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Delivery and Preparation tips

This page contains some helpful tips for mixing and producing well prepared material for mastering, along with information on the formats that we accept at GSM and on the details GSM needs from our clients.

Delivery

Preparation

  • • 24Bit/32Bit (float) & 44.1 KHz or higher in AIFF or WAV format (no data compression!).
  • • Never up or down sample anything.
  • • Don’t use dithering.
  • • Don’t use limiting or normalization on the master-bus or final mix!
  • • Only use compressors, equalizers and exciters if you know what you’re doing and use them only for their vibe and character. Never use them for corrections or volume and dynamic adjustments! Leave this to the mastering engineer.
  • • Don’t do fade-ins and fade-outs at the beginning and end of a song. Just let your mastering engineer know what you’d prefer.
  • • All songs should approx. have 2 seconds ‘silence’ at the beginning and the end.
  • • Minimal peak headroom of -3 dBFS. Maximal peak not more than -2 dBFS

Listen carefully to clicks, pops, ticks etc. before final mix-down and try to remove it in the corresponding track. Especially vocal tracks contain a lot of these and vocal sibilance is a common problem. These are some of the issues commonly dealt with during mastering. Even with powerful mastering tools, attempts to reduce these problems will often affect other elements in the mix. So try to reduce these problems in the mix before going into mastering. 

 

Provide GSM as complete as possible the following details and without typo’s!