Mastering                                                                                                             

Simply put, mastering is the final adjustment of tone and space so that your album is consistent with great sounding records in your genre. If you're an independent band who's labored long and hard over your mixes only to rush out to the cd player to check out the CDR ref of your mixes only to wonder why there isn't the tone, depth, punch of your favorite records, then you are already on your way to understanding the necessity for mastering.

What a mastering engineer does is listen to many different records and reference recordings on a specially tuned system. They understand how the best sounding records represent the loose concepts of Bass, Treble, Width, Depth and Warmth. They can instantly recognize that a vocal track needs de-essing to remove harsh sibilance or a snare needs peak limiting. You know the phrase "a picture says a thousand words"? With a ten second "audio snapshot" of your music a mastering engineer can formulate a series of adjustments to make your record hold it's place among other records in your genre. In general, after your album has been mastered for CD, for example, you should be able to put your CD in a multi-disc changer with similar records and not have to reach for any of the tone or volume controls when changing from one disc to another.

With the first class tools at his disposal, our mastering engineers can give your music the same dynamic range and tone as the best records out there. A simple phrase we often use to describe what mastering does and how it affects your music is "it's the difference between a Demo and a Record".

The mastering engineers at NMS feel confident that we can deliver you the sound you're looking for, that will sound great everywhere.