Mastering For Vinyl Tips

Mastering for vinyl when submitting your music for vinyl production it is very important that it has been mastered for the vinyl medium.

Mastering for vinyl tips.

At the end of the day listening to records is a mechanical process. Taming them is really important for getting good audio quality on vinyl. Don t get me wrong i love it dirty. The sequencing difference is that delivery from mastering for digital is either individual wav files for download or a single ddpi file for cd replication whereas for vinyl the delivery is generally two wav files one for each side of the record.

Luckily joe albano is here to demystify the process using some specialised plugins from the waves abbey road collection. Mastering is the final step in the recording process which takes place after the mixing process post production to optimize and add the final sonic touches to your recordings. Most of the issues with vinyl is high end stuff cymbals probably being the biggest thing. And therefore many variables are at play.

If you re mastering strictly for cd start by setting your final limiter s output ceiling to 0 2 or 0 1 dbfs never to 0 0 or intersample peaks can sneak through and cause distortion on consumer playback devices. Mastering for vinyl has its own special set of considerations. While limiting makes the average level of a digital track louder it will cause lots of trouble at vinyl mastering. Due to the physical nature of the cutting and playback process there are a number of considerations and limitations that must be addressed in mastering.

For vinyl the optimum source is 24 bit dynamic and limited either extremely lightly or not at all. Just be careful as digital distortion easily becomes more apparent when transferred to vinyl. Applying a low pass filter on the entire mix cutting off around 16k will also help. Andre calilhanna audio mastering excerpted from our new guide the musician s guide to vinyl this post digs into post production audio mastering for vinyl records.

Izotope rx 7 s de ess module does an excellent job of isolating harsh sibilance with a transparency that s suitably unobtrusive to the overall sound of the master. Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers. Vinyl is more popular now than it has been for many years but mastering your music for vinyl requires a different approach to other media. The only way to make sure your master is ideally suited for the vinyl format is by hiring a professional mastering engineer to pre master your material for vinyl.

Don t limit the mixdowns too much. Remember though there are many dos and donts of de essing. Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers.