Preparing audio files for mastering

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If you have made the decision to send your tapes or files out to a professional mastering service then there are some really basic concepts to stick to here regarding mastering. Above all get into your head the concept that the recording studio is for recording and mixing and the Mastering Studio is for Mastering, if you start polishing your stereo mix before the mastering stage you are wasting your money and limiting the mastering engineers options

1. Create the best mix possible without any mastering compression, at all, in your studio, be it home studio or a commercial one. You may come across some engineers who will try to sneak some mastering compression on before it leaves their studio but do your best to discourage that, it's in your interest to leave ALL the mastering processes to the service you are about to pay good money for. If the studio engineer does not realise you are going to pay for a third party service he/she may try to master it for you, so you must explain it's not needed.

A general list of things to avoid doing before the pro service is:

a) heads and tails of the tracks, i.e. don't do any cleaning up of starts and ends.
b) normalising (yuck)
c) de-noising
d) limiting
d) stereo compression, obviously you may compress the individual tracks during mix-down etc.
e) stereo e.q.
f) anything else to the final stereo mix (or 5.1 stems)

2. Talk with the mastering service and you may even provide them samples of some tunes you feel you want your music to sound similar to. Hopefully you'll be able to pop aloing to the studio itself and be there when they master.

3. Mastering engineers love to have logs. Logs means that you have a record of the full song title, addreviated filename on the media and the order you wish to have your album played in. You may also want to include your notes about particular bits of the individual songs as guidlines for the engineer. (first word in chorus 2 needs raising etc). Don't worry about putting the songs in any order in the studio by shuffling them around or creating copies, the logs are fine. Create two copies and keep one for yourself for safety. If you are recording into DAT lave a good length of tape free at the start, a minute is fine, then ID your first track.

4. When creating your mixdown keep the overal level way down to a suggested level of - 3 dBFS.

5. Label your shit, this means actually writing "Session Tape" on the media, this is vital, also include your name and phone number on it.

6. Formats you can send (to any serious mastering house) are:

a) analogue tape - tailed out, this means you take the reel off the machine after it's played through, this is to avoid "print through", which can manifest a "pre-echo", generally ugly stuff. Include information about the tape speed and record level used for 0VU, stereo or mono source, noise reduciton used (if any) the E.Q the machine uses such as NAB or IEC. Often tones can be included to allow the mastering engineer to align his machine with the one that the material was recorded onto.
b) digital tape - simple rule here is to NOT sample convert anything, leave that to the mastering house, who should have nice expensive convertors.
c) CD-ROM - rules are: leave silence before the track starts to avoid glitches, use either AIFF or WAV formats ONLY. Record all the files at the same sample rate if possible, log them if they differ. Use sensible file names that have a relationship with the song. Use high quality CD-ROMs, Record at the lowest speed on your burner, just go to the pub while it burns. Above all check the thing works in your friends PC also.

7. Remember you get what you pay for generally.