Welcome! As a fellow musician, I know how hard you've worked to get that perfect take, the subtle edits, and the right mix. I want to help you add that final polish to your album while staying true to your artistry. Mastering is an important step you should consider to help ensure your audio plays well on various platforms, yet maintains an appropriate amount of dynamic range (differences in volume). The mastering process will help your music sound more like a commercially produced CD.

Originally I got into mastering for my music endeavors, but I've since discovered how much I enjoy working with other musicians on their material.

As I master an album I tend to focus on two areas:

1) Tonality

As more and more musicians record in home studios, some of the preamps and converters being used can make the mix sound a bit cold and sterile. If necessary, and it's to your taste, I'll "warm up" your audio by running it through analog summing and make-up gain from Class A analog preamps. This step also helps "glue" the instruments together and they will seem to reinforce each other more. The analog summing often adds noticeable clarity to the mix.

2) Dynamics

I will increase the loudness of your audio without losing the dynamics of your audio. I use several compressors, but typically I use an opto-electric model that has a very fast response time and will not "breathe" when compressing full mixes. The main compressor I use is very transparent and will not color your sound. I will handle the transient peaks of your audio with an analog limiter that has both hard and soft limit modes; this limiter is also very transparent.

The Analog Difference

Though I was once more dependent on digital processing, I've come to find that using real analog gear (rather than plug-ins that simulate them) at the final stages of production can go a long way towards making your album sound more like a commercial release. As we take your audio from the digital domain to the analog domain, then back to digital, we will use some of the finest AD and DA converters available. Having good converters helps to avoid distortion in the audio and maintains clarity. Running your audio through lesser converters is somewhat like making a copy of a copy - each subsequent pass negatively impacts the fidelity.

Partial Equipment List

Pendulum Audio OCL-2 stereo compressor/limiter
Pendulum Audio PL-2 stereo limiter
Neve Portico 5043 stereo compressor
Apogee AD-16X
Apogee DA-16X
Neve Portico 5012 stereo pre
Universal Audio 2-610 stereo pre
DAV BG-1 stereo pre
Audient ASP-008
Adam A7 monitors + sub
Canare Star-Quad and Accusound cables


Rates

We can work on your project per song or per album - contact me to discuss rates. I can provide a free demo to let you compare your unmastered audio to my mastered version.

Contact

Adrian Johnson
adrian@peakslimited.com
(719) 238-2525