FAQ

Mixing & Mastering

Mixing is the art of balancing and fining tuning individual tracks in a song to bring them all together in a creative way. Think of mixing a song similar to cooking, you need balance. Too much of one ingredient, or too little of another will make or break your recipe.

What makes a great mix engineer compared to an amateur, is their creative talent in using their skills to do cool and creative things to a track with EQ, compressors, delays, flange, chorus, reverb, etc.

Mastering is the art of unifying a single track, or multiple tracks together to form an album or EP. A mastering engineer will make skillful choices between EQ, level, compression to bring a consistency between all tracks in an album.

Simply put, no major label will listen continue listening to your tracks for more than 10 seconds if it doesn’t sound polished and ready to ship.

Whether your goal is radio play, CD/cassette duplication, CDRom/DVD authoring or publishing your music to your fans on your social networks, it must sound as punchy and warm as the major artists do!

I take pride in my work, and love what I do. I view mixing and mastering as an art. I do not use presets like some competitors do. Every track is different, and should have its own approach.
1. Choose what kind of mix or master you want on the prices page.
2. Once your material is received and verified, we’ll work our mad skills on your track and send an MP3 for you to audition.
3. You can approve or submit for revision.
4. Once approved, we’ll send the full quality Master as a .wav file in 44.1kHz 24bit.
For mixing there are 3 included revisions.
For mastering there are 2 included revisions.

Additional mix revisions are $25 and $10 for mastering revisions.

Turnaround Time & Delivery

Depending on how many clients I have, it can take 7-10 working days. For more than one song it can take longer, contact us before hand so we can discuss further details.
Of course! The best and fastest will be by digital delivery. I would send a DDP file, which you would send off to where you want your master to be duplicated.

If you’re set on having a master on CD, please contact me before hand.

Preparation, Exportation & Finalization

I prefer to work with the bounced audio files. There are too many different versions of software, which would lead to compatibility issues.

For online mastering just send your bounced version of the track in a stereo audio file in .wav or .aiff. The sample rate should be 44.1kHz/48kHz/96khz/192kHz, usually 48kHz is enough.
The bit rate should be 24 bit (preferred) or 16 bit.

Please no limiting, if possible the track should hit -6 to -3 dB on the master.

For online mixing you can export all tracks from your sessions, if you’re unsure on how to do this for your software view one of the following videos below.

We encourage you keep any compression, EQ and effects (ex. flange, chorus, delays, reverb, etc.) that you find add a musical importance to your song left on the individual tracks.
If it’s on the master, we encourage you turn it off.

All tracks should be properly labeled according to what they are. Example, if you have multiple kick drums, kick_01.wav, kick_02.wav, etc. Not audio_01.wav, audio_02.wav.

You can also include a demo mix, a reference track you would like the final mix or master to sound like, along with any other mix notes.

Please name the folder ‘ArtistName_SongTitle_BPM’ then zip/rar the folder. (Ex. ‘TheEmaxes_Its_1986_128BPM’)

We prefer WeTransfer, as it’s absolutely free, reliable and fast. If the file filesize exceeds 2GB, we prefer Filemail. Do not send us tracks through e-mail.
We greatly appreciate any credits given! Please credit as ‘Vivid Mastering’ (ex. Mixed and mastered by Vivid Mastering).