Mixing & Mastering
This is the meat and potatoes of what I do. Mixing makes up the largest portion of my job, and for good reason! Clients appreciate my ability to tackle most any genre with ease and give them mixes both technically and stylistically excellent. On top of that, it’s simply the part of the process I love the most! It is in many ways the ultimate expression of what makes recorded music special. I like to talk with clients about the music I’m mixing (or may be mixing) to get a feel for what they expect my mixes to accomplish, since the kind of work I’ve done has ranged from stem mixes that take the tracks the last 15%, to turning a big old mess of a Pro Tools session into a beautiful final product.
The desired feel of a track - especially if it has no rough mixes coming with it - is especially important to define since that’s the most important part of a song. I also don’t typically rely on inspiration or reference tracks for mixes because it’s very difficult to separate what parts of another artist’s song a client is really vibing with, from the client simply enjoying the song itself: a general feel of the sonic ballpark, and maybe a couple examples of specific ideas, is almost always as far as I go, then let your song dictate where it wants to be.
-Mastering-
My mastering is, depending on project, either fully digital-domain or a mix of digital and analog processing. In no way do I try to color the sound or leave a personal fingerprint on my masters: getting your tracks to sound full, professional, and natural is the foremost goal, while also achieving a competitive loudness if desired. A lot of the time, I’ve done this for lower-budget projects where a dedicated Mastering engineer is cost-prohibitive, but I’ve become quite happy with the results I get; if you’re on the fence, I can do a single test master for you, no strings attached.
-Costs-
Pricing is quoted per-project both for ease of bulk prices with EPs, LPs et al. and for Mix projects which may take additional time to ingest and prepare. A reference guide is in the works for prepping your tracks for mixing, but in the meantime what you should know is that I work in Pro Tools and prefer PTX sessions, AAF packages (most DAWs can export them), or prepared stems - tracks sent in other DAW formats may cost an hourly work rate to convert or I may not be able to work with them at all.
Recalls up through three major revisions (Typically labeled Mix 1 through Mix 3 with letters a/b/c/etc denoting minor revisions) are included in the mix cost. Additional recalls or changes after-the-fact will be charged an hourly work rate.
With Mastering, WAV files at or above your desired resolution are expected - my Mastering fees are the same no matter if you’ve sent a 44.1/16-bit track or a 192/24-bit track, and you will receive masters at that maximum resolution as well as versions in Redbook standard. Mixed resolutions in your project? We can talk about the right format solution so you get exactly what you need.
Please email me if you have any questions or would like to get a quote for Mixing, Mastering, or all the rest!
And of course, here’s an inexhaustive Spotify playlist of music I’ve mixed to get a feel for what I do: