Album Mastering

In this day of disposable digital-only singles culture, the release of a proper, full album is becoming a rarer beast every year. But rare beasts have always been the most prized catch! An album remains the best place to showcase your musical works.

Our album mastering service is where we really demonstrate our skill too. Mastering an album requires subtlety, intuition & a certain sprinkle of black magic that can only come with plenty of experience. It’s important to bear this in mind when choosing your mixing and mastering services.

Even if you have a mixture of soft & heavy songs on the album, the end result must make them flow perfectly together, & smooth out any discrepancies between mixes. This must be achieved while keeping your original preferences & ideas in mind.

Highly dynamic, subtle music must be blended flawlessly & sensitively into an understated work of art. By contrast a bass-heavy, banging album needs to hit the listener hard and loud all the way through.

Whatever the music needs, an experienced mastering engineer can intuitively can make it happen – they must feel the vibe to know the best approach to master an album!

It’s important to trust your gut – where the music is felt. No A.I. online mastering service (like eMastered or Landr for example) can actually feel music in the same way as the artist did when creating it – by definition A.I. automatic mastering can only ever see it as digital binary code. Getting a little deeper, we believe music is an expression of the living fabric of the universe.

Loz (our engineer) is a zen practitioner & generally esoteric chap. He uses barebow archery & other ways to clear his headspace when the computer gets too much. We feel this gives us an edge which helps make us one of the best song mastering services around. These visceral skills really come into play when finding the correct natural point to work from, thus making the final result flow together beautifully.

Your finished album should sound cohesive, level matched & with appropriate pauses between tracks (or seamlessly if you prefer). We believe the human touch wins out again here over album mastering software – it’s all about the feel.

It’s important to finish the album slightly differently for a vinyl press run too, so the vinyl version translates well compared to the version for digital.

So there’s a lot more to think about than just getting all the tracks to the same volume!

If you are having a CD run made, you can then optionally deliver a DDP file (like 1 special zip file with everything needed to make a cd) to put all your ISRC codes, credits and title metadata embedded in a CD.

Fat As Funk offers great rates on album mastering, & you can order with confidence knowing that your carefully crafted studio mix will stand up as a complete work.

You can try our online mastering free. You can also test our mix and mastering for just the price of the stems (no real professional will usually do a free mix+master session, due to the amount of work involved).

Upload your track today for a free stereo mastering demo, and if you want to test our stem mastering before committing to a full mix master you can buy some stems and get it at a greatly reduced cost! (Stem mastering is like a mini-mix+master).

We would love to transform your recordings into a record!