Mastering is arguably the most vital process of all; it allows the music you’ve put all your creative efforts into to sound great on all platforms and systems. This essential final step is often misunderstood as being one that can simply fix a bad mix, but the truth is, mastering is simply adding the final polish to enhance a good mix and turn it into a great mix with excitement, clarity, detail, openness, and balance, ready for distribution.

Mastering is the final polish before distribution and ultimately the listeners ear, so it is imperative that it is optimised to sound impressive on every system, whether it is your phone, a high end hifi, or the Royal Albert Hall. We take every aspect of mastering very seriously and treat every track with utmost respect, working closely with our clients, taking into consideration creative choices with the highest regard for exemplary results. Our degree-level mastering is always tailored to your requirements, working on each project individually to the highest standards for both digital and vinyl until you are 100% satisfied with the end result.

Definitive alignment for Album/EP consistency, finalised tonal balance, mid-side equalisation to open the stereo field, then leveling the end result for industry standard maximisation whilst retaining essentaial dynamics, using multi-stage processing to bring you the most impact for your productions to stand head and shoulders above the competition. We work hard to maintain fast turnaround times without compromising on quality.

Please provide clean unmastered copies of your mixdowns, ie. no plugins on the master bus.

A text file with the following:
Song Title
Artist
Genre

Also if you could provide any of the following:
BPM
ISRC codes
Artwork
Remixer, publisher, any other relevant info

Any clipping will not be magically hidden by the mastering process, so please keep your output levels within 0.3dB throughout the mix.

When providing your final mixdown, please ensure all channels that do not require sub frequencies (lead riffs, hihats, snares, etc.) are hipassed at 100Hz minimum, this will prevent any spurious bass frequencies muddying the low end, and allow more headroom for loudness and punch.

Please watch the following video for more tips on preparing your mix ready for mastering:

While we at LEK Productions prefer to concentrate on the positives, we feel it is important to let our potential clients know that there are a large number of cowboys in the industry, who download a few free plugins, fire up the presets they like the name of, with little or zero education in the field, then put themselves out there as mastering engineers, undercutting the professionals to make a fast buck, while potentially causing irreversible damage to your music by means of over saturating the compressor or pushing the loudness way beyond any media platform can handle. While it might often sound ‘better’ playing on your machine (louder is always better, right?), often do not have the indepth knowledge required to analyse and processes the mix to keep the dynamics, open the sound stage into the wide stereo field whilst retaining punch, and make it work on every platform, including vinyl. A bad master would be akin to spending 15 grand on a Hasselblad medium-format camera, then fitting a cheap $2 tarnished plastic lens filter on the front.

Another false economy is to use a 'do-everything' mastering plugin, or website mastering, such as that found on Soundcloud. While more and more are becoming AI powered, you need to remember; the machine is not sentient. It is unable to, for example, set the compressor threshold & ratio level, or make an informed choice of the optimal attack & release times for parallel compression to compliment the sound of your music. A well trained human ear can. The machine will never replicate a hand mastered piece by a well informed industry professional.