We provide the opportunity for one minor revision within our normal mastering rate.
What does this mean? We will send you a link to high res mp3s of the mastered tracks to listen to. Then if needed there can be a round of minor changes, for example you might want a little more bottom end on a particular track or a little more top end on another track. We then make these changes for you for the final master. If you feel you need more extensive revisions or alternative versions for labels etc… these will incur an extra fee.
Don’t feel you need to make revisions necessarily, many of our clients don’t. Our experience is that it’s best not to over think it. The master we give you sound better to you than before it was mastered and there isn’t anything immediately obvious that you feel needs to be different, it’s probably best to trust that we’ve done what’s needed.
Mistakes made in certain listening situations
The mistake some people make is to listen to the masters in someone’s car and suddenly realise the bass is too loud or not loud enough. Or listen in a friends house and for some reason there the top end seems too much or too little. Then temptation can be to use these isolated listening situations to judge whether the master needs to be changed.
It is important to realise that car stereos often hugely exaggerate or under represent certain frequencies. This can vary enormously from one car stereo to the next so judging your master on any set of car speakers is not a good idea. Similarly living rooms typically have parallel walls which have not been acoustically treated. This will cause phase cancellation which will increase or decrease the highs in the music. The corners of the room will create bass modes which will multiply or subtract bass frequencies. Again these effects can change dramatically from one living room to the next. And that doesn’t even take account of the huge variation in hi speakers.
Our advice when listening to your master is to choose a listening environment and a hi-fi system you know incredibly well and have listened to countless albums in. Then, if listening in the familiar environment, you compare your master to a number of other albums of a similar genre and you feel your master needs an adjustment, that may be worth asking for. But it’s very likely a mistake to base changes on listening anywhere other than somewhere you are intimately familiar with.
One of the main points of having your music mastered by a professional mastering house is to avoid these problems. A professional mastering studio will be acoustically treated at great expense and effort to remove any sonic issues or distortions from the room. They will have speakers and amplifiers which are completely flat across the entire frequency spectrum. They will have a mastering engineer with vast experience who knows how to make your music sound as good as it can across all the variations that real life listening situations can present. Of course it goes with out saying that at Heron Island we have all these things!