Mastering a bit of techno today. Good solid production. Mainly just adding a little fiz from the valves and refining the width with some mid-side on the TK2. It's a very dense sound so using the Multicore I enhanced the transient punch in each band, which prepared the track for the limiting stages. Something we have to accept in dance music, despite digital gain correction in streaming platforms, electronic music is still fighting the loudness war. -7LUFS or louder is pretty common. Everyone wants their music loud. Well if you want those levels, you can't expect your mastering engineer to do ALL the dynamic reduction. If we are trying to slice out 8, 9 or more dB is dynamic to get your music up to the level you want, there will be compromises. If you want loud you need to produce and mix in a way that allows a loud master. Control your dynamics, EQ away the chaff you don't need, and get into clipping. Clean transient clipping. Channel and bus level. If you want -7LUFS then you should be looking at delivering a pre master to something like -16 LUFS or around there. You can do it pretty clean at the mix level, but it requires technique and knowledge. Luckily these tunes I'm working today are pretty much spot on as premasters. If I got work like this every day, then work would be easy.....but not as a fun.

Mastering some techno today, after a few weeks of mixing albums, back to some straight up mastering.

Mastering electro today. Getting old skool productions to modern loudness levels is a challenge. Soft clipping and saturation in small amounts in stages is the way to do it as clean as possible. Here I'm using 3 stages of tube saturation, some transformer saturation, and some analog shunt limiting to shave down the transients, a little tightening up again in the mids on the Multicore just to keep the punch consistent. Tricky work.

Mastering a nice slab of techno today. Solid well out together mixes, so not a lot of correction. Just enhancing and embellishing depth and width. Tightening up the lows combining the Pultec trick on the Stereo Pultec with some dynamic punch from the Multicore acting on the lows only. Some colour and grunt from the stereo RS124. Top end was a little subdued so added nice silky clean and dynamic sparkle from the tube vitalizer doing extra magic with the coil filter array, and then a little push further from the air band on the TKlizer2 . The 20k and 25k on this thing is so clean and smooth, no harshness at all. Great EQ.

Some more electro from this double vinyl VA I am mastering. It's quite nice music to work with as it arrives not already squashed to death, unlike a lot of modern dance music, so it really responds well to, and gets most benefit from, all the lovely harmonic and dynamic character the outboard gives.

Mastering some lovely electro for vinyl today. The main thing with old skool style analog production is getting it up to modern loudness without killing the vibe, as the transients are often huge. So I'm doing a lot of soaking up of transients using various stages of saturation as soft clipping, gentle and stage by stage you get a clean reduction in dynamic and gain harmonic richness. Then tightening up the punch with the multiband to make sure the drums make it through the process without losing their snap.

And back to work after the birthday weekend. Nice solid dub techno that just eats up all the valve goodness.