Signaturetone Recording

Tracking

Why “fix it in the mix” when you can get it right in the tracking?

Just like the best meals start with the best ingredients, an album’s quality begins with the performances and raw sounds captured in the tracking phase. With our terrific sounding live room giving your drums the depth they need, our massive stockpile of high end microphones and preamps, vintage and modern bass and guitar amps, and our capture mediums both analog (Otari 2″ 24 track) and digital (Mytek converters, with up to 192khz/64 bit sampling for maximum accuracy), Signaturetone starts your project off right.

Just as importantly, our in house producer/engineers help bands pull off performances that you just can’t fake later on. A tuned set of ears behind the gear means you can trust us to hear when things can be better, and more crucially when they’re going well! A deep knowledge of music theory, genres and styles, and the nuts and bolts of what makes a record sound great is indispensible at the start of a project, regardless if it’s a 2 song band demo or a major label release.

A project can really reach it’s full potential when it begins with hi-fi tracks with stellar performances. Let Signaturetone give you a head start on a great album by tracking it with enegry, style, and quality!

Mixing

Bringing it all together

Taking all the raw material from the tracking phase, we move into mixing. The two main elements here are the technical and the creative. On the technical side, mixing involves file organizing and editing the tracking session material, both to polish performances and streamline the project. This is more important than many people realize, especially on projects tracked outside Signaturetone and brought in for the mix phase – an unorganized project with less than stellar performances is tricky to work with and not ready for the second area of mixing.

The creative aspect is, of course, where the magic really begins to happen. After we’ve prepped a session to sound it’s best performance wise and be tight and organized, Signaturetone can begin to make it come to life. Using our massively powerful selection of analog outboard compressors, eqs, we take the raw tracks and twist, shine, smash, and smooth them into whatever sonic fantasies you can dream up! Also, ourproducers/engineers can put their own twist onto your material – if you like what you’ve heard from us, ask us how we can put our creativity and musical experience to work and help you create art as well as support you with our technical skills.

We love to see bands tracking their material outside of Signaturetone bring it to us for mixing – it’s a huge bang for your buck as far as the quality and creativity we can add. We encourage bands to use Signaturetone during the tracking as well as mixing to ensure maximum quality of performance and sound, but helping bands shine up home or outside studio recorded music is a favorite job of ours as well!

Mastering

The dark art of final perception perfection

After a mix is complete, where to go from there? Mastering, the final sweetening and organization of finished songs, can be done to either mixed down stereo files or “busses”. Stereo mastering involves us taking a finished mix and giving it a once over with our extremely high end equalizers and compressors to give it the final audio glue it needs, as well as fix any glaring errors from mixing if possible. A buss master is when your mix engineer delivers up stereo tracks of the drums, guitars, bass, and vocals and let’s us ”final mix” them together into the stereo master. This gives us more control to fix and polish elements of an album, as well as more chances to get our sweet analog love into more nooks and crannies of the music.

When something is lacking in the final mix and there’s no going back to change it, mastering can be a lifesaver. Both a tool for fixing problems and adding the last creative touches, Signaturetone’s ears and gear can tweak your tunes the last few steps to that elusive “finished record” sound. Use your ears – if you’ve heard material we’ve mastered and you like it, ask how we can do it for you!