Mastering For Vinyl Tips

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.

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. 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. Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers. 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.

Remember though there are many dos and donts of de essing. Mastering for vinyl has its own special set of considerations. Mastering for vinyl in detail. 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.

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. Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers. 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.

Try to avoid using psycho acoustic processors to an excessive degree. 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. Luckily joe albano is here to demystify the process using some specialised plugins from the waves abbey road collection. At the end of the day listening to records is a mechanical process.

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. For vinyl the optimum source is 24 bit dynamic and limited either extremely lightly or not at all. Remember though there are many dos and donts of de essing. Mastering for vinyl is the process of creating a separate master that can be cut into a vinyl record without added unwanted distortion.