First topic started! Feel like I’m growing as a result of this beautiful community and I give my gratitude to you all.
I’ve recently mixed and mastered an album for a female guitarist singer songwriter… Recording wasn’t great (she did it herself) but we are both pleased with the mixes and the digital masters we’ve managed to end up with.
However she wants to release on vinyl too.
I have mastered a lot of other material across a wide range of genres for digital and CD release, so whilst I wouldn’t consider myself an expert mastering engineer, I feel I am competent for those mediums.
I have a basic understanding of what’s required when mastering for vinyl and whilst I consider myself good at research / learning for myself, nothing beats experience and I’ve never done this before.
So - who here has experience about mastering for vinyl they could share? Pitfalls to avoid, recommended practices, sources of guidance etc.
Obviously it’s VERY programme-dependent. I.e. mastering a techno track for vinyl without the needle jumping out or a loss of sparkle is a very different proposition to the material I’m working on, but let’s get the topic started!
Reach out to the place doing the pressings and see what they want as far as formats and best practices when prepping the file.
Usually I just try and make sure the low end isn’t super wide, and work on tightening things up without worrying about the overall volume of the song too much. Usually just a couple dB headroom is fine too. I always let the pressing plant know when I submit masters for pressing that while I’m happy with the sound of the mix as is, I will leave the overall final volume control up to them. They know their cutting heads better than I do, and know what’s appropriate for most styles in terms of what the overall levels would be. Just make sure you communicate that with them in advance.
Most reputable places will tell you if they hear something off and check if you want to proceed, but it depends on how big the run is too. Always better to ask in advance what makes their job easier if you can.
…basic rules for vinyl masters remain alwaaays the same…
it’s batter a mid/side master…not a “classical” l/r one…
no matter what genre at least under 90hz you need dead mono…120 never hurts and ur on the safe side of things…
ur hi end will forgive a lot on vinyl…but ur mid lows and mid hi’s must be cleaned up and smoothly balanced out as much as possible…
don’t spread the phase too much on the side channel…u better wanna end up with a slidly too narrow stereostage than a too wide one, where some elements went totally missing in the end…
always sleep on the test cut…don’t give the call for final go too fast…
so tripple check ur white label one…otherwise u might end up with 500+ records that could have tuned out way better for such an investment…
so only give ur ok if ur really happy with that test cut…
Thanks for all your advice! I’ll definitely be getting the vinyl cutting engineer to review my efforts, and make the final final masters as you’re totally right - they will know what works best for their setup and methods.
Excited to get this going but need to wait for one final live track to be recorded which will be the opening song on the release, but not sure when that’s gonna happen yet.
I’ll post back here about my experience and any learning I think might be useful to share.
TDR has two dedicated plugins for vinyl mastering that simulate the cutting process and has a lot of controls over the process, they are free for non-commercial use but the free version does not retain settings, still worth taking a look and trying it out
In my opinion, having a different version of an album - mixed and pre-mastered specifically for vinyl before being handed over to the engineer - would be a cool approach. People would want both the digital and material versions… but of course, it depends on the music and style.
I have some modern vinyl that are nothing more than careful and lifeless adaptations of a music to that format and did not feel it
This is an interesting idea - are there any examples you could suggest @Moonwax - singer songwriter genre ideally? I’d buy a few releases on multiple formats to research this a more for sure.
Ok, you got me there, probably I don’t have many such examples. Maybe Current93 who did a lot of unique/subscription editions and also released a couple of albums in mono, but it’s quite a different story.
Underground artists usually don’t have much budget for such experiments (maybe only put digital masters on BC after the original vinyls are sold) and huge labels just mindlessly spam vinyl factories with orders, because it’s again in vogue…
But jokes aside, imagine a cutting engineer who starts quite heavy manipulations to adapt your audio to a format. Result may sound good, but it could be very different, so having mono’d the low end and reduce the dynamic range before hand could work much better…and it may require different depth of effects as well.
(Sorry, too much thinking aloud and that’s how I’d do it. I created a thread about printing LP in a low quantity, but did not decide yet. I don’t have space for even 100 records…)