Who we are:                                                                                                   Based in the heart of South Bristol, Sonicmastering is an affordable, high quality alternative to top end, analogue mastering studios. We are aiming for a market that is underrepresented in the mastering world. That market is unsigned bands, artists and producers who don’t want to pay the earth, but expect quality even in mid budget projects.  We are a fully digital studio, and can accommodate  a wide range of musical styles. Our engineers have over 15 years experience in production, recording and mastering, and understand the often turbulent processes that creative people experience. As a result they are understanding, professional, affable and attentive to your mastering needs.

Our Mission:                                                                                                                           We believe that your music is extremely personal to you, often the culmination of creative aspirations, pent up emotions, or just the desire to express your feelings to others. Music is like no other medium, it evokes passion, feelings, its asks questions of it listeners, and we believe that mastering has it’s role to play in ensuring that passion shines through.  We are not just dealing with a bunch of songs, they are a statement of your creative mind captured on a digital medium. Mastering ensures that they are presented to the world in the best possible light.

What does Mastering involve?:                                                                                               Mastering is the process of producing a final master cd version of your mixes that can be used for replication. The desired result is to create a master cd where all the tracks are balanced in level and sonic clarity, and sound good on all types of playback system, from cars through to radio. Often this involves the use of additional eq, gain, editing and limiting. Extreme peaks can be limited, noisy sections can be cleaned up and the general level raised so that the cd can compete with commercial releases.  Creative use of eq can also be used to bring out sections of the music as in mids for guitars in a rock mix or high end eq to add sparkle to the mix . The low end of the spectrum can be eq’d and limited for extra punch, useful for dance music or hiphop. See our Mastering section for further info on this subject.                                                                                                                             The main advantage to using a mastering engineer is that they have impartiality with the tracks. They are often hearing the tracks fresh for the first time and will hear things that you may have missed, and will listen to the track as a whole. This is usually hard to do if you have recorded it yourself as you will have an entirely subjective view.

Mastering is still dominated by top end studios using bespoke analogue equipment, but recent advances in technology have allowed digital mastering to come of age.  Some people might say that mastering “in the box” will never achieve the sonic clarity and warmth of analogue systems.  We say that, as with most things in life, the skill is always with the operator, and that even with the best analogue equipment available, projects can still be ruined by inexperience.  We hope that our experience and good use of our ears will shine through in your projects.

We look forward to working with you .