This page contains some helpful tips for mixing and producing well prepared material for mastering, along with information on the formats that we accept at GSM and on the details GSM needs from our clients.
-
•24Bit/32Bit (float) & 44.1 KHz or higher in AIFF or WAV format (no data compression!).
-
•Never up or down sample anything.
-
•Don’t use dithering.
-
•Don’t use limiting or normalization on the master-bus or final mix!
-
•Only use compressors, equalizers and exciters if you know what you’re doing and use them only for their vibe and character. Never use them for corrections or volume and dynamic adjustments! Leave this to the mastering engineer.
-
•Don’t do fade-ins and fade-outs at the beginning and end of a song. Just let your mastering engineer know what you’d prefer.
-
•All songs should approx. have 2 seconds ‘silence’ at the beginning and the end.
-
•Minimal peak headroom of -3 dBFS. Maximal peak not more than -2 dBFS
-
•GSM prefers to receive your material on the FTP server. GSM provides you with the upload details. In case of delivering on CDR/DVD: burn the songs as data and not as audio. Burn on the lowest speed possible and only use the best quality CDR/DVD you can find.
-
•Listen carefully to clicks, pops, ticks etc. before final mix-down and try to remove it in the corresponding track. Especially vocal tracks contain a lot of these and vocal sibilance is a common problem. These are some of the issues commonly dealt with during mastering. Even with powerful mastering tools, attempts to reduce these problems will often affect other elements in the mix. So try to reduce these problems in the mix before going into mastering.
Provide GSM as complete as possible the following details and without typo’s!
-
•Band/artist name.
-
•Album / e.p. / project title.
-
•Song titles.
-
•Track order on the album.
-
•Provide us the ISRC/UPC/EAN details when these need to be included.
-
•Cd text yes or no? Cd text means that some cd players show some info on the song while playing, e.g. band name, song-title etc.
A good preparation of your material can save a lot of time during a mastering session; therefore, the costs in the end will be lower. Try to realize the following before delivering your material: