FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

If your questions have not been answered here, please drop us a message using our contact form.

HOW LONG DOES MIXING AND MASTERING TAKE?

  • From receipt of your files, we can normally turn around tracks within 2-3 days, or whole albums within a week. In some circumstances such as being away from the studio, the turnaround time will be longer but we will give you an accurate estimate when you make your enquiry.

  • As a rough guideline, most mixes take between 1.5-3 hours work per track, but some may take longer if they are particularly complex.

HOW DO I PREPARE MY TRACK FOR MIXING?

  • Ensure that each stem starts from ZERO [the very beginning of the track] meaning that the stems can be loaded up easily with every element in its correct place.

  • Please provide either 16 or 24 bit .wav stems at 44.1khz

  • Check that the volumes on your supplied stems are roughly the same as on your reference mix with no digital clipping. A good tactic is to load your stems into an empty session and check that everything is in the right place.

  • It is often a good idea to include a reference mix / rough mix along with your stems.

WHEN I SUBMIT A TRACK TO BE MIXED, SHOULD I KEEP MY EFFECTS AND PROCESSING OR GIVE YOU THE STEMS RAW?

  • Please remove excessive limiting and compression from the master fader. It is important to supply the stems with some headroom (i.e. not too loud).

  • Vocals are best supplied dry, so please remove any reverb / delays from the vocal stems unless you specifically want certain words to be effected.

  • However, on the instrumental parts please do keep any of your ‘creative processing’ that you have done (delays, reverbs, EQ’s, compression, flanging etc.) in order to retain the general feel of your composition.

WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO SEND FILES OVER, AND WHAT ARE YOUR PAYMENT TERMS?

  • You can easily upload a .zip file of your stems folder using WeTransfer / Google Drive or similar file upload systems.

  • We will supply you with an invoice for the work and payment is made by bank transfer. We require full payment before we send over finished full quality files.

THIS IS VERY CHEAP MASTERING, IS IT GOING TO SOUND GOOD?

  • According to our philosophy, mastering does not, and should not take very long. In some more unscrupulous studios it is common practice that unattended mastering jobs actually take the engineer just 10-20 minutes… yet they often charge upwards of £200 per track by invoicing for hours of work. We are 100% honest with our customers in how fast we work and therefore we are able to provide low cost mastering for everyone whilst maintaining our high standards.