Black Belt Mastering

Once the mastering process is complete, and payment has been made, you will receive fully sequenced WAV masters of your songs. Other formats such as a DDP image, Apple Digital Masters (MFiT) or 24 bit vinyl ready masters can be provided on request.

Please provide the following info: Song order, Artist or Band name, Album Title, Song Titles, ISRC codes (if you have them).

Yes. If you’d like to provide a reference song I will gladly accept it. This is a great way for me to get a feel for the sound you are after. I also find it helpful to include a few brief notes if there are specific song transition requests. Ultimately, a quick phone call is best.

Yes, I encourage attended sessions for full LP’s only. Sessions start at 10am. Attended sessions allow you to be involved and understand the mastering process from beginning to end and provides you access to ask questions and hear immediate before and after mastering samples of your record. As these sessions tend to take more time, the cost is more than unattended.

You can send mixes by clicking this link for wetransfer.com or by forwarding a link to a Dropbox folder.

We proudly accept 1/2" and 1/4" reels of analog tape, 1-bit DSD, WAV or AIFF files.

Digital songs should be delivered as Stereo. We prefer to accept 24bit / 44.1k or higher, but can accept others if necessary. Please do not send MP3’s or ‘lossy’ audio. Make sure there is no distortion or clipping as it’s best to start with the highest possible quality.

Analog reels (either 1/2” or 1/4”) should be delivered with tones of 10kHz, 1kHz and 100Hz at a level of 0VU. At least 30 seconds of each tone with 10 seconds of silence in between at the end of a reel is appreciated. Please number and label your tape boxes with the tape speed, reference level and the EQ standard that was used. If possible, please organize the songs in the correct running order (as they will show up on the record) with sufficient leader tape at the top and tail. As a backup, supplying a digital copy of each song on a thumb-drive is recommended.

Unless intended for artistic reasons, please omit any “loudness” or “brick-wall limiting” plugins from the stereo bus of your mix. If you are unsure as to what level to deliver your song, a good suggestion is to have the digital peaks approaching -3dBFS and an RMS value below -15dBFS. It’s always nice to have some headroom to work with!

Yes, one free hour of revisions is included with each session. If for whatever reason you want to change something related to mastering after receiving your initial reference master, it’s on me! Any revisions beyond the first hour are billed at an hourly rate.

Yes, in the first degree. I studied Tae Kwon Do from age 12 through college with short studies in Wing-Chun Kung-Fu.

Reference Acetates — A one-off evaluation cut you take home and play to discover how your record will sound on vinyl.

Master Lacquers — These are individual ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’ master lacquer discs that are cut and shipped to the pressing plant for mass production of vinyl records.

Digital Cutting Masters — If we did the initial mastering for your record and you’re choosing to have lacquers cut elsewhere, we can provide the 24-bit side A and B digital files and required timing log.

While CDs can hold over 70 minutes of material, this is essentially impossible for a single 12" record. There’s only so much physical space to pack the grooves. As the length of a side goes up the loudness goes down because the grooves on the record have to be cut with less side-to-side movement (quieter) to fit more information in the allotted space. Very long sides are possible, but not very loud.

Please use the information below as a guideline for timing sides:

12" (33 1/3 RPM)

Best — 18 minutes per side

OK — 20 minutes per side

12" (45 RPM)

Best — 8 to 9 minutes per side

OK — 12 minutes per side

10" (33 1/3 RPM)

Best — 8 to 9 minutes per side

OK — 13 minutes per side

10" (45 RPM

Best — 6 to 7 minutes per side

OK — 10 minutes per side

7" (33 1/3 RPM

Best — 5 minutes per side

Just Don’t — 8 minutes per side

7" (45 RPM)

Best — 3 minutes per side Sorta OK — 5 minutes per side

Both myself and the pressing plant will ask you to provide what’s known as a matrix number. The matrix (sometimes also called the ‘catalog number’) is unique identifier that you create or your record label provides you, it is not generated by the pressing plant (though plants have internal ID numbers of their own, it’s best to not use those as your matrix). The matrix you provide is physically etched into the master lacquers and serves as a way for the plant to track your record throughout the manufacturing process. It’s usually an abbreviation of your record label or band name along with a number (i.e. B0032451, RHR-009 or SDRE0217). A letter ‘A’ or ‘B’ gets added to the end of the matrix to denote the side of the record.

• Select a record pressing plant in the US to press your records and submit an order with them. Let the plant know that you are providing your own lacquers (from me). I should not be cutting your master lacquers until you have a confirmed order set with a pressing plant. The plant needs to be expecting lacquers from me. If a pressing plant receives lacquers that are not accounted for, they will not get processed.
• Book a session to have master lacquers cut. Sessions to cut master lacquers are not attended. One lacquer is needed for each side of a record. A single album needs 2 lacquers created, a double LP would need 4, etc. Let me know where the project is being pressed, and once the masters are cut I’ll express ship the lacquers directly to it or the corresponding plating facility.
• Finally, after everything is sent to the plant you’ll receive test pressings of your record. These are a small batch of finished records. Most plants require approval of test presses before manufacturing the bulk of your order. Once you approve the test presses the plant will complete the rest of your order.

Acetates are more than double the weight of a test pressing and are cut on aluminium discs that are coated with nitrocellulose lacquer; they are not made of vinyl like a test pressing. If your acetate sounds like a good vinyl translation then it can be approved.

Please note, if your record player is inexpensively made or has a low torque motor the acetate may play back inconsistently or with warble; this is a turntable issue, not a problem with the acetate or overall cut. Some things to consider when evaluating an acetate at home:

• Handle your acetate by the edges only. Avoid touching the surface where the grooves have been cut.
• If your turntable has difficulty playing your acetate, adjust your tonearm’s counterweight or stylus force; a worn or damaged stylus can mar the grooves or distort the sound of the acetate.
• Your acetate is for reference only. Acetates are a softer material than vinyl and will only last a few plays at maximum fidelity before getting noisy. Use it to evaluate the sound of the cut on one or two trusted playback systems before it begins to degrade.

• First off, it’s important to note that test pressings are not always perfect. Still, in order to properly evaluate them you should be confident that your record player is calibrated with the recommended ‘stylus force’ for your phono cartridge and has an anti-skate setting that will prevent your tonearm from swaying side to side.
• About a month after your lacquers have been submitted to the plant, you’ll receive a box of test pressings (usually 5 copies). The first thing you should do when opening the box is number the tests 1-5, this will help when taking notes and referencing a specific copy.
• Please do not disperse the test pressings (to friends or family or kickstarter contributors) before they have been fully approved, the whole point in evaluating them is to have all copies at-hand and available for comparison should an issue be discovered.
• True problems worth reporting back to the pressing plant are ones that are repeated on each and every test pressing in exactly the same way every time. For example, if you hear a loud ‘zip’ sound in the middle of the second song on test pressing 1 and again on 2 but not on 3, 4 and 5. It’s just a random anomaly and not something that will be on the final production run of records.
• However, if you discover a distracting skip or loud ‘pop’ or ‘swish’ sound that happens at the same moment on all 5 pressings in exactly the same way, this is something worth documenting and contacting myself or the pressing plant about.
• Please be sensitive to accept the reality of how vinyl sounds, the random clicks and pops that are present in one test pressing but do not repeat in others are not a cause for concern, they are part of what makes vinyl unique. ‘Diameter loss’ (when a record sounds successively less-bright and a bit more ‘gritty’ as you get closer to the inner diameter) is also normal to hear on vinyl. Keep in mind, we’re talking about an audio format that reproduces sound by a microscopic shard of diamond scratching through a plastic trench the width of two human hairs and then amplifying those mechanical vibrations to then recreate the original sound so it’s just going to sound reasonably different!
• I don’t find it helpful or constructive to compare the test pressings to the digital masters as it’s likely that the vinyl pre-master (and thus the actual vinyl) will potentially have a bit more dynamic range and just ‘feel’ different than the digital (it’s not a 1:1 transfer, so don’t treat it like one). It’s also worth noting that vinyl generally has a ‘softer’ and less-bright treble as well the low-end will usually be tighter with not as much low-frequency extension and less stereo feel to the bass. There are physical limitations to vinyl and it would be counter productive to expect it to have the same clarity and frequency response as a digital counterpart that is without the same mechanical constraints.
• If you ever have questions about what is and is not a problem with test pressings you should consult with the person who cut the lacquers (me). I can often help you understand what is or isn’t an actual issue of concern. I can also help be a liaison between the pressing plant and plating facility to help discover where an issue is stemming from, ultimately a new side may need to be cut to best resolve a problem.
• Be wise, plan ahead and give yourself extra time to account for potential setbacks. The process of making vinyl records is not quick and all stages leading up to the pressing happen in real time with little to no automation. Great sounding vinyl is worth the extra time!

Yes, we can do both. Our Neumann lathe is equipped with the most advanced direct drive motor that can spin at 16 2/3RPM which allows more detail to be cut in to the grooves and yields a more pronounced stereo image and articulate treble with full bass. Cutting an endless loop of audio into the lock groove of a record is also possible, the duration of the loop should be exactly 1.8 seconds at 33 1/3 RPM and 1.33 at 45 RPM.