Imperial Mastering - Affordable, professional CD mastering.

Mixing down for mastering

If you are a mixing engineer reading this, I’d like to go over just a few ideas for making your mixes perfect for the mastering stage. Many engineers know what I am about to say, I want to mention a few items to help some newer engineers. First is to start your mixes with your channel faders low. A 24 track mix might start with all faders down at -15 to -12 or in that range. Also if the original...

Mastering: The final step

Creating a musical album is a three step precess: Recording, mixing and mastering. Mastering originally was part of the process of creating a physical metal master for pressing vinyl on a lathe. A record cannot handle frequencies which are too low or too high and can not handle excessive dynamic range. So mastering tailored the music to allow the record to be pressed and perform properly in playback...

Mixing studio mastering?

The band asks this question: What would happen if we had our mix engineer also do the mastering? This question is asked by most bands these days at some point. Budgets are small and mixing engineers like the fact that doing their own mastering gives them greater control over the project. Many times the mix engineer doesn’t charge too much for the mastering job, so money is not a primary motivation, ...

Recording metal guitar to...

Here is an instructional video I made several years back called “How to record professional heavy metal guitar tone” for recording engineers who want to perfect their abilities in metal guitar tone recording. It will be mostly relevant to those recording other styles as well. Its about 48 minutes long and covers a lot of material. My goal was to go over every aspect of guitar recording and to speak...

About

Hi, thanks for stopping by my website! If you are seeking affordable CD mastering for your heavy metal, rock, reggae, electronic, folk or jazz album, you have come to the right place for down-home quality work and service! Imperial Mastering is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and offers international service. I specialize in [...]

The Engineer

My name is Colin Davis. I have been involved in audio engineering for most of my adult life, but I started working in a recording studio in 1996. That studio was built by myself and band mate Juan Urteaga which operated under the name Trident Studios in Pacheco California. Since then, I branched out into [...]

Mastering Samples

Here are some before and after examples of my work, in 320 KBPS MP3 format. The “before” samples have been normalized, just to be fair. Compare the “after” samples to other albums of similar style you may have. (Try to compare MP3s to other MP3s to be fair .) Each of the samples here are [...]