Mastering Process

Your music deserves the best finish. With more than 25 years of mastering experience, the engineers at Low Price Audio Mastering from Loud Crow enhance every element of your sound for maximum impact and quality.

Why Have Your Music Mastered?

Mastering is the final polish that transforms a finished mix into a release ready piece of art. It’s the last stage of the production process, where a skilled audio engineer enhances and refines the sonic character of your music so it translates beautifully across every playback system. Mastering brings balance, clarity, and cohesion to your tracks. By shaping tonal balance, dynamics, and stereo width, it elevates your music to a professional standard and gives it that polished, competitive edge. It also ensures consistent loudness across all tracks in an album or playlist. This helps your music sit comfortably alongside commercially released songs without sacrificing dynamic range or musicality. A great mastering engineer can reveal subtle details that may be hidden in the mix. Through precise EQ, compression, and other processing techniques, mastering enhances depth, presence, and overall clarity. Technical issues can also be addressed during mastering. Problems like uneven frequency response, unwanted noise, or distortion can be corrected, ensuring your music sounds clean and intentional. Finally, mastering prepares your music for distribution across all platforms, streaming services, radio, CDs, vinyl, and more. By optimizing your audio for each format, mastering guarantees your music translates consistently and effectively wherever it’s heard. In short, mastering is an essential step that elevates your tracks to a professional level. It enhances sonic quality, ensures consistency, and prepares your music for release to a wider audience. Never underestimate how much mastering can transform the impact of your music.

Our Mastering Process

Multi Band EQ: Experience a sonic revolution as we balance and shape the frequency spectrum across multiple bands, giving your tracks a rich, full- bodied sound that captivates listeners. Compression: Unlock the true dynamics of your music with precision compression techniques. Say goodbye to uneven levels and hello to a polished, professional sound that grabs attention. Dynamic Expansion: Breathe life into your audio by intelligently enhancing its dynamic range. Our dynamic expansion techniques bring out the nuances and subtleties in your music, creating a captivating listening experience. Stereo Enhancement: Immerse your audience in a three-dimensional sonic landscape with our stereo enhancement technology. We widen the stereo image, adding depth and dimension to every note. Noise Reduction: Bid farewell to unwanted background noise that can detract from the clarity of your tracks. Our advanced noise reduction techniques ensures that only pure, pristine sound remains. Peak Limiting: Maintain optimal levels without compromising on sonic integrity. Our peak limiting techniques prevent clipping while preserving the dynamics of your music. Normalization: Achieve consistent loudness across all tracks with precision normalization algorithms. Say goodbye to volume discrepancies - every song will be perfectly balanced. Bass Management: Ensure that low frequencies are reproduced accurately and powerfully across different playback systems with our comprehensive bass management techniques. Input Maximization: Harness the full potential of your mix by maximizing input levels without distortion or loss of quality - it's time for every detail to shine through! Output Maximization: Make your music stand out in any playlist with our output maximization techniques. Achieve the perfect balance of loudness and clarity that demands attention. Volume Levelling: Smooth out any inconsistencies in volume levels across different tracks to create a cohesive listening experience. Your music will flow seamlessly from one song to the next. Vocal Levelling: Achieve professional sound quality with vocal levelling. We will Enhance the balance and clarity of your vocals to make your music stand out. Mastering Reverb: Add a touch of ambiance and depth to your tracks with tasteful mastering reverb. It's the secret ingredient that takes your sound to the next level. Fades and More: Polish your tracks with seamless fades, ensuring smooth transitions between sections and creating a professional, radio-ready sound. We will also make sure you do not have any phase issues. If you are interested in the equipment we use here at Loud Crow Studio? Please visit our About Us page

Recommended Preparation &

Delivery Guidelines

Please follow these technical specifications when submitting your mixes to get the best out of your master: File Format Please provide uncompressed WAV or AIFF files. We recommend 24-bit or 32-bit (float) depth at the original sample rate of your session (e.g., 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88.2kHz, or 96kHz). Headroom Ensure your master bus is not clipping. Ideally, peaks should hit between -3dB and -6dB. This provides the necessary "air" for our analogue gear to react musically to your transients. No Master Bus Processing Please remove any limiters or heavy compression from your master output. While "top-down" mixing is fine, we need the dynamic range intact to apply our professional outboard processing effectively.

Mastered For Streaming

Did you know? If you're planning to release your music on streaming services, our Mastered for Streaming Services option may be the best choice for you. Most major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and others, use loudness normalisation, typically targeting between -14 LUFS and -16 LUFS, depending on the service. This means that if your master is excessively loud, the streaming platform will automatically turn it down, which can sometimes negatively affect the overall listening experience. Our Streaming Mastering service is specifically designed to optimise your music for these platforms. We will master your tracks to achieve the best balance of loudness, clarity, dynamics, and impact while meeting the recommended specifications of today's leading streaming services. We also understand that different genres have different loudness expectations and characteristics. Whether you produce Pop, Rock, EDM, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Classical, or any other style, we take your genre into account to ensure your music sounds its absolute best across all streaming platforms. If you are serious about getting your songs mastered send us your song(s) today!

Samples Of What We

Can Do For You

Please be aware that these samples could take a little time to load depending on your internet speeds & should only be used as a guide as they are only 320kbps Mp3 for us to keep your bandwidth low

Go by your own mix!

If you are serious about getting your songs mastered send us your song(s) today! and let us send you a free mastered sample of your own mix