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If you want to give your music the final polish and professional edge to stand-out in the marketplace, then you need quality mastering.

Mastering is last stage before your music is ready for the world to hear. It does far more than simply increase the loudness as many are aware of. It adds punch, clarity, and fine-tunes your music into the perfect sound.

Many musicians are aware of the importance of mastering. It can sometimes make or break the success of your music. When done right right, it ensures it makes the right impression.

However, trouble comes when deciding where and how to get it done.

Traditionally, you had to use an offline studio. This meant you were at the mercy of the quality in your local area.

Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you had to shell-out major bucks to get top quality and personal service.

Today, the software to allow you to do it yourself has improved. You can now make small improvements on your home computer.

The problem with this is that you can often make the music sound much worse on your own. You lack the heavy duty equipment a professional has. And, most importantly, you don’t get the “fresh independent and professional ears” to identify problems and help you achieve your final vision.

You’re on your own. The best is not brought-out in your music.

However, in the past 4 years a new option has grown in popularity: Getting your music mastered with online-only mastering houses.

You can now access world-class talent no matter where you live. And since online studios save money on the costs of a brick and mortar storefront, your investment is much less than if you did it offline.

There are generally 3 steps to working with an online mastering house:

1. Create an account and transfer your music over to the engineer.

2. The mastering engineer can then listen to it and give you his or her first impressions and tell if there are any major problems. Sometimes music must be sent back to the mixing engineer or, in rare cases, re-recorded.

3. Through discussing your final vision, the engineer makes it happen and instantly sends your music back online for you to review. Any revisions can be easily made.

As you can see, the advantage is there is a lot less waiting on your part. You tell the engineer what you want, go about your daily business, and he or she makes your vision come to life. Everything happens instantly online without you having to be in the studio.

Simply put, going online is an ideal choice for independent muscians or small labels. It allows you easy access to world-class talent (once only the “big guys” had access too) for less money and fewer hassles.

In addition, since online houses have clients from throughout the world, they’re also experienced with a wide-range of sounds. Often a limitation with local studios is they’ve worked with only one or two types of music and lack expertise with anything else.

To find a good online mastering studio, it’s important you look for experience. If an engineer is just getting started, be wary. He or she may not have the right equipment (or know how to use it) and does not know the techniques which are gained over time to optimize your tracks.

When it comes to picking a mastering engineer, experience is the key to getting a great result.

The concept of premastering your music is a method that can save you a gobs of money when compared to having it all done at the replication house later on. It also does usually yield a better quality when doing it at a dedicated mastering house who does just that solely. Then it is always easy to find a good replication facility afterwards whom you can send your already premastered CD and they just have to do the replication without modifying the sound anymore.

Most mastering facilities have to charge an hourly rate for the time it takes to do compression, stereo-image-adjustments, equalize, or whatever else necessary to prepare the music for CD and Vinyl production and hence replication. In getting your recording as close as you possibly can to the sound you want in the end as you can before entering the premastering, you can also reduce those charges. However, nowadays there are mastering studios that offer their work completely online (so called “online mastering”, or “iMastering”/”eMastering”), worldwide, at a flat fee. Transfer of your music is done online as WAV or AIFF files, they master (premaster) them and send a finished physical CD (or CD Image for Nero / Toast) back to you which you then take to the replication facility.

Important points to ponder when doing the mixing are making sure the instruments are mixed properly and the need for each is appropriate. By need it is mostly the reference to the use of re-verb, equalizing and effects similar that allow the instrument or voice sound like it is immersed into the mix, or the absence of them that makes the instrument or voice sound like it is right in your immediate area.

Using a mix with the guitar processed with re-verb and chorus, and having the lead vocals dry, for example, could sound unrealistic due to the fact that the guitar will appear to sound like it is further from you than the vocalist, which will appear to be screaming in your face. But if that is the effect or sound you want to portray, go ahead. But, as a general rule of thumb it can be annoying, and may result in ear and listener burn-out, which obviously you do not want!

If you happen to be faced with a scenario where your available tracks necessitated you to make the rhythm section mono, make sure that you apply the re-verb to them in stereo. This method will enable you to create an illusion of a stereo-image though the drums are in mono, and add to the sound quality.

You also need to use good speakers that are equidistant from your listening area so you get a realistic stereo image, and, if you can, listen to your mix through several different speakers. In the event you have a boom-box available to test the mix through that, or possibly a car stereo, or even on one your friend’s high end stereo systems. This will allow you an opportunity to get the highest level of “compatibility”, reveal most of the flaws the mix might have and assure the mix is as good as it can get before supplying it for premastering.

In so far as tricks go for using effects on the mix, it is completely a matter of your personal preference. If you like the overall sound that is the goal. So, long as it sounds good on as many systems as possible, it is good. Though try to avoid compressors and limiters on the masterbus when supplying your mix for premastering (though it is OK if you have them running when doing the mix, just take them off when doing the bounce for the mastering house). In general, too much processing starts to sound weak, and using too much re-verb is a common error as well. Try to keep things clean and make sure the sources (e.g. the equipment and room you use to record the guitar/vocals, etc.) sound as good as possible already so that they require just very few processing during the mixing. This is the real “trick” to get a great mix and afterwards a great master and CD after you have sent it to the mastering house and replication facility.

I wanted to let you know about something really exciting I´ve just recently discovered which affects all of us (labels, studios, artists, the end-listener - the whole music industry).

Finally some of the “big players” in the music industry (namely: Grammy-winning engineer/producer Charles Dye, alternative indie artist John Ralston, and recording studio owner/podcaster Allen Wagner) had the courage to do something against the still ongoing and getting worse and worse “LOUDNESS WAR” (you notice how boring it would be if I would yell at you all the time and only write in UPPER CASE, equally boring is it to listen to dynamically death music). Their just founded non-profit music industry organization Turn Me Up! is about to bring back dynamics to music, as the topic already suggests. Now the great thing is that this is not just-a-few-man organization trying to change the (dynamics) world, but that all of us, regardless if artist, label, studio, can participate and certify us with them. It´s clear that XARC Mastering, as a supporter of dynamics and simply spoken: high quality music enjoyment, is one of the first to having joined turnmeup.org and now awaiting our certification to soon be able to extend our service and offer turnmeup.org certification for your XARC-Mastered record.

If you would also like to make a difference it´s just a few clicks away to join turnmeup.org at no costs and get your next record certified by them as well so your end-listener knows you care about quality, not just loudness. While the page to join is certainly over here I first suggest that you explore the sites and read some of the very interesting articles on the homepage and especially watch the video on the homepage called “Loudness War - The Movie” - it´s an eye opener for those who wasn’t aware of the problems this creates yet.

On the other hand I have to thank all my clients that *are* and always *have* been aware of this already throughout the years and allowed me to not dynamically destroy there music which is there to stay for years with compressing it to the maximum, but instead compressing it as much as it *needs* to *sound good*! It´s your quality releases which will still be listened to in decades from now not like all the more-than-often “sonic trash” (to say it with honest words) that is out there nowadays from the major labels (and unfortunately to often also the smaller ones because they feel they have to “compete”). This quote from turnmeup.org expresses it the best: “It’s not our intent to discourage aggressively limited records, they are a valid creative choice for artists. But today, most artists feel they have no option other than mastering their records to be as loud as everybody else’s. And when everybody is doing this because everybody else is, who’s actually doing it because they want to?”

So I hope that this site is a relief to you as much was it was for me when first discovering it a few days back. All joined together we can make a difference and bring back quality music once again, which is the main goal of mastering and for the end-listener (and maybe I actually will start buying CDs then as well again once they contain *quality* again instead of LOUDNESS ON ALL COSTS).

One of the artists for which I have produced results that I’m particularly proud of is an Estonian group, by the name of Soul Militia.

From their site…

The R&B/Soul/Hip Hop trio Soul Militia formed in Estonia in the late 90’s. Semy, Craig and Lowry were already pursuing careers in music business when a series of fortunate events brought them together. Starting out as a quartet the group released their debut album in 2002 appropriately titled “On The Rise” . The completely self- written record spawned a couple of radio hits and was the first contemporary R&B album released in Estonia.
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One common (mis!)conception I see when people think of me, XARC, or other on-line mastering firms, be it in forums or elsewhere, is that they think on-line mastering is just for a “quick shot” – perfect for when they don’t have the time to go to a “real mastering studio,” or when they need a demo mastered “quick and cheap.” Thus, for the real mastering, they think they would go somewhere else. But…

On-Line Mastering is Real Mastering*
(* At least in the case of XARC!)

The difference between XARC’s on-line mastering and an equally-skilled “brick and mortar” firm – lets call them “Firm X” – is not to be found in the “usefulness” of the product. XARC and Firm X both use professional-grade equipment, and both employ professional, skilled and talented mastering engineers. Both have actual studios too, and both are in every way real mastering firms. The true difference is that XARC is simply not tied to certain constraints that exist with “Firm X”. We are thus in a position to deliver not equal, but rather higher quality. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• Having an on-line firm enables us to work within a global marketplace, rather than a more limited, local one. The advantages to this are huge, particularly in the realm of being able to work with such a wide range of musical genres. It’s never the “same old, same old.”
• In terms of efficiency, there is far more flexibility too. For example, we can “pre-listen” to the clients’ mixes to see if they’re optimal for mastering. If any changes are required, those can be done and delivered very quickly, even if it has to be repeated several times. With snail mail, it’s impossible – or at least would take weeks to accomplish. The same applies in reverse – when it’s time to deliver the approval master, it’s just a download for our clients. Iterations at that stage again benefit from nearly instant delivery, rather than days back and forth.
• Not being limited to having to go from mix to final master in a day or two (which is the typical practice when a mastering session is conducted at a “brick and mortar” mastering studio), also gives us the opportunity to refine the final product. We can get every last bit of perfection out of a track, and improve quality with the extra time, because we’re not as “rushed.”

So, on-line mastering really is real mastering. It’s just that the on-line aspect of the process creates the preconditions for what us mastering engineers are able to do; in the case of XARC that means we are able to provide a better product to our clients, that in every way matches (and I like to think at least typically exceeds) the quality of what is produced at Firm X. And, who knows – it may just be that in a few short years, it will be Firm X who will have to say, “but we’re just as real and good and as high-quality as XARC and the on-line firms!”