Digtal/Vinyl PreMasters
Enhancing the dirt from your strings, the growl of your guitars or the thunder from your toms is my specialty. My goal with PreMasters is to make your music sound better for your format and to draw out the vibrancy, the strings and the “wood” of your instrument. I like to make a loud digital master, but also maintain the dramatic elements of your audio’s dynamics, and to balance all of these elements the best way possible for your format, whether that is a hot 45, a 22 minute metal side, or a 7” EP.
I’ve literally seen almost everyone’s work come across my desk over the last decade. I have mastered well over 25k titles. Either provided by the likes of your current local favorite mastering guy, to premasters or final mixes from the biggest names in music. Whether you are choosing a recording, mixing or mastering engineer, the popularity of your choice or how much they charge or even how long they’ve been doing it, doesn’t always mean their work is Vinyl-Friendly, and the less vinyl friendly it is, the quieter it has to cut to vinyl, in order to play back without distorting.
The volume difference alone, between cuts from Lucky’s Vinyl-Pre’s and most records today is around +4 to +8 Decibels, and up. That is a quarter to almost a complete half-dial on your volume control. At Lucky, I am literally cutting acoustic and shoe-gaze or new wave, about 5DB louder than most of the heavy metal albums out there today mastered by the competition, and I am not sacrificing Stereo-Width or EQ to do it.