Tone Death Studios

Professional Mastering

My role is to translate your productions into the final form for your listeners' ears. I am not here to change but to enhance. My passion is finding what gives your tracks their essential essence and bringing that to life. To me, music should feel alive; how else will it be a visceral experience? To make it alive, I massage the transients, harmonics, balance, and, where suitable, add a bit of grunt.

I mix and master tracks with a hybrid methodology, utilising both hardware and software. I believe analogue excels at some tasks, and plugins excel at others. At present, I work with Cranbourne Audio, Solid State Logic, Elysia and TK Audio analogue processors along with a host of top-of-the-line plugins.

My studio is acoustically treated with custom-built absorbers and diffusers, and it has been repeatedly measured, treated, tested, modified and then measured again with Arc Studio 4 to ensure it is the optimal listening environment. I monitor using 3-way Ex Machina Pulsar MK2 monitors. They are the clearest, flattest and most honest speakers I have ever heard, and I have road-tested many speakers over the years. This clarity allows me to truly hear every detail, thus enabling the smallest adjustments in compression and equalisation to make your tracks shine.

Often, I give clients constructive feedback on their mixdown before mastering their tracks, if I think there are small tweaks which would help. I don't need to do this, many mastering engineers wouldn't, but I know I can hear things on my monitors that most people would wish they could. These tiny changes can have a massive impact on the end result.

Most tracks I work with are for digital release. If working on vinyl masters though, I will do two versions: one that is louder, wider and more vibrant in the top end for digital, and one that is less limited, warmer in the highs and less wide for wax. This ensures you get the best out of both mediums.

After DJing for 25 years, running record labels for 15, producing for 10 and mastering for 2, I can confidently say my musical career has focused above all on sonic quality and banging tracks. Let's make your tracks bang.

You shouldn't trust me with your music without hearing what I do...

These clips flick between the pre-master and the master I created, which was subsequently released. The pre masters have been normalised for this demonstration, so both versions of the track have the same true peak level. The difference in perceived loudness, which can be quite stark, demonstrates the tonal and dynamic changes made to the track as part of the mastering process, usually through a combination of equalisation, compression, saturation, limiting and a sprinkle of other top secret techniques. 

Use my ears, my gear and my experience
to get the most out of your tracks.