Saintpid Mastering

The past year has been filled with so many fun and interesting assignments it’s hard to pick any favorites. To mention a few, I mastered music for an IKEA advertisement, mastered music and mixed the trailer to the upcoming game Little Misfortune from Killmonday Games and did a numerous bunch of albums and singles. Thanks to all of you who entrusted me with your exciting and challenging assignments and I’ll be seeing you again during 2019!

We added a new column with Sample Peak values to the ISP limiter test. So far it’s only New Fangled Audio’s Elevate that actually contain a value but we’ll slowly start to update old tests and all new additions will have Sample Peak as well as True Peak!

https://www.saintpid.se/isp-true-peak-limiters-test/

Det är rörigt hos musikverket och det rör till det i en av Sveriges mest framgångsrika kulturinvesteringar. EMS studion har odlat både framgångsrika kompositörer och Sveriges avtryck på den musikaliska världskartan och jag kan inte tänkta mig en värld utan denna fantastiska instutition. Hjälp till att behålla EMS som den stöttepelare för nytänkande musik den är och har varit sedan 1962.

https://www.skrivunder.com/radda_elektronmusikstudion_ems_-_save_ems_stockholm?a=2

Saintpid is in full swing after a well-deserved vacation!

Recently I’ve discussed True Peak limiting in some different contexts, with an interested client, a friend and an upset discussion on Facebook with mastering people who defend their right to have +3dBTP peaks on material “because it sounds better “… Well … I’ll let them continue to commit misconduct, just leave me out of it so that I can do my job.
As more and more streaming services shift to measuring with True Peak, it will become obvious why handling ISP is important. Today, for example, if Spotify gets a file at say -10LUFS, limited to 0dBFS (dB Full Scale) but with +2.5dBTP (dB True Peak), they’ll reduce the gain about -3 to -4dB (with the loudness setting set at normal). When Spotify eventually switches to True Peak, the same master suddenly will drop -5 to -6dB, so instead of being as loud (or louder) than the average track, it will be quieter. Guess whos phone will start to ring when artists and record companies realize that this is the case.

Back in the days, you created a master for a final media, it could be cassette, CD or vinyl. After a CD was pressed, the mastering engineers responsibility pretty much ended. That’s no longer the case, nowadays you have to make sure it’s up for all kind of post mastering processing. A good master should hold up for both fixed media such as CD or vinyl, but also distribution over the internet, where the audio will both go through loudness normalization and conversion to a new format as well as traditional broadcast. Your master ain’t sacred no more and staying under the True Peak zero is one of many things required by a good master today. When I choose myself, I deliver my masters with -1dBTP. It happens quite often that my clients want a louder master, then they get more compression as well as a file with -0.3dBTP. No matter what they prefer, they will sound just as loud online but the -1dBTP file may sound a bit better. However, the -0dBFS master with True Peaks at +2dB, no matter if it sounds good or not, will be quieter and you don’t want that, do you?!

Hello lovely customers,

Since you’re so kind to trust me with mastering all this music I actually earned enough to take some time off this summer. Saintpid will be closed between the July 7 – August 8th. If you want to book a mastering session in August or later in the fall you can do so by sending me an email at info@saintpid.se or use the contact form here on the site!

See you in August!

dav

Have you looked at Spotify’s settings recently? Volume Normalization (Set the same level for all track) has moved from “Advanced Settings” to the first settings page, and you can choose Loud, Normal, or Quiet. With Loud, they restore their previous settings and land at about -11LUFS, with normal -14LUFS and Quiet runs as low as -22LUFS! If you let me decide, put it on quiet and adjust your playback gain with your amplifier to a level you’re comfortable with, this way all music from Metallica to Mozart will work together without any problems with limited peaks or volume.

My colleague Sigurdor Gudmundsson’s have more details in this blog post: http://siggidori.wixsite.com/skonrokk-studios/single-post/2018/06/04/Spotify-is-now-more-dynamic-than-ever

During Dynamic Range Day 2018, Ian Kerr from Meter Plugs and mastering engineer Ian Shepherd released the Loudness Penalty tool, where you get to know how the various music platforms will turn your music up or down (mostly down). For example, if you get -6dB as a result with Spotify, it means that you could maintain 6dB of dynamics by relieving compression and limitation and still have the same sound but with more pressure and a sense of more air in the mix. Material turned down by -2, -3 maybe -4dB on Spotify can be considered normal but when these numbers start to be -8, -10 or maybe -12dB, you’re doing something wrong and your material will probably be perceived as quieter and far less punchy than tracks well mixed and mastered.

http://www.loudnesspenalty.com/

cof

Saintpid had the honor of mastering Cajsa Zerhouni’s debut album “My Billie”. Listen to it on Spotify or your preferred online streaming service!

The magic behind mastering isn’t really magic, it is knowledge and experience (and a great sounding room and, most of the times, seriously expensive gear and speakers ). This video from Sonic Scoop with mastering engineer Joe Lambert (http://joelambertmastering.com) show you how small changes add up to something that sounds so much more than some EQ and a couple dB of gain. This is what we do, it’s both easy and the hardest thing in audio you can do at the same time.