Mastering

What Is Mastering?

After you have recorded and mixed all of your songs, mastering is the third step before replication. CD Mastering enables your recording to faithfully reproduce your vision, making it the most musical and commercially competitive it can be. Mastering will bridge the technological gap between the artist's recording equipment and the listener's stereo system. Mastering your project will make a huge difference in the competitiveness and musical value of your product. Mastering is also the greatest bargain in the entire workflow of making a CD.

When you send us your audio for mastering, your tracks will be listened to by an experienced engineer. After we get an overall impression of the existing sound balance, your project is then professionally mastered using an appropriate chain of equipment. Below are a few tools that we use in the mastering process:

Noise Reduction                           Equalization
Compression                                Mastering Reverb
Peak Limiting                             Adding Ambience
Stereo/Widening                          Bass Enhancement
Maximization                               Dynamic Expansion
Fades/Crossfades                      Text/ISRC Encoding

After mastering, your songs will not only be consistent with each other, but they will be as high in volume level as possible while preserving their proper dynamic structure. Mastering adds punch and clarity to your sound. At the same time, mastering removes unwanted frequencies and noise that can reduce the overall quality of your music.

If you choose the full analog mastering, JW Mastering uses some of the industries best gear during the mastering of your project such as:

Prism                                Waves
SSL                                   GML
Lucid                              Crane Song
Neve                                Dangerous Audio
ATC                                  Adams
Genelec                           Steinburg
Digidesign                        z-Systems