Professional product finishing for the independent artist
RELAX! - We have it all covered!!
SERIOUSLY... finishing off an album or music release can be one of the trickiest, most annoying and ultimately creativity - sapping activities on the planet. After all the amazing work you've done on your DAW or even taperecorder - suddenly there's all the technical bits and hours of trawling the net to find out how to make something called a "CD Red Book Compliant Master", or find out what "Dither" is and how to produce it. How to complete and make a DDP file to send your final work to the pressing plant for either CD or Vinyl, how to have the track names come up correctly when played on a Car Stereo or on a Mobile Device. How to make the music levels ideal for dancefloor PA systems, radio, streaming platforms. Mastering, Mixing, Authoring are all things we can do and have successfully done many many times before. Leave the niggles to us so you can get on with your sequel or next project.
We do...
AUTHORINg
mastering
mixing
session players
And we also do ...
Art/Graphics/Web
authoring
Authoring is a crucial technical stage of music production for all hard copy formats. In most cases this means CD or Vinyl and we can do this for both of these formats plus any similar work required for Digital Streaming. We can efficiently produce the final files you require to send to CD and Vinyl pressing plants knowing that your tracks will be in the right order, with the right gaps, at the right levels, with the right information showing on displays. With Vinyl and CD all correct paperwork will be done for track banding, naming etc. Once correctly authored, your product can be sent for manufacture.. and yes, we have contacts who can do that too. Our Authoring prices start from a very reasonable 50 GBP per format - subject to your providing us with everything we need.
Mastering is often thought of as some Dark Art of music production that you can spend a lifetime trying to understand and there's more opinions on the matter than there are about which the best Pink Floyd album is or isn't. Fortunately, we at MBL have been masters of the dark arts of Vinyl and CD since the mid 1980s, and even more fortunately we listen to what our clients want from their master. We are open minded enough to go to what we consider to be unnecessary extremes, yet can work transparently and subtly to get the very best out of your music.
Our Mastering prices start from a very reasonable 50 GBP for a basic error free artistically unaltered master (per format) - subject to your providing us with everything we need. Extra Costs for artistic input eg Overall EQ, Apparent Loudness, Track Spacing, Crossfading, Stereo re-imaging and "Remastering" are negotiable and dependent on quaity of source material.
mastering
mixing
Mixing is the biggie of course, and we'll just assume you know exactly what this is all about and how to do it. But we also know just how frustrating a mixdown can be, especially after a couple of days of it. MBL can offer help here from straightforward advice, through to a full mixdown performed at our own studio. Give us the audio files that make up your mix and we'll talk about it and then get on and provide you with our take on it. We'd be charging around 15 GBP per hour spent mixing but can discuss a fixed price for a large (album size) job if that's more your work pattern. Most people do their own mixes, but not everyone is comfortable with it. if you are one of these people, you can put it in the hands of a company who have been mixing real world albums since people had Mullet haircuts without being arrested.
Session Musicians... For those wishing to add a new dimension to their music, we have a good contacts list of top notch players we can recommend to you and include in your final bill to us. Our own studio is equipped with Synths, Piano, a real 1960s Hammond Organ and a person to play just about any sound you can think of on keyboards. We also have access to regular contributors on guitar, wind, bass, drums, backing vocals. So if you need a player, we can organise that for you, record them ourselves - even send you "takes" to wherever you are in the world for your approval while the session is in progress for comments etc. We can provide ANYTHING from a short solo in one of your own recordings, or go as far as providing an entire recording for you to play a small solo in!
musicians
Music and Multimedia