Before a master CD (or CD-R) can be produced,all songs need to be put into the correct sequence and the proper spaces placed between each track. Therefore the tapes from the location recording or mixdown sessions are transferred to a digital editor at first. Digital editing allows you to remove countdowns, stick clicks, guitar hum and other noises between tracks. Fade-ins and fade-outs can be chased to digital silence so that console, microphone or analogue tape noise disappears. This gives a polished result that people notice. The tunes will be sequenced into the order you specify and correct spacing is made between cuts. Finally a CD-R will be cutted. This CD-R can now be send to a replication plant, where copies are made. What do we need? We need a DAT tape with start IDīs and absolute time code recorded from the beginning of your tape, preferably are 44,1 kHz since extra conversions can remove "Live" feel and a bit of audio quality. There should be at least 60 seconds of digital black (no sound but timecode) before and after the program material. This ensures that no signal is recorded at less reliable extreme ends of the tape. If you mix to DAT with (external) converters that offer dithering make sure that the noise shaping option is turned off. The levels must never exceeds digital zero, an absolute overall maximum level of -1dB is the most preferable for all DATs. Make sure to provide a track sheet with the titles, start time in minutes and seconds as well as length of each cut. Hand-written sheets will do fine but need to be clear and readable. Please note: Mastering can make a good recording sound excellent. Most discs can be made competitive for radio and in-store play. Mastering can only improve a good or fair product. It cannot fix bad mixes, poor arrangements or sloopy playing. If the kick drum sounds great and the bass guitar sounds terrible, there will be a problem trying to get both sounding good. Avoid the use of exciters and enhances (e.g. Finalizers, Vitalizers or Edisons) at final mixing stage since the consequences to the sound can hardly (or even never) be compensated. Also use Reverb and compressing rather sparingly. If in doubt, just leave it to the Mastering engineer. A finished mix is a very complex and delicate thing that can be worse at easily as it can be improved. The Mastering facility has ultra-clean processors that are built to handle stereo signals. Studio processing gear usually doesnīt work right for Mastering. There is one thing to run a guitar through a limiter and equaliser, another thing to run your whole mix through. Basically we are doing all processing exclusively in the digital domain in order to maintain internal accuracy and the best possible audio quality during all stages of sweetening. On request we could also perform certain steps through analogue gear if there are strong preferences like "it needs to sound like Soundgarden or other early seventieth sounding recordings". The most important thing is to do what serves the music best.