KIA ORA, WELCOME TO KOG STUDIO
Kog Studio is one of the most experienced and well-endowed music mastering facilities, having over 20 years experience and credits on more than three million albums and single sales, tens of millions of streams, plus multiple top and award-winning releases - gold and platinum-selling or indie or whatever. Whether you prefer to come in for your session or have it done online as so many do these days (especially if you are out of town) itʻs easy.
Mastering is the final process you need to get done before your music goes out to the world. Our job is to work with the engineer and the artists to make the best out of their hard work sound and make it sound even better, so they get more fans and more jobs :)
With the number of digital mixdowns being done these days, it is more important than ever to make sure the mix goes to things like top-level analog gear to polish and breathe that extra important life into our music and make it stand up with the best in the genre. Mastering is the one stage in which you are wise to use the highest quality of gear and monitoring.
There's a good reason that every top-level or classic album is mastered in the analogue realm... we are happy to have been able to help out on mastering more award-winning artists (and finalist) albums, EPs and singles than any other mastering studio in Aotearoa NZ.
If you are sending us your project to work on there are a number of ways to get it to us.
Personal delivery if you are in the area is always nice, but in many cases these days we get the project over the internet.
There are a number of ways of digital delivery, and ultimately the choice is yours, but we find the easiest are systems like Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, Hightail, Sendspace or Wetransfer. Please ensure links do not EXPIRE.
Here's some extra info for Mastering jobs -
Mastering
When you bounce your tracks for mastering, PLEASE DO NOT apply any compression* or limiting to the stereo output. This severely inhibits the mastering process and affects our ability to give you good results. Please allow some headroom for your track. It should never touch digital 0.0. For example, headroom of at least 4 dB, i.e. your highest peak will be minus 4dB.
PLEASE NEVER hit 0.0dB! The audio files can be .wav, .aiff, or SDII.
We prefer all audio supplied to us for mastering to be 24 or 32 bit. We may still accept 16-bit though it is not as favourable (32 bit is fine). There’s 144dB of dynamic range in a 24-bit audio file, so there’s no need to get the signal as hot as possible, a few dB of headroom is totally fine. To put it in perspective, if you listened to your music on a system playing back the full 144dB of dynamic range it would be so loud that you would die... serious. But give us some good dynamic range and let us use our fancy mastering gear to get the best levels for you. :)
The sample rate needs to be at least 44.1kHz, we can accept everything up to 192kHz, but in all honesty anything over 96kHz is probably unnecessary.
Reference tracks - If you have a particular track you’d like us to use as a reference point (i.e. that you would like yours to sound 'similar' to), please send us that too (make sure if possible it's CD quality i.e. 44.1kHz 16-bit or the best quality possible) and we can match them. We recommend for high quality tracks you get them from QOBUZ - click here for the link.
Choose a track on it's sonic characteristics, e.g. the amount of highs and lows, or middle crunch, not just because you like the track, e.g. you might really like a Katy Perry track, but please don't provide that as a reference track for your metal bands album unless you want some smart ass comments and a request for a more appropriate reference track.
Please make sure you are totally happy with your mix before sending it to be mastered.
Because the mastering is done with boutique outboard gear, if we need to make any changes for you, it is time consuming. The settings for each piece of gear in the signal chain need to be reset and re-calibrated, which is pretty boring even for the most saintly person, so even for the slightest changes (e.g. if you resubmit your mix with some tweaks) we usually have to charge for the time taken. We can do one revision of the supplied track master for no charge (fwiw it is pretty rare we need to :) ), and after the first revision there is a charge rate for each extra revision. Please note this applies only to the particular mix you submitted. If you supply a new adjusted/revised mix then, as explained above that counts as a new mastering job (as the gear set up will be substantially different and that all takes time). So, please make sure you and everyone in the band is happy with the mix and has signed it off as completed and ready for mastering.
All files are to be given to us as data, ideally by internet, or USB stick, hard drive, CD, or DVD with each track clearly named please.
When we send you the download link for your masters please ensure that you save them in multiple safe places (including at least one copy in a cloud service). We do our best to keep backups of tracks for a year for you, and maybe much much longer. But ultimately this is your responsibility from the moment we deliver the files (e.g. we can't promise anything if you come back 20 years later and expect us to have your masters sitting happily waiting for you).
Summary:
Well done on all your hard work!
Please - No compression or limiting applied to the stereo output your bounce*
Leave headroom.
Don’t hit digital 0.0dbFS
Send us .wav, .aiff or SDII files, ideally 24 bit.
Same sample rate for all tracks if possible (if not please try and label the sample rates that are different and we can convert them as appropriate for you).
Provide reference tracks
Please label everything clearly, and listen through your mixes to check they are correct and signed off by everyone that needs to before you send them for us to master :)
*If you are really confident at using compression on the master out as part of your sound then we trust you, so if you can send us 2 versions - 1 with your mix buss compression on it, and one without the compression on it.
Terms and Conditions -
TERMS OF TRADE (short version)
1] Please pay your bill on time :)
2] Don't be a dick and not pay :(
3] Have a productive and fun week and enjoy the music you created :)
4] If you don't pay your bill, we technically OWN your song which we don't really see the point of doing..
So use your karmic common sense and pay your bill. :)
So you know, if you don't respond to us in a professional manner or in a normal amount of time, we will be forced to use our debt collection partner AEL. (boring)