> mixing
greyfade studio employs a high-quality monitoring chain, optimized acoustics, a handpicked collection of analog outboard equipment & creative effects, multiple options for analog summing & mix capture, and a deep library of digital plug-ins — all with the goal of helping artists realize the essence of their sound, while ensuring accurate translation across a variety of playback mediums.
for projects where a light touch is required, the mixing process might strive for transparency: achieving great balances between the instruments, correcting any issues from the recording stage, choosing a stereo perspective & reverb that perfectly complement the music, and enhancing the mix with some beautiful sounding tube equipment.
for more sonically adventurous projects, there’s a wide palette of colors to explore: fat & dirty compression sounds, gritty springs and lush plates to experimental digital reverb algorithms, tape delay & slapback effects, creative distortion, incorporating guitar pedals and eurorack modular as signal processors, and even reinforcing existing parts with synthesizers or other sounds.
wherever your project falls on this spectrum, the studio is set up to go anywhere the music takes it, quickly. we’ve mixed projects ranging from the most purist jazz & classical recordings to the incredibly experimental & sonically complex. the studio’s mix approach always comes down to what’s best for the music, in ongoing conversation with the artist.
> how long?
how long will it take to mix a given record? the average project we mix here probably takes 2-3 days of work, but the answer really depends on a number of factors.
— amount of material to be mixed (35 minutes? 70 minutes?)
— basic instrumentation & number of overdubs
— how well the music was recorded (are there significant issues that need to be corrected, or is it in mostly good shape?)
— editing (already edited? or tons required?)
— file organization (are the session files well organized and clearly labeled?)
— mix approach & creative direction (is the mix focused on balancing & enhancing the existing material, or will it be more creative — experimenting with the presentation or character of the sounds? is the whole record supposed to sound roughly the same, or will each piece require its own unique appraoch?)
so if your project is a 40-minute jazz piano trio record with no overdubs, it’s well recorded & edited & organized, and the mix is mostly about balancing, refinement, and enhancement — it might only require a one-day mix, with perhaps a couple hours of small revisions. if it’s a 100-minute double album, recorded in 6 different studios across 4 different DAWs, with 30 tracks of overdubs done at home that need to be edited & re-amped, and each of the 15 songs needs a completely different mix approach — that might take a bit longer!
feel free to reach out via our contact page with some projects details and we’d be happy to give you an estimate.
> attended / remote / unattended?
for most projects, we use a combination of attended, remote, and unattended mixing sessions.
if the artist is in new york, we usually like at least the first mixing date to be attended, so that we can determine the sonic direction of the album together. if you’re not located in new york, we also offer attended mixing remotely via web browser. artists can log in to a full resolution audio feed of the session, and provide feedback on the mixing process in realtime from the comfort of home — or anywhere they can access a quality pair of headphones.
after listening to the mixes at home over a few weeks, oftentimes an artist will want to make a couple small tweaks to the mix before it goes on to mastering. these can usually be handled in a shorter unattended session, with the artist sending over their notes via email.
> mastering
mastering is process of optimizing & formatting stereo mixes for commercial release and creating a cohesive final album sequence. it is the final stage of an album’s creation where the project can be assessed in a neutral listening environment, polished & enhanced using beautiful analog circuitry, and captured in its destination format at the highest resolution.
each destination format — from vinyl LP to digital download — has its own technical requirements and aesthetic considerations. mastering can optimize your recording for each of these formats, in the same way that one might frame and position a work of art differently depending on its overall context and the specific space. mastering highlights and enhances the most essential aspects of a piece of music, minimizes anything that might detract from that experience, and serves as a final checkpoint before the music finally reaches a listener’s ears.greyfade studio’s mastering services include album and single mastering. destination formats include CD, vinyl record, digital download, and high-resolution digital files. the studio is also certified by apple to produce apple digital masters (formerly mastered for itunes).
