How much will this cost?

Please refer to the quote calculator at the bottom of the home page to know exactly how much your project will cost.

What is mastering?

Mastering is the final stage of audio engineering, following the recording and mixing production stages, immediately before manufacturing and distribution. It provides an opportunity to ensure all the tracks across an album sound balanced, creating a stylistic cohesion so that when played through, an album sounds like exactly that—a tightly knit collection of related tracks, rather than a random assemblage of disparate elements. A well-mastered album will sound great on all formats, on all playback systems.

What does mastering entail?

A mastering engineer employs various techniques and processes during a session in order to achieve optimal results, maximising a track's sonic potential. It is a combination of these processes in conjunction with the engineer's hearing and experience, that makes the mastering process effective.

Every project has unique requirements, but some of the more common processes utilised include:

• Equalisation: to ensure every track is spectrally balanced, from sub-bass to treble, as well as creating a natural album-wide cohesion from track-to-track, so the album flows effortlessly.
• Compression: to tie together the whole mix, bring out depth and detail, and occasionally rein-in unruly peaks.
• Limiting: to optimise track headroom, increasing the overall track level for a competitive loudness, limiting peaks without distortion or unduly affecting the track's punch.
• CD/DDP compiling: introducing necessary PQ codes (track markers), gaps and fades/crossfades between tracks.
• Writing UPC/EAN codes into the CD/DDP, as well as adding ISRC codes for each track.
• Burning to CD at a low speed, ensuring a minimum of C1 BLER errors (and no C2 errors) for a high quality Red Book audio CD premaster, ready for replication.

Some less common processing techniques may include restoration/noise reduction, mid-side processing, an element of harmonic generation, multiband compression or dynamic expansion.

How will this help me?

You've spent hours crafting your music, so having your music professionally mastered ensures that your music is heard at its strongest, sounding as good as possible, and able to compete with the rest of the market.

Mastering also creates a final opportunity for quality control before your music is released, and in our DIY age of sole songwriters and producers, provides essential objective input. After all, it's easy to lose objectivity while working on a piece of music on your own.

How should I credit Melograf on my album?

Please credit mastering by 'Christopher Leary at Melograf Mastering'.

Melograf?

I appropriated the name from 'Melograph', the name given to a music transcription tool used by early ethnomusicologists, as a means of recording the music they encountered on their travels (From Greek: melos = music, graphos = inscribe or draw). But I simply love the way it sounds, and to me it denotes a combination of comforting approachability and scientific accuracy.

What is an ISRC?

An ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is a unique 12-digit alpha-numeric string used to identify a single song, for royalty tracking when a song is purchased. Every track on your album will ideally have its own ISRC, which can be obtained from usisrc.org in the US, or PPL in the UK, for example. Locate your local ISRC agency here. Once a code for a track has been issued, it remains the track's identifier for life (i.e. codes do not change with rights ownership). The ISRC is burned onto CDs, and can now also be embedded within individual wav files (for those who don't required physical CDs).

What are UPC/EAN codes?

A UPC (Universal Product Code) code or EAN (European Article Number) code are very similar; they both denote a series of digits beneath a barcode, used for identifying unique products such as whole albums, rather than individual songs. UPC is US–specific, while the EAN is its European counterpart. Your CD manufacturing plant ought to be able to supply you with one of these, as will a distributor such as CD Baby.