year 2 years in a row or something), and his vinyl mastering is less than dubplates and mastering, I learned a lot from him. You pay for their name with those guys.
I wouldn`t pay the money DP&M are charging, I could go to abbey road and do a sit in with Geoff Pesch for less than that.

Records mastered by DP&M tend to sound extremely good though. Could of course be just the source material, but there's this really nice depth and sheen in most of their mastering jobs I've heard, maybe they do know some magic.


Do the guys at Abbey Road and other such mastering studios know anything about mastering techno? Not a necessity of course, but I'd rather go to a great techno/house specialist than to a great rock specialist, were I to pay for mastering. If it's some rock/pop dude who's never even been to a nightclub I'd be worried about him making sound too midrange-y and too radio friendly, instead of sounding nice on a club PA (which is the only thing I'd want were I to master my tune, I don't care how it sounds like on earbuds or on laptop speakers).

[Mattias]

Only magic in mastering is the ears and experience and know-how of the engineer.
I made a remix for a label and got the master back from DP&M a while ago if you want to make a comparison between my original and their master I can fix that. Is it worth the hefty amount of money they charge for their masters? Personally not.

In my experience, houses that are not that used to mastering electronic music and or dance music in particular can treat everything in the mix as a pop / traditional song kind of layer.
But tons of engineers that master good can master everything. For me, I've mastered everything from Christian pop (haha) to doom metal. Knowing styles well is a big advantage though imo, for example I was involved in a woodwind / brass live recording and the guy they used to master the recording was surely not used to the sounds of alphorns and had tried to "remedy" certain aspects of the horn's sound. He fixed it though.

[Mattias]

I'd go with Matt Colton also, he's great.

[Lost to the Void]

Do the guys at Abbey Road and other such mastering studios know anything about mastering techno? Not a necessity of course, but I'd rather go to a great techno/house specialist than to a great rock specialist, were I to pay for mastering. If it's some rock/pop dude who's never even been to a nightclub I'd be worried about him making sound too midrange-y and too radio friendly, instead of sounding nice on a club PA (which is the only thing I'd want were I to master my tune, I don't care how it sounds like on earbuds or on laptop speakers).

the idea of being a mastering "specialist" is kinda, and I don`t mean this to be condescending, laughable.
A good mastering engineer can maybe do one or 2 types of music, a great one can master anything.
The same principles apply across the board.
The kind of things you are talking about are the decisions of a mix engineer, the mastering engineer is polishing the mix, not making massive decision changes that could turn a club mix in to a radio mix.
Mastering for earbuds, or for PA speakers????? mastering is mastering, you don`t aim for a type of speaker, you aim for the best translatable representation of the material.
Again this is a misunderstanding of what mastering entails.

[Lost to the Void]

I suppose an example of this would be Matt Colton, he`s mastered some massive pop and rock hits over the last 5 years, but also cut loads of shit hot techno, blueprint, surface, downwards etc the man is a true MASTERing engineer.

George "Porkie" Peckham, if you know anything about the history of dance music you`ll know what it means to have "A porkie prime cut" written on a piece of vinyl. The man used to master beatles records in the 70`s, cut a swathe of seminal 80`s british music, and then in the 90`s, cut some of the most balls out mind blowing drum and bass of the era. A true mastering engineer.

Then you have Geoff Pesch, Nilz (RIP) and Mike at The Exchange.

None of them specialists, all of them amazing engineers.

[Mattias]

It seems a lot of people these days think that when a song goes to mastering it turns out to be something radically different then it was before it was sent away.

The kind of things you are talking about are the decisions of a mix engineer, the mastering engineer is polishing the mix, not making massive decision changes that could turn a club mix in to a radiomix.

Good way to say it man. This is very well executed and easy to grasp.

[Mattias]

I know another one!

"The mix decides the outcome"

[Lost to the Void]

I`ve had people query masters with stuff like "why doesn`t my synth sound bigger?"

To which I can only reply, because you didn`t use a big synth sound when you made the tune?

There is a vast misunderstanding of what mastering is and what it should be, and I`m really not sure how it all came about.

[Lost to the Void]

I think Katz made a good example once when he said

Our job is to finish the product.

We might be able to take a B mix and make it a B+
Or in some special cases a C mix might become a B mix.
And when we are really good we can take an A mix and take it to an A+

[intrusav]

Fuck yeah, Nilz @ the exchange...that man seems to have cut a crazy amount of records back in the day ..