STEP 1: Place your order for mixing and mastering using our services and pricing page.
STEP 2: Upload your files.
Once payment is complete, you will be emailed a receipt and sent to an upload page on our website where you can submit your files. Please read the requirements in the preparation section of our website if you have not already.
STEP 3: Approve or request any changes before receiving the final mastered files.
That’s it. Once your project is complete it will be 100% streaming and distribution ready. You can use these files to upload to streaming platforms, send as demos, or distribute it on all major music platforms.
There are many myths and misconceptions that surround the mastering process – from its ability to turn even the most lackluster recording into a polished release-quality track, to the fact that mastering can only be practiced by a few highly skilled individuals.
Just like tracking or mixing, mastering is just another piece of of the puzzle known as the production process. Darkroom Mastering will take your music and give it the body, color, warmth, balance, and loudness your music needs while preserving your original vision you intended.
Once we receive your music we will download your files and review everything. This includes giving your music a proper listening in an acoustically sound room.
We will point out anything that may cause any issues before we begin mastering. Mainly harsh frequencies that should be corrected before we start. This includes any frequencies that are too loud that may cause issues in the limiting process.
During this process we also find the peak levels in your track and make adjustments to the volume to give us sufficient headroom to properly master your music.
We will review your music to make sure it’s not too compressed as this will be hindering the entire mastering process and will need to be adjusted. In such a case we will ask you to make adjustments and send us a new version before we start.
Most mastering agencies online will master your music on a linear level, meaning that they will load your arrangement into a single audio channel.
We find the most common problem with audio is that there’s often too many frequencies overriding each other in the low end (200hz to 500hz region).
We will often bus the low frequencies in your tracks onto one track and the mid/high end to another track. We do this so the bass doesn’t end up driving most of the compression we apply to the mid/high-end portion of the song.
This way we can treat the low-end separately from the high end and bring out much more punch if necessary without affecting the mid/high frequencies.
The result is a cleaner, more consistent separation between low-end and mid/high frequencies.
It is important to note that too much compression in a mix will distort the sound and it will lose it’s transient detail and dynamic range.
Your low end frequencies may need to be less compressed than your mid/high frequencies. For this we use multiband compression where we can compress different frequency ranges in your music separately from the others. This will add dynamics to your tracks that are pleasing to the ear.
Due to many different artists’ listening environments (aka headphones, untreated rooms, etc), everyone has a different idea of how wide in the spectrum some instruments or songs should be and some aren’t even aware of it.
We will provide a more accurate stereo picture for your music that will sound great on all speaker systems including surround sound environments like club settings.
This is the last stage of the mastering process. Although a good dose of compression will make your master sound proportionately louder, there’s still another stage to the signal processing chain.
Maximization. The principal is to add overall loudness to your mix without damaging the dynamics or volume of your music.
