Analog Mastering

Fandango Recording provides outstanding analog mastering services across Costa Brava, Barcelona, Girona and for remote clients from all Europe. We are highly specialized in analog mastering and mixing. Our studio takes great pride of the experience gained in the analog digital mixing and analog mastering services for almost three decades. As a professional analog mastering studio in Europe, we're looking forward to bring to the table everything we learnt in the last 30 years in Toronto, a major musical hub in the world.

Your music will be brought up to meet the highest industry standards thanks to world-class mastering skills, experience, equipment, and acoustic environment. It all starts with free mix checks offered, so you get advised if the mix is ready to be mastered.

The mastering room was built specifically to provide the proper acoustical environment for analog mastering, and the monitoring system is of a very high standard. The analog mastering equipment is exceptional, and everything in the studio is strictly "mastering grade".

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What is mastering

Mastering is the last part of the creative process that brings a musical project to its final sonic dimension. Mastering is the process of taking the source, the final mix, to a data storage device, the master, from which all the copies will be produced. Mastering takes care of the final assembly of an album, ensuring that a collection of songs will flow from start to finish, with consistency and impact, in the desired order and with the right amount of space in between songs. Fandango Recording provides mastering for CD, Internet formats, vinyl, cassettes, and Masters for iTunes.

Mastering brings forward the best in the mixes; expect mastering to enhance the sound, add more depth and make the songs shine. The better the songs sound, the more records will be sold. Mastering is equally important for playing songs on the radio, on a CD, on streaming, for vinyl, for promotion and for the new formats that gained so much popularity as a result of the Internet and mobile devices explosion. The mastering engineer is, if you want, your and your customers' best friend. He needs to ensure the listener loves the sound, and, in return, the listener will appreciate the artist and buys their music.

I read somewhere that Mark Twain said: “A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client”. That is the reason you want somebody with an objective set of ears to do the mastering, because one thing is clear: there is no middle way here, at mastering you either make it or break it! There is nothing else after this process!

A good final mix speaks for itself, but this is not good enough. The competition in the music business is tough and you shouldn’t make any compromise when it comes to the quality of your song. Even a demo for promotion needs mastering. A/R people, agents and producers who are doing the screening of hundreds of tapes are getting tired too, and you don’t want them to concentrate to hear your music instead of listening to it; they simply won’t do it. So, unless your demo is for promotion in clubs, I advise you to master your songs and have that in mind when you plan your budget.

How is analog mastering different than digital or AI mastering?

Generally analog mastering is a bit more expensive, as, beside a calibrated room, mastering monitors and master grade cables and converters, it uses very expensive analog hardware units specialized for mastering. Their precision, coloration, harmonic saturation in some cases give the song a beautiful shine, make it stand out of the crowd. Generally, in an analog mastering studio the first processes are done digital, like some mix correction and some unpleasant resonance elimination, editing, de-essing or removal of harshness, then the signal is sent out and passes through high-grade mastering equalizers, compressor, harmonic generators. The mastering engineer has the experience to understand what the song needs in order to both enhance it and prepare it for the commercial purposes. The analog hardware units are clean or have some gentle coloration and the master engineers with experience know where and how to use these high-end mastering processors units.

Digital mastering is possible, there are high quality plugins, most of them are simulations of the famous analog hardware units; however, there is a very clear difference between the hardware and their counterpart digital simulation plugins. We tested these plugins doing the master in analog, then use these plugins with the same settings, and the results were very clear: there is a huge difference. That is a reason all the top commercial releases are mastered in analog!

Also, there are some automated mastering services over internet, like Landr or Aria mastering. They do a decent job, raising the songs level. But as it stands now, all this systems can't judge the flow and feeling of the song, they rather work on automated formulas based on the musical genre. And they also don't do a verification, as the algorithms look mainly at the technical aspect. AI can not grasp emotion, period! For beginners, or for demos, as a cheap way, that can be a solution, but for a song where the musician has the expectation that the mastering brings something valuable to the table I would definitely look at analog mastering. Using an analog mastering studio over internet is very different than an automated system: a human, the mastering engineer does the work in an acoustically controlled environment with high-end equipment; infact, is the same like being there.

For more info about this subject, and for the technical aspects that mastering deals with, please check the FAQ section in our website.

Things to know about mastering...

There are things you should know about mastering. Mastering will clean a mix, but there are flaws that can’t be removed. There are things you didn't notice in the mix, but you'll notice them at mastering through the revealing mastering speakers and the acoustic space. Most of them can be corrected. The mixes can be made brighter or heavier, the stereo width can be changed and the mix can be made to sound tighter and together.

If a mix needs to be redone, it should be redone; sometimes there are problems no mastering can take care of them; this is the reason we offer free mix checks, where we can point at the problems that should be corrected at the mix stage.

How many masters do I need?

A single master these days may not be good enough; there are some specific rules and recommendations for the audio masters for streaming, versus the masters for LP (vinyl). A CD master can be used for vinyl, but a master made specifically for vinyl will sound better, as each medium has its own particularities. It seems that finally the days when the loudness race was "the thing" are slowly going away to a certain extent, and practices and rules to ensure a better sound are imposed by the steaming services. I would advise to go and read some details about mastering on the FAQ section, then call or email us with any questions you may have.

How we do it...

Fandango Recording performs the mastering in a hybrid analog-digital manner, which allows us to cover a large range of characters and flavours, from extreme transparency to fine colours and cohesion. When you trust us for mastering, you must know that the room acoustics are exceptional, with a +/- 3dB vs the Bruel&Kjaer ideal frequency response curve; the main monitors are mastering monitors Barefoot MicroMain 27; and there are additional sets of speakers – Auratones and KRK V4 with sub, a boombox, computer speakers and earbuds for checking the masters right away.

Fandango Recording performs the mastering in a hybrid analog/digital manner using high-end and esoteric analog hardware units like Thermionic Phoenix Red Mastering Tube Compressor, Millenia NSEQ2 EQ- FET+Tube, Chandler Curve Bender, API 2500 and API 5500 EQ, Neve MBP Portico compressor/limiter, Retro Instruments 2A3 Tube EQ, Serpent Audio SB40001, Neve Portico tape emulators 532, Bricasti M7, Avalon 747SP, Kush Clariphonics MS, SPL Tube Vitalizer, ZAL EQ1 stereo equalizer, Tube Drve Mastering stereo saturator, and DAV SIPP M/S matrix.

Our mastering plugins are the best possible used in the business: MAAT Orange EQ, Weiss suite, Tone Project’s Michelangelo, Unisum and Bass Pro Lane, Leapwing Audio suite, Acoustica Acqua (Magenta, Azure, Water, Amber, Ivory, Aquamarine, White, Ultramarine), Sonoris Mastering Compressor and EQ, PLParEQ, UAD Manley Massive Passive, Massenburg EQ, Brainworks digital V3 and dynamic EQ, Sonnox dynamic EQ, Inflator, Envolution, Limiter and De-esser, UAD Precision Multiband EQ, Limiter and DeEsser, UAD Ampex ATR 102, Paul Frindle’s Dynamic Spectrum Mapper, DMG Equilibrium and Limitless, Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro Codec and of course the Apple utilities: Master for iTunes droplet, AURoundTripAAC AU and Audio to Wave Droplet.

Mastering preparation

Mastering formats