Note: This is a page about reference works/tracks/songs. If you are looking for customer references for this business, visit the Engineers Page and read the various customer testimonials on the mastering engineer profiles.
The process of mixing and mastering a song can be deceptive. It's easy to listen to a song several times and think that it sounds great, only to later discover that, compared to other songs, it sounds mediocre, or even flawed. Even experienced mixing engineers and mastering engineers can fall into this trap. For this reason, it's important to keep things real by referring to reference mixes and masters from time to time. These are tracks that we know to be of good quality. Three seconds listening to a reference track can change one's whole perspective on a project! There are several different kinds of reference masters.
Industry Reference Masters are a collection of excellently-mastered songs that the mastering engineer keeps handy to compare against when mastering a song. It's important to have a variety of reference masters for different music genres.
Customer Rough Masters are masters generated by the customer. When someone wants to commission a mastering engineer to master a song, it's often a good idea for the customer to attempt to master the track themselves using whatever methods they might know about, and give that to the mastering engineer along with the final mix. The customer shouldn't spend too long doing this.
The customer rough master serves a number of purposes.
First, the mastering engineer can get an idea of the direction the customer wants to go with the master. Is it highly compressed? Is the frequency spectrum a smiley face?
Second, it provides a clear baseline for the mastering engineer. If the mastering engineer can't do better than the customer, then the mastering engineer isn't adding any value and should issue a refund!
Customer Reference Masters are songs chosen by the customer as examples of how they want their track to sound. Customer reference masters serves a number of purposes.
First, the mastering engineer can get an idea of the direction the customer wants to go with the master. The same considerations apply as for the customer rough master.
Second, it provides a clear goal for the mastering. The mastering engineer can try to make the master sound as good as the reference master. It's a much clearer goal to try to make a song sound "as good as THAT" than just "good".
Although we don't require it, when you submit a song to us for mastering, we strongly recommend that you also submit at least two reference songs that you would like your song to sound like. If, in addition, if you have the time and the skills, quickly attempting to master your own song and provide us with the result will provide another baseline for us to improve upon.
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