Mastering more....

2011-06-03T08:24:00.000-07:00

Here's some more mastering work I did. The goal with these tunes were to keep them raw sounding.

Keeping secrets by derekirving

You're Gonna Lose ~The Aces by derekirving

Los Shimmy Shakers Mastering

2011-06-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I had the pleasure of mastering a debut record for Los Shimmy Shakers out of San Francisco. Turned out great. They wanted a vintage sound to the final master.

Here's one of my favorite's off the CD "The Twitch"
The Twitch by derekirving

"The Sneak" The Sneak by derekirving

Shoulder Holster by derekirving

Mastering The Aces “No One Rides for Free” for El Toro Records

2009-06-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

We recorded this at Greaseland Studios located in San Jose CA engineered by Chris Anderson. His studio has tons of old microphones and guitar amps and he recorded our record to hard disk using Pro Tools. We recorded 11 songs live and mixed in two 9 hour days. A true budget success! After listening back to the final mixes, the only things which stood out to me were more mid-range on the guitar than I prefer and drum levels were a tad lower than I desired. Now the thought was; does this go back to the mixing engineer to pull some of the mid range frequencies off the guitar track only or see if I can smooth this out in the mastering process knowing that doing this in mastering will affect all of the instruments and vocal frequencies. I opted to go the mastering route first and was able to identify the offending frequency and pull it back slightly which gave me the desired result. The next question was should I use compression or not. After listening to the mixes without compression then listening to them with a analog compression plug-in I felt the compression helped bring out the drums a bit and overall glued the sound together without compromising our tones and the overall rawness we wanted. I opted not to use any reverb or delay during mastering as I felt this did not enhance the sound and took away from some of the natural room sound we captured. Plus the reverb and delay would take away from that loud in your face sound we were going after. Also using an analog compressor / limiter plug-in I was able to push the levels up for even more rawness without clipping/distorting the recording. I think of it similar to when your tubes have a nice glow to them when they’re being pushed.

The result is an album which we feel captures the essences of the band.

DI Mastering - Where Analog meets Digital

Mastering more....

Los Shimmy Shakers Mastering

Mastering The Aces “No One Rides for Free” for El Toro Records