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Fandango Recording Toronto provides mastering services of excellent quality for your musical projects. Mastering is the last creative process that brings a musical project to its final sonic dimension. Mastering is the process of taking the source - the final mix to a data storage device- the master, from which all the copies will be produced. Mastering takes care of the final assembly of an album, ensuring that a collection of songs will flow from start to finish, like they belong together, in the desired order and with the right amount of space in between songs.

Mastering brings forward the best in the mixes; expect mastering to enhance the sound, add more depth and make the songs shine. The better the songs sound, the more records will be sold. Mastering is equally important for the new formats that gained so much popularity as a result of the internet explosion as is for CD mastering. The music need to be polished and sound good on the new generation of listening devices that explore the internet capabilities, like ipod's, iphones, mp3 players, computers.

Many projects are made on project recording studios, where the monitoring system and the room are less than accurate. I definitely recommend having the mastering of these projects done somewhere else, with an experienced engineer familiar with different styles of music, working in an acoustically treated room using a great speaker monitoring system, with mastering grade A/D/A converters and excellent cables (read very expensive!).

The loudspeakers are most likely the most influential factor after the mastering engineer ears and experience. The mastering speakers should have a wide and flat frequency response, provide a very detailed stereo image and accurate phase response and be unforgiving and reveal any problems. Good mastering speakers are very expensive, from 5000 upwards, between the most used are ATC's, Duntech Sovereign, Barefoot MicroMain27, B&W Nautilus, Tannoy, Lipinski, etc. They have an almost perfect impulse response, a fantastic phase coherency and a stunning accuracy: you can hear a half dB when added or subtracted!

The list of the most important issues the mastering takes care includes:

• noise, glitches and hiss removal, de-humming (cause by the 50/60 Hz of the power supplies), declicking and decrackling for remastering from vinyl
• clean up the beginning and the end of each song and smooth out or create fades through editing, dynamic or harmonic enhancement of the song or just make up for inconsistencies through EQ, compression and multiband compression
• optimize average and peak volume levels for proper loudness
• achieve the right sonic balance for the type of song (country is different than jazz or R&B)
• add warmth and depth to your mixes
• correct and adjust stereo imagine if needed
• place songs in proper order and adjust the gaps between them
• create a sonic signature for all tracks
• sample and bit rate conversion
• adjust the song levels and make them match so the listener won’t have to turn the volume up and down between songs
• place everything into the format required by the CD manufacturer- the master CD.

A good final mix speaks for itself, but is definitely not enough anymore. The competition in the music business is tough and you shouldn’t make any compromise when it comes to the quality of your song. Even a demo for promotion that has three songs needs mastering. There is always a tendency to save money, but in this case it can be too costly and can compromise your chances. A/R people, agents and producers who are doing the screening of hundreds of tapes are getting tired too and you don’t want them to concentrate to hear your music instead of listening to it; they simply won’t do it. So, unless your demo is for promotion in clubs, we advise you to go for mastering and have that in mind when you plan your budget.

The mp3 files are very popular; their problem is the inherent sonic compromise and loss in audio quality. More and more acts are paying attention now to the quality of mp3 and understand that these files can be improved sonically through mastering the same way the regular songs are mastered. Mp3’s are a fantastic marketing tool: you don’t want to compromise the sales because others have better sounding mp3’s.

There are some things you should know about mastering. Mastering will clean a mix, but there are flaws that can not be removed. There are things you didn't notice in the mix, but you'll notice them at mastering: most of them can be corrected. The mixes can be made brighter or heavier, the stereo width can be changed and the mix can be made to sound tighter and together. If a mix needs to be redone, it should be redone; no mastering can take care of that. It is recommended to send a preliminary mix to the mastering studio and ask the mastering engineer opinion; he can point to some problems that can be fixed in the mix.

The following is a guideline you can use to estimate how much mastering time a CD project will take:

1. 1. Roll-on time - assuming your mixes are in a different format than a .wav or .aiff files – digital or analog tape – the loading of the workstation is done in real time. Having your mixes burnt on CD as .wav or .aiff files saves you a lot of time, the loading is much faster. If mixes are on tapes, it takes longer.
3. 2. Mastering – this step is quite hard to predict; it depends a lot on the quality of the mixdown and the processing we have to do it. On average, a one hour CD project with 10-12 songs takes 1-2 days of mastering under normal circumstances. Fandango offers different packages - see rates, and the main difference between them is the time we take to do the mastering and the extended quality control.
5. 3. Roll-off time – the final edited and mastered project gets burnt onto a CD-R master. The burning is done "Disk at once" - at 1x speed, to eliminate all possible errors, so you won’t have a problem at the CD manufacturing facility.

Fandango has two rates for CD mastering; the explanation is simple. The Silver type is a basic mastering, for those on a very limited budget. This type of mastering enhances the qualities needed for demos and promotion. The Gold is the top mastering package, a fine mastering, with state-of-the-art multiband compression, limiting, equalizing, for national and local releases and professional demos. We take the time to discuss with the producer and explore every avenue. At the end of the process, a mandatory second quality control with headphones will be made, to catch problems that can not be heard on speakers and make sure no abnormal sounds exist. Regardless of the package, we are listening to the master in a couple of music systems (in the studio, a regular house music system, boombox, car) to make sure the final product offers an enjoyable experience in all the systems.

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Questions, info, contact:  florinb@fandangorecording.com or call 416 579 5569.

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